John Sculley

Captain of Industry and Business Icon, Motivational Speaker and Conqueror of a Childhood Impediment

He would come to be known as a bold entrepreneur, a brilliant marketer, and an American businessman with the ability to turn around an ailing company. But as a child, John Sculley felt like a failure. “I felt I was just inferior,” he said. “It really gave me a complex.” Where his classmates shared their ideas with ease, Sculley struggled to even get the words out. He stuttered and stammered, plagued by the disconnect between what formed in his brain and what came from his mouth. He couldn’t even answer the telephone, much less speak in class. His schoolwork suffered. Teachers wrote him off as unintelligent. By middle school, his grades were average at best. That’s when he told himself: “I’m not going to have my life held back because of this speech impediment. I’m going to overcome it.” Once Sculley unlocked his ability to learn, he developed a lifelong passion for discovery that would guide him to lead some of the world’s top companies, including Apple and PepsiCo. But this took extraordinary dedication. It almost never happened. As a child, Sculley began to see a medical hypnotist who taught him that many people who stutter can sing clearly, without a hitch in their voice. He found that singing lifted the pressure of communicating. His words began to flow, and his confidence grew. He kept at it for years. “It was just sheer persistence,” he said. “I was absolutely determined that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life not being able to communicate and do the things I saw other kids doing.” By the time he enrolled at Brown University, he had conquered his speech impediment and was ready to get serious with his studies. His stutter had left him feeling locked away, shut off from the outside world. Now he felt his mind blossom. “I became a very good student,” he said. “I took tough and challenging courses. When I got out of school, I said, ‘I’m going to take the thing that was a big obstacle from my early life, and I’m going to make it a strength in my life going forward.’” And so, learning, and hands-on learning in particular, became a hallmark of Sculley’s life. When he went to work for PepsiCo, he delivered soft drinks and reset supermarket shelves, repairing tin bodega roofs in the hot Arizona sun in exchange for getting a Pepsi sign in the window. His friends asked why he, a promising future executive with an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, would accept such menial tasks, he said, “Because I believe in hands-on learning. I want to learn—I want to see it firsthand and get my hands on it.” That experience proved invaluable to Sculley’s success at Pepsi, where he became the company’s youngest marketing vice president in 1967. When he joined Pepsi, the soft drink giant was dwarfed by Coca-Cola’s dominance, outsold 10-1 in half of the United States. By the time he left in 1982, Pepsi was the top consumer packaged goods in America and outsold Coca-Cola—due in large part to Sculley’s Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign that featured lifelong Coke drinkers choosing Pepsi in blind taste tests. “When I got the chance to become marketing vice president of Pepsi—when I was just turning 30 years old—the reason I was able to succeed was because I had a mental picture in my head of what happened throughout the whole process of being somebody who made soft drinks, and delivered those soft drinks, and displayed those soft drinks,” Sculley said. “A lot of the marketing programs we came up with which were successful at Pepsi were things that I had gained a perspective on back in those early days of being a trainee.” Sculley’s huge success at Pepsi had captured the attention of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who lured him away from the soft-drink company—where Sculley had risen to president—with an evocative pitch: “He looked up at me and just stared at me with the stare that only Steve Jobs has, and he said, ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?’ And I just gulped, because I knew I would wonder for the rest of my life what I would have missed.” Again, Sculley’s passion for learning pushed him to follow his curiosity. He accepted the job as Apple’s CEO, much to the consternation of Silicon Valley skeptics, who wondered what value a soft-drink salesman would bring to the fledgling computer company. They didn’t realize just who Sculley was—an inquisitive and driven executive who brought not only marketing expertise but also hands-on, self-taught consumer electronics experience dating back to his invention of the cathode ray tube for color television when he was just 14. His decade at Apple was a roller coaster—he and Jobs clashed so intensely that Jobs left the company and didn’t return until after Sculley resigned in 1993—but he managed to boost sales from $800 million to $8 billion and succeed in mass-marketing Macintosh personal computers, a considerable feat in the days before most people had computers in their homes. Among Sculley’s accomplishments was the “test drive a Mac” promotion that allowed customers to take home a personal computer and return it, at no charge, if they didn’t like it. “It wasn’t magical what I did,” Sculley said. “It was just based on my experience selling Pepsi and competing against one of the largest and most successful consumer brand in the world, Coca-Cola. Silicon Valley didn’t know this, but many of those consumer techniques were very transferable to high-tech products—at a time when there really was not consumer marketing for high-tech products.” After Apple, Sculley spent the years that followed establishing himself as an investor and tech entrepreneur, founding and advising a variety of companies, some that fizzled and some that grew to become billion-dollar ventures. Along the way, he also found himself speaking—about his Apple experience, his marketing expertise, and that stutter that once threatened to hold him back. “I do a lot of public speaking. I do a lot of television. I couldn’t have imagined back when I was 15 years old that I could ever stand up in front of a class and even talk to my fellow students,” he said recently. “What was an impediment and could have sent my life in an entirely different direction has actually enabled me to keep my mind alert. That lifelong learning never stops.” It’s tempting to accept our constraints, to shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s what life handed me. But doing so could deny the world our true potential. So, when you think of what’s holding you back, think about the trajectory of John Sculley. Once he made the decision to take that leap over his most daunting hurdle, he found something extraordinary waiting just beyond it. Can you, like Sculley, take your biggest obstacle—and turn it into your greatest strength?

If you enjoyed this story, consider ordering Mark’s new book.

Barbara Lopez

Retired Global Chief Executive of Drug Information Association, Board member of Children’s National Health Care System and National Research Institute

Of the world’s largest multi-billion-dollar, global research company’s nine leaders, she would be the only woman. Barbara Lopez was painfully aware of what she was stepping into in 2007.

So were her new colleagues.

Shortly after Lopez started, one of her fellow executives approached her during a break in a meeting.

Barbara, she recalled him saying, when I heard we were bringing in a woman as an officer, I’ve got to tell you, I was really upset. I had no idea what I was going to be facing. But I have to tell you, you are really smart, and you’re feminine, too.

Lopez weighed his words. Clumsy though they were, the man was trying to pay her a compliment. She was being welcomed into the fold. She decided to go with it, heeding her CEO’s advice about listening and absorbing the culture rather than pouncing with a new strategy, and soon she found the approach working.

“Probably three or four months into it, the CEO took me aside and he said, ‘Have you noticed? They’re all copying you now. They’re all using your ideas. They’re using your language.’ And they were. I brought a sense of strategy, of vision, of score card, of metrics—it was all new for them. And frankly, it was a great time, because even though they were very different from me, I felt like I was figuring out how to fit, how to be credible at the table.”

Lopez has built an impressive career of figuring out how to fit—and finding the fortitude to keep trying. A professional adventurer, she’s held leadership roles and board positions across industries, forming a reputation as an intense, spirited executive, a force to constantly be reckoned with. Her strength is her trademark, a personal toughness forged through decades of breaking barriers of gender and ethnicity—and formed during a life-defining experience that rattled her joyful childhood.

“I had a vision at a very young age of what success looked like,” she said. “And when I look back at it now, I think there were lots of things that were wrong about it. You know, a parent may look at their child and say, ‘Boy, I’d love to have a girl that was that,” But I look back at it now and I say, ‘My God … I was a child.’”

She grew up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, one of seven children born to parents completely and unconditionally committed to the family’s education and health. They were a big family that filled up the whole church pew on Sunday, and they felt so close that it seemed unbelievable that tragedy might break their bond.

“How could God do this to a child?” her parents cried.

Lopez’s younger sister Mary was 5 when she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops in immature nerve cells. A regiment of surgeries and chemotherapy followed, as did a shift in the nuclear dynamics of the family. Lopez, just two years older, took over as Mary’s protector.

“She was in the first grade, and she couldn’t really go to school,” Lopez said. “But the days she could go, and she could get up, my mother would get us both dressed, and I would walk her to school. I remember walking, and she would walk a bit and get tired, and we would find a little place to sit on a curb, and we would just sit for a while. And I’d wait for her to be ready to keep going.”

Mary was just 8 when she died, leaving behind a crushing grief that sunk her parents into a deep, encompassing depression. Lopez, then 10, and her older sister, Nancy, stepped in to help. They packed lunches for the three youngest children and made sure the laundry was done.

“I mean, I just kept going,” Lopez said. “And honestly I look back on it and … this is why I made the comment about things happening for me very young, because I was out the gate very early, figuring out my own classes and doing my homework without any guidance. I got a job when I was old enough to work at the local bakery and make a few bucks so I had pocket change. I was living kind of like a little adult early on, and I think that set me up for victory.”

She found a role model in her older brother, the family’s eldest child. Victor was six years her senior, the valedictorian of his high school, a curious intellectual who would go on to become a successful physician. Victor and his friends pushed Lopez to succeed, coaching her through Shakespearean sonnets and rooting for her academic accomplishments. She was just a kid, but they showed her what her future could be.

“I was very goal oriented,” Lopez said. “I literally felt like I lived a life that other people would have lived in twice as many years. And I made some decisions that were wrong, because I didn’t have the intellectual or emotional maturity that would go along with those sort of major decisions. But what I learned about myself is that I know how to take care of problems. I’m very tough. I don’t let things get me down very much.”

That strength became an important ingredient in her life. As Lopez developed from a scientist to senior leader at highly regarded science, research and health care organizations, her toughness built her into a person who could dominate in the workplace and tackle the challenges that might have cowed others. It kept her head high in a board room where no one else looked like her—and taught her that even when things didn’t feel right, she could figure them out.

“It’s also created a person who not everybody likes, you know,” she said. “I know that I’m intense. And I sometimes think, ‘Oh, in this next situation, I’m going to really try to not be intense,’ and … it comes with me. I can’t stop it.”

Yet this did not stop her in serving in several executive leadership roles, and a host of corporate and nonprofit boards, including The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and the Children’s National Research Institute.

While her laser focus can make her intimidating, it’s also been key to her success in managing multimillion dollar businesses and navigating complicated new environments. One such example, was her proposing to the board of her Columbus-based, life science research business that they needed to make the largest investment they had ever made to accelerate a key line of business, or to exit it all together. There was no middle ground. She recognized a very unique opportunity; but it involved spending what was considered a king’s ransom. It was over 100 million dollars just in building and equipping a new tier one science facility and staffing it with world class talent.

This could shut the company down if everything didn’t go perfectly. In-spite of the risk of potentially losing her job and the business going bankrupt, the board trusted her and her compelling pushback on what could be.

The economy did weaken at the worst of times, but this was a women with nerves of steel, that many would say would be the next CEO. In taking a bold stand they rallied around her proposal.

On my end, as the Chief Talent Officer, at this same organization, she was one of my client executives. I couldn’t help but marvel at her leadership, but as importantly, the example she was setting for all to see. There was genuine risk and severe consequences potentially at play—many who could lose their job; yet there was also informed, bold thinking; courage, humility and humor. Years later, this life science business became untouchable in generating research that has saved many lives, unparalleled to what was ever imagined. Who was this person that could be so publicly vulnerable yet so sturdy and strong?

Underneath this tough exterior was someone with heart. Lopez cared deeply for others like nobody’s business. Something she would never say about herself. Yet I believe this was her secret sauce. People would follow her to the edge of a cliff because she gave part of her soul to others. She mentored young women in a hands-on way. She regularly took mid-career employees to lunch to get them excited or more deeply committed about what they were doing. She had junior executives shadowing her meetings up close to see what it was like to be on the firing line. She regularly held fireside chats with troubled research, product or sales teams to explore and encourage them to not give up or give in when it was the easier thing to do. In some ways it was like Lopez being back home as a ten-year-old looking after her younger, struggling five year old sister. That is, being there for others in a deeply personal, validating, inspiring fashion.

In 2013, Lopez was named the global chief executive of the Drug Information Association, known as DIA. It was a job she didn’t even know she wanted—and then couldn’t wait to start. DIA connects life science professionals from more than 80 countries, with the goal of collaborations leading to better policies, regulations, science, research and development—for better patient outcomes worldwide.
“I was in love from the first time I walked in and met the wonderful people at DIA,” Lopez said. “But I came into an entirely new ecosystem. I had zero experience in this. I didn’t even know it existed.”

She found her way, naturally. She knew she could, because she’s done it time and again. That’s what toughness teaches you. Lopez had learned young—too young, unfortunately—that life isn’t a paved path. You’re going to hit bumps even if you try your best to steer clear, and preparing for the worst means you’ll be ready should you find yourself there. Each time you conquer an obstacle—or lose to it—you’ll find that you’ve gained something valuable.

“Just be continuously open-minded to the learning that’s going to come,” Lopez said. “If I really was going to unwrap my life, I would tell you that my best outcomes came when I was at a point of a big challenge because I learned so much about how to navigate it— but mostly I learned about myself.”

Consider the next time you find yourself facing a daunting challenge or life circumstance. It could be hard. It may be painful. It just might alter your life forever. But when you emerge from it—and you will—you’ll have discovered something new about yourself. You’ll learn how tough you truly are.

If you enjoyed this story, consider

nec gravida tempor dolor convallis. facilisis in nec gravida tempor dolor convallis.
facilisis in facilisis tempor libero, orci cursus nec orcial nec gravida tempor dolor convallis

2-way access:

To purchase the THRIVE book separately, click “Buy Now”
Want to purchase only the Toolkit? Click on the ‘Get Toolkit’ button to access it instantly