Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple...A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future.

Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (1987), written by John Sculley with journalist John A. Byrne, is a business autobiography that stands as one of the more candid and consequential executive memoirs to emerge from the turbulent early decades of the personal computer industry. Sculley, who had risen to president and CEO of PepsiCo by the age of thirty-eight - orchestrating the celebrated Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign that reshaped the American soft drink landscape - was recruited away from that success by Steve Jobs, who famously challenged him with the question of whether he wanted to spend the rest of his life selling sugared water or have the chance to change the world. The book chronicles both worlds with considerable candor: Sculley's account of the Cola Wars and his years building Pepsi's marketing infrastructure remains one of the most instructive portraits of consumer brand strategy in the literature of American business, while his chapters on Apple illuminate the creative intensity and organizational turbulence of Silicon Valley in the 1980s - including his fraught relationship with Jobs, which culminated in the boardroom confrontation that led to Jobs's departure from the company he had founded.