Someone ought to write a comparative study of Scully's time at Apple with the successful turnaround of IBM led by Lou Gerstner, whose prior experience was at RJR Nabisco.

What people have studied is how much difference CEOs make. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10441713

Lou had 1993 until 2002. Scully had 1983–1993. I think Lou had the .com boom on his side. Scully not so much. There's definitely a deflection point around 1994 where everyone did a lot better. I guess the question is how did IBM and Apple perform relative to some benchmark under those leaders and even that could be just luck. Microsoft certainly outperformed both thees companies by a huge amount of this time period: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

So compared to MSFT both were huge failures.

[EDIT: it's interesting that at least during some Scully's tenure APPL tracks MSFT fairly closely... So at least during those years he was as good as Bill Gates? :) ]

Conveniently, a comparison of two companies such as that can ignore all counter-examples. After all, it's a case study, not a boring statistical survey.

Speaking of case study, Louis Gerstner's account of the turn-around is a great read [1]. I read when it was published, so not sure it has aged well; need to check it again someday.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Who-Says-Elephants-Cant-Dance/dp/0060...

And, prior to that, president of Pepsi-Cola.

Jobs is said to have lured Sculley to Apple by asking, “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?”

Heh, how much world-changing did Sculley end up doing after all? One always need to keep one's wits when making decisions influenced by charismatic personalities.

Not just apple, running computer companies seems to have been somewhat of a hobby for pepsi executives. I forget the names but the pop up a few times in the history of amiga/atari and the other competitors of the era.