BPR Interviews: John Sculley

John Sculley is the former CEO of Apple Computer, Inc. He began his career at Pepsi-Cola Company, where he became the company’s youngest president and CEO. Sculley is also author of the just released new book, “MOONSHOT!: Game Changing Strategies to Build Billion Dollar Businesses.” He is a managing partner of Sculley Family Office. 

As the former president of major multinational corporations, how did you think about interacting with the Federal Reserve? 

Corporations don’t pay a lot of attention to what the Fed does. We are all taking the benefit of the fact that interest rates these days are stagnant, and even when they start to go up, they are still pretty low. So the good news is that capital is available at low cost; the bad news is that the biggest [banks] have figured out how to make a lot of money, and as a result, big banks get even bigger. The irony is that big banks don’t do much with small businesses. There’s something systemically misaligned in the country, but you can’t trace it all back to the Fed.

Many corporations, including your former employer Apple, have been criticized for labor exploitation abroad. How far should corporate responsibility go toward ensuring labor rights in developing nations?  

In the United States, there was never a specific responsibility that the corporation’s job was to look out for various codes or groups. The role of the corporation was to make money for the shareholders, to keep employees generally happy, and to make customers happy. The only one that is [legally binding] of those three is to make money for the shareholders. So in that criteria, it’s really up to the individual boards of these companies to say, “Do we want to figure out a way to keep jobs in the United States?” The reality is, in this fast-moving global economy, that’s practical sometimes, but not practical all the time. For example, the H-1B visa is very controversial, because it allows green cards for high-skilled people from other parts of the world to come in and get a job here. Those who are against that say that it’s taking jobs away from someone else. People who are brought in on an H-1B visa have unique skills. And what is really weird is that while we have the greatest universities in the world, international graduate students have to go home after graduation. Here, we train them and give them great education, but they work for our competitors, because they go back to where they came from. It doesn’t make sense because they could be creating new companies, new jobs. On the other hand, I’m incredibly sympathetic to the fact that for some jobs that we do have the skills for here — those skills are also available outside the United States. Companies go to the least-cost alternative, and it’s often somewhere else. In some cases, those countries don’t follow the same human rights [and] civil rights as we do, so our government tries to build that into trade policies.

You spoke about immigration as a problematic area for US competition. Do you think the United States is less competitive because of its immigration policies, and, if so, how would you make it more competitive?  

Immigration has become a really ideologically driven argument. The reality is that our country has always done well when we have attracted immigrants to come in, who contribute by working hard, paying taxes, building businesses, and creating jobs. Generally, I’d say it’s a bad idea to build a wall around the country and keep people out. Conversely, we are a country of laws, but there are people coming in illegally, and we don’t have any enforcement of border control. This is a political football, and it’s not going to be solved by the 2016 election, because there are strong advocates on both sides. My sense is that having healthy immigration works. For example, Canada has a very different immigration policy than the United States. People who have skills but cannot get green cards to the United States go to Canada — especially those in the high-tech industry, who go to Waterloo or Vancouver. So the US high-tech companies, which can’t recruit those people, move their research and development centers to Waterloo and Vancouver. That’s just ridiculous; they are moving our talents and jobs out of the United States, just because there are some special interest groups who have blocked the opportunity to get high skills that we may not be able to find inside of the country. The problem is that democracy is messy, and there’s never a clean solution. Over time, you get results, which don’t make any sense, and that’s why compromises are so important. It’s a very odd time in America in that we see this polarization when people don’t compromise, and I hope the next president will be the leader to bring the country to logical practical compromises.

What is your advice to young people at Brown and across the country who want to make an impact at the intersection of business and politics? 

Your generation is going to discover solutions to problems [that] revolve around data. We didn’t have anything like that in my generation. Our resource was oil and gas, whose pricing is based on supply and demand. In the world of data, there’s no limit and there’s a complete abundance. Technology is becoming a commodity, which is inexpensive and is getting more and more powerful over time. What you can do with data is amazing. Medicines will be made out of data; climate challenges will be dealt with using data. So I’d say anyone in your generation has to have a foundational understanding of STEM. You don’t need to become a scientist, engineer, or mathematician, but you have to have curiosity about how powerful these technologies are…Otherwise, you’ll be left out of the world.