史蒂夫·乔布斯的管理课

14条领导真经

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

那些疯狂到认为他们可以改变世界的人正是那些改变世界的人
-- 苹果“不同凡想”的商业, 1997年

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

他的传奇故事是企业家创造的神话:1976年,史蒂夫乔布斯在父母的车库中创立了苹果公司,并于1985年被赶下台,1997年他从濒临破产的边缘拯救了苹果,到2011年10月去世的时候,他已经把它建成了世界上最有价值的公司。在此过程中,他帮助改变了7个行业:个人电脑、动画电影、音乐、手机、平板电脑、零售商店和数字出版。他因此与托马斯·爱迪生、亨利·福特和沃尔特·迪斯尼一起属于美国伟大的革新者。他们都不是圣人,但在他们的个性被遗忘很久之后,历史将会记住他们是如何将想象力运用到科技和商业上的。

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

在我的关于乔布斯传记出版后的几个月里,无数的评论家都试图根据它规划管理课程。其中一些读者是有洞察力的,但我认为他们中的许多人(尤其是那些没有创业经验的人)在他个性的粗糙边缘上太过关注。我认为,乔布斯的本质是他的个性决定了他做生意的方式。他的行为就好像正常的规则并不适用于他,他给日常生活带来的激情、强度和极端的情感主义,都是他在他的产品中倾注的东西。他的任性和不耐烦是他完美主义的一部分。

One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children.

最后一次我见到他时,我已经写完了这本书的大部分内容,我又问了他关于他对待员工很苛刻的事。“看看结果,”他回答,“和我工作这些人都是聪明人,如果他们真的感到被残酷对待,他们中的任何一个都能在另一个地方找到一份高级工作。但是他们没有。”然后他停了一会儿,近乎激动地说,“我们完成了一些让人大吃一惊的事情。” 事实上,他和苹果在过去的十几年里经历了一系列的成功,比现代任何一家创新公司都要大:iMac、iPod、iPod nano、iTunes商店、苹果商店、MacBook、iPhone、iPad、应用商店、OS X Lion,更别提皮克斯的每一部电影了。当他最后与病魔作斗争时,乔布斯身边围绕着一群忠心耿耿的同事,这些人多年来一直受到他的启发,还有一个非常爱他的妻子、他的姐姐和他的四个孩子。

So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.

所以我认为,从史蒂夫·乔布斯那里得到的真正的教训必须从他实际完成的事情中得到。我曾经问过他,你认为自己最重要的发明是什么,我认为他会回答iPad或麦金塔电脑。相反,他说这是苹果公司。他说,打造一家持久的公司,要比制造一款伟大的产品要困难得多,也更重要。他是怎么做到的?从现在开始,商学院将会一直研究这个问题一个世纪。以下是我认为他成功的关键。

1.专注( Focus )

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

1997年,乔布斯重返苹果公司,当时公司生产的电脑和外设产品又杂又乱,光Mac机就有十几款。乔布斯召开了几个星期的产品评议会,最后实在受不了了,大喊道:“停!这简直是疯了。”他一把抓起一支记号笔,光着脚走到一块白板前,画了一个2乘2的网格。“这是我们需要的,”他宣称。在这两列上,他写了消费者和专业版。他把这两行标记为桌面和便携式。他告诉他的团队成员,他们的工作是专注于四种伟大的产品,每一种产品都有一个。所有其他产品都应取消。一片死寂。但通过让苹果专注于制造四台电脑,他拯救了这家公司。他告诉我,决定不做什么与决定做什么一样重要,对公司是这样,对产品也是这样。

图片来自阮一峰

After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards, because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”

在他恢复了公司平稳发展之后,乔布斯开始每年都要带领他的百名员工休假。在最后一天,他会站在白板前(他喜欢白板,因为它们给了他完全的控制,并引起了聚焦),然后问,我们接下来要做的10件事是什么?人们会努力争取把他们的建议写道列表中。乔布斯会把他们写下来,然后把他认为的那些愚蠢的东西划掉。经过多次的激烈讨论,团队将列出10条建议。然后,乔布斯会删掉后面的7条,然后宣布,我们只能做三件事。

Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical diagnosis—they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready.

专注是乔布斯个性的一部分,并且在他修习禅宗过程中得到了磨练。他坚决不考虑他认为会分心的事情。有时,同事和家人试图让他处理一些他们认为重要的事情,如法律问题、医疗诊断等,结果被他气得够呛。他只是冷冷地看你一眼,不想放下自己专注的事情,除非等事情做完。

Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.

在他生命即将结束的时候,乔布斯在家里接受了拉里佩奇的拜访,此时,拉里佩奇即将恢复对他共同创立的谷歌的控制权。尽管他们的公司长期争斗,但乔布斯还是愿意给出一些建议。“我强调的主要事情是专注,”他回忆道。他告诉佩奇,“要弄清楚谷歌长大后想要做什么。现在所有的产品都展现在眼前。你最关注的五种产品是什么?把剩下的都丢掉,因为他们会把你拖下去。他们把你变成微软。他们会让你生产出足够的产品,但不是很好。佩奇听从了他的建议。2012年1月,他让员工专注于一些优先事项,比如Android和Google+,并让他们变得“漂亮”,就像乔布斯会做的那样。

2.简化( Simplify )

Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Apple’s quest for simplicity.

除了拥有禅师入定一般的专注能力,乔布斯还会本能地简化一切事物,他会抓住事物的本质,去除不必要的部分。在苹果的第一本宣传册上写着这样一句话:“至繁归于至简。”要明白这句话的意思,你只需要把苹果软件和微软的Word软件做一下比较。Word变得越来越丑,越来越杂,导航功能区缺少人性化设计,有些功能也非常扰人。从比较中,不难看出苹果对简单的追求是值得称道的。

Jobs learned to admire simplicity when he was working the night shift at Atari as a college dropout. Atari’s games came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions for its Star Trek game were: “1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons.” His love of simplicity in design was refined at design conferences he attended at the Aspen Institute in the late 1970s on a campus built in the Bauhaus style, which emphasized clean lines and functional design devoid of frills or distractions.

当他在雅达利大学的夜班工作时,他学会了欣赏简朴。雅达里的游戏没有任何手册,需要足够复杂,一个被石头砸了的新生可以把它们弄明白。它的星际迷航游戏的唯一指示是:1、插入 2、避免克林贡。他对设计简洁的热爱在20世纪70年代末在阿斯彭研究所参加的设计会议上得到了改进,当时他在包豪斯风格的校园里,强调简洁的线条和功能设计,没有任何装饰和干扰。

When Jobs visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and saw the plans for a computer that had a graphical user interface and a mouse, he set about making the design both more intuitive (his team enabled the user to drag and drop documents and folders on a virtual desktop) and simpler. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons and cost 300; Jobs went to a local industrial design firm and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple, single-button model that cost15. Hovey complied.

当工作参观施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心,看到了电脑的计划有一个图形用户界面和一个鼠标,他着手使设计更直观(他的团队让用户拖拽文件和文件夹在一个虚拟桌面)和简单。例如,施乐鼠标有三个按钮,花费了300美元;乔布斯去了当地的一家工业设计公司,并告诉该公司的一位创始人迪恩霍维,他想要一个简单的单按钮模型,价格为15美元。霍维履行。

Jobs aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

乔布斯追求简单并不是无视复杂,而是战胜复杂。他知道,简单到这种程度后,生产出来的机器,就会友好地听从于用户,而不是让用户觉得是一大挑战。他说:“我们必须付出很大的努力,才能生产出简单的东西,才能真正认识潜在的挑战,拿出绝佳的解决方案。”他们知道,简单并不是极简主义风格,也不是删繁就简。要去掉螺丝、按键或多余的导航界面,就必须深刻了解每个元素所起的作用。

In Jony Ive, Apple’s industrial designer, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for deep rather than superficial simplicity. They knew that simplicity is not merely a minimalist style or the removal of clutter. In order to eliminate screws, buttons, or excess navigational screens, it was necessary to understand profoundly the role each element played. “To be truly simple, you have to go really deep,” Ive explained. “For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured.”

在苹果的工业设计师乔尼艾夫,乔布斯遇到了他的灵魂伴侣,追求的是深度而不是肤浅的简单。他们知道,简单不仅仅是一种极简主义风格,也不只是一种杂乱的东西。为了消除螺丝、按钮或多余的导航屏幕,有必要深刻地理解每个元素所扮演的角色。我解释说,要做到真正的简单,你必须走得非常深。例如,在某些东西上没有螺丝,你最终会得到一个如此复杂和复杂的产品。更好的方法是更深入地了解它的简单性,了解它的一切以及它是如何制造的。

During the design of the iPod interface, Jobs tried at every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to whatever he wanted in three clicks. One navigation screen, for example, asked users whether they wanted to search by song, album, or artist. “Why do we need that screen?” Jobs demanded. The designers realized they didn’t. “There would be times when we’d rack our brains on a user interface problem, and he would go, ‘Did you think of this?’” says Tony Fadell, who led the iPod team. “And then we’d all go, ‘Holy shit.’ He’d redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.” At one point Jobs made the simplest of all suggestions: Let’s get rid of the on/off button. At first the team members were taken aback, but then they realized the button was unnecessary. The device would gradually power down if it wasn’t being used and would spring to life when reengaged.

在设计iPod的界面时,每次会议乔布斯都设法去掉繁琐的部分。他坚持要求,只需按三下,就能找到想要的功能。有一次,乔布斯提出了一个最简单的建议:我们把开关机键去掉吧。一开始,团队成员都很吃惊,但很快意识到,这个键确实没有必要。如果用户没有进一步操作,设备就会逐渐进入低能耗状态。一旦用户按下任意键,它就会自动“醒来”。

Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”

同样地,当乔布斯看到一组杂乱的iDVD的导航屏幕时,他就跳起来,在白板上画了一个简单的长方形。“这是新的应用程序,”他说。它有一个窗口。你把你的视频拖到窗口。然后你点击“燃烧”按钮。这年代。这就是我们要做的。

In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In 2001 portable music players and ways to acquire songs online fit that description, leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next. Jobs would grab a phone at a meeting and rant (correctly) that nobody could possibly figure out how to navigate half the features, including the address book. At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click on a simple device to watch what they wanted when they wanted.

在寻找可能被颠覆的行业或类别时,乔布斯总是问,谁制造的产品比应有的更复杂。2001年,便携式音乐播放器和在线购买歌曲的方式符合这一描述,从而导致了iPod和iTunes商店。手机是下一个。乔布斯会在会议上拿起电话,咆哮(正确地),没有人能弄清楚如何浏览一半的功能,包括通讯录。在他职业生涯的末期,他把目光投向了电视行业,这使得人们几乎不可能在他们想要的时候点击一个简单的设备来观看他们想要的东西。

3.全程负责( Take Responsibility End to End )

Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated. An Apple ecosystem—an iPod connected to a Mac with iTunes software, for example—allowed devices to be simpler, syncing to be smoother, and glitches to be rarer. The more complex tasks, such as making new playlists, could be done on the computer, allowing the iPod to have fewer functions and buttons.

乔布斯知道,要做到简单,最好的办法就是确保硬件、软件和外设无缝融合。苹果建立的生态系统(如通过iTunes软件,iPod可以和Mac机相连),可以让设备更简单、同步更顺畅、小故障更少。较为复杂的任务,如制作新的播放列表,可以在电脑上完成,这样iPod就可以减少功能和按键。

Jobs and Apple took end-to-end responsibility for the user experience—something too few companies do. From the performance of the ARM microprocessor in the iPhone to the act of buying that phone in an Apple Store, every aspect of the customer experience was tightly linked together. Both Microsoft in the 1980s and Google in the past few years have taken a more open approach that allows their operating systems and software to be used by various hardware manufacturers. That has sometimes proved the better business model. But Jobs fervently believed that it was a recipe for (to use his technical term) crappier products. “People are busy,” he said. “They have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”

乔布斯和苹果对用户体验全程负责,而极少有企业是这样做的。从iPhone的ARM微处理器性能,到用户在苹果专卖店购买iPhone,用户体验的每一个环节都紧密相扣。微软在上世纪80年代,以及谷歌在过去几年里,都采用了一种更开放的策略:不同硬件生产商都可以使用它们的操作系统和软件。有时,这种商业模式确实更具优势。但乔布斯坚信,这样出来的产品只会更蹩脚。他说:“人们都很忙,有其他事情要做,根本没时间考虑怎么把电脑和其他设备连起来。”

Part of Jobs’s compulsion to take responsibility for what he called “the whole widget” stemmed from his personality, which was very controlling. But it was also driven by his passion for perfection and making elegant products. He got hives, or worse, when contemplating the use of great Apple software on another company’s uninspired hardware, and he was equally allergic to the thought that unapproved apps or content might pollute the perfection of an Apple device. It was an approach that did not always maximize short-term profits, but in a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, it led to astonishing products marked by delightful user experiences. Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.

乔布斯愿意为他所称的“整个小玩意儿”负责,部分源于他的个性:他有很强的控制欲。当然,他热衷于追求完美和制造精巧产品,也是原因所在。一想到卓越的苹果软件用在另一家公司毫无创新的硬件上,或者未经验证的应用程序或内容可能“玷污”完美的苹果设备,乔布斯就会浑身不自在。这是一种不总是最大化短期利润的方法,但在一个充斥着垃圾设备、难以理解的错误信息和令人讨厌的界面的世界里,它带来了令人惊叹的产品,以令人愉快的用户体验为标志。在苹果的生态系统中,可以像在京都的禅宗花园中漫步一样,让人觉得自己很享受,而这两种体验都不是通过在开放的祭坛上敬拜,或者让千朵花绽放的。有时候,在控制狂的手中,感觉很好。

4.落后就奋起超越( When Behind Leapfrog )

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. That happened when Jobs built the original iMac. He focused on making it useful for managing a user’s photos and videos, but it was left behind when dealing with music. People with PCs were downloading and swapping music and then ripping and burning their own CDs. The iMac’s slot drive couldn’t burn CDs. “I felt like a dope,” he said. “I thought we had missed it.”

创新型企业不仅第一个提出新理念,还知道在落后的时候如何奋起超越对手。乔布斯在开发最初的iMac时就是这样。当时,他关注的是管理用户的图片和视频,在音乐处理方面则落后。人们用个人电脑下载和交换音乐,然后自己刻录CD。而iMac的插槽式驱动器无法刻录CD。乔布斯说:“我就像个傻子,我们把它漏掉了。”

But instead of merely catching up by upgrading the iMac’s CD drive, he decided to create an integrated system that would transform the music industry. The result was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share, manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.

不过,他并没有给iMac装上一个CD驱动器就完事,而是决定创造一个一体化系统,改变整个音乐行业。于是,便有了iTunes、iTunesStore和iPod这个组合,用户利用它们可以更方便地购买、分享、管理、存储和播放音乐,这是任何其他设备无法比拟的。

After the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it. Instead he began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile phone makers would start adding music players to their handsets. So he cannibalized iPod sales by creating the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will,” he said.

iPod大获成功,但乔布斯并没有沾沾自喜。他开始担心什么会对它构成威胁。一种可能性是,手机生产商在手机上安装音乐播放器。于是,他开发出了iPhone,蚕食了iPod的销量。他说:“如果我们不蚕食自己,也会有其他人这样做。”

5.产品先于利润( Put Product Before Profits )

When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it “insanely great.” He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader. At his first retreat with the Macintosh team, he began by writing a maxim on his whiteboard: “Don’t compromise.” The machine that resulted cost too much and led to Jobs’s ouster from Apple. But the Macintosh also “put a dent in the universe,” as he said, by accelerating the home computer revolution. And in the long run he got the balance right: Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.

当乔布斯和他的小团队设计了最初的麦金塔电脑时,在20世纪80年代早期,他的禁令是让它变得异常伟大。他从不谈论利润最大化或成本权衡。“不要担心价格,只需要指定电脑的能力,”他告诉最初的团队负责人。在他与麦金塔团队的第一次撤退时,他开始在白板上写下一条格言:不要妥协。这台机器的成本太高,导致乔布斯从苹果公司离职。但麦金塔电脑也通过加速家庭电脑革命,对宇宙造成了影响。从长远来看,他的平衡是正确的:专注于让产品变得伟大,利润也会随之而来。

John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”

1983年至1993年,约翰·斯卡利(JohnSculley)执掌了苹果。他曾是百事公司(PepsiCo)的高管,负责市场营销和销售。乔布斯离开后,他更专注于利润最大化,而不是产品设计,结果,苹果的经营每况愈下。。我有自己的理论,关于为什么公司会出现衰落,乔布斯告诉我:他们生产一些很棒的产品,但随后销售和市场营销人员接管了公司,因为他们是能够提高利润的人。当销售人员管理公司的时候,产品的人就不那么重要了,很多人都关掉了。当斯卡利进来的时候,苹果就发生了,这是我的错,当鲍尔默接手微软的时候。

When Jobs returned, he shifted Apple’s focus back to making innovative products: the sprightly iMac, the PowerBook, and then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. As he explained, “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything—the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.”

当乔布斯回来的时候,他把苹果的注意力转移到制造创新产品上:sprightly iMac,PowerBook,然后是iPod,iPhone和iPad。正如他解释的那样,我的热情是建立一个持久的公司,让人们有动力去生产伟大的产品。其他一切都是次要的。当然,赚钱很好,因为那是让你做伟大产品的原因。但是产品,而不是利润,才是动机。斯卡利把这些优先事项翻转到目标是赚钱的地方。这是一个细微的差别,但它最终意味着你雇佣的人,得到提升的人,你在会议上讨论的内容。

6.不要盲信焦点小组( Don't Be a Slave to Focus Groups )

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

乔布斯和最初的Mac团队第一次举行静修会时,一位成员问是否应该做一些市场调研,看看顾客想要什么。乔布斯回答说:“用不着,因为在我们把产品拿给顾客看之前,他们根本不知道自己想要什么。”他还提到了亨利·福特的一句话:“如果我当初问顾客想要什么,他们会说‘一匹速度更快的马’。

Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

深入关切顾客想要什么,与不断问顾客想要什么,存在很大的不同,前者需要你发挥直觉和本能,预见顾客尚未形成的需求。乔布斯解释说:“我们的任务就是读出那些还没写在纸上的东西。”他没有做市场调研,而是不断磨练自己形成共鸣的能力,也就是从直觉上感知顾客的需求。他从大学辍学后曾到印度研究佛教,在那段时间里,他领悟到了直觉的力量——一种从经验积累中获得的感知能力。他回忆说:“在印度农村,人们不像我们用理智来思考问题,他们用的是直觉。直觉是一种非常强大的东西,我觉得,它比理智更强大。”

Sometimes that meant that Jobs used a one-person focus group: himself. He made products that he and his friends wanted. For example, there were many portable music players around in 2000, but Jobs felt they were all lame, and as a music fanatic he wanted a simple device that would allow him to carry a thousand songs in his pocket. “We made the iPod for ourselves,” he said, “and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.”

有时这意味着乔布斯使用了一个人的焦点小组:他自己。他生产的产品是他和他的朋友想要的。例如,2000年有很多便携式音乐播放器,但乔布斯觉得它们都是蹩脚的,作为一个狂热的音乐爱好者,他想要一个简单的设备,让他可以在口袋里放上千首歌。“我们为自己制作了iPod,”他说,“当你为自己、或你最好的朋友或家人做点什么时,你就不会去奶酪了。”

7.扭曲现实( Bend Reality )

Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.

众所周知,乔布斯很擅于敦促别人去完成不可能完成的任务。于是,同事们根据电视剧《星际迷航》,将乔布斯的这种能力称为“现实扭曲力场”(RealityDistortionField)。对那些不了解乔布斯的人来说,“现实扭曲力场”只是以强凌弱、大言欺人的委婉表达。但是,与乔布斯共过事的人都承认,尽管这种特质可能让人窝火,但他们也确实因此创造了非凡的业绩。乔布斯认为,生活中一般的规则并不适用于他,所以,他才能够激励团队用比施乐或IBM少得多的资源,改变计算机历史的发展进程。

Those who did not know Jobs interpreted the Reality Distortion Field as a euphemism for bullying and lying. But those who worked with him admitted that the trait, infuriating as it might be, led them to perform extraordinary feats. Because Jobs felt that life’s ordinary rules didn’t apply to him, he could inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a small fraction of the resources that Xerox or IBM had. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” recalls Debi Coleman, a member of the original Mac team who won an award one year for being the employee who best stood up to Jobs. “You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

那些不了解乔布斯的人将现实扭曲场解读为欺凌和说谎的委婉说法。但是那些和他一起工作的人承认,这种特质让他们表现出非凡的成就。因为乔布斯觉得生活的普通规则并不适用于他,他可以激励他的团队用施乐或IBM的一小部分资源来改变计算机历史的进程。“这是一种自我实现的扭曲,”Debi Coleman回忆道,他是最初的Mac团队的一名成员,他在一年的时间里获得了最佳工作机会奖。你做了不可能的事,因为你没有意识到这是不可能的。

One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster.

一天,乔布斯走进工程师拉里·凯尼恩(LarryKenyon)的办公室,抱怨说他负责的Mac操作系统启动时间太长了。凯尼恩开始解释为什么无法缩短启动时间,但乔布斯打断了他,问道:“如果能救人一命,你能想出办法让启动时间缩短10秒么?”凯尼恩说也许能。乔布斯走到一块白板前,算了一笔账:如果有500万人使用Mac机,每天开机多花10秒,那么一年加起来差不多3亿分钟,这相当于至少100个人的寿命。几星期后,凯尼恩把开机时间缩短了28秒。

When Jobs was designing the iPhone, he decided that he wanted its face to be a tough, scratchproof glass, rather than plastic. He met with Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, who told him that Corning had developed a chemical exchange process in the 1960s that led to what it dubbed “Gorilla glass.” Jobs replied that he wanted a major shipment of Gorilla glass in six months. Weeks said that Corning was not making the glass and didn’t have that capacity. “Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was unfamiliar with Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field. He tried to explain that a false sense of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but Jobs had repeatedly shown that he didn’t accept that premise. He stared unblinking at Weeks. “Yes, you can do it,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” Weeks recalls that he shook his head in astonishment and then called the managers of Corning’s facility in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays, and told them to convert immediately to making Gorilla glass full-time. “We did it in under six months,” he says. “We put our best scientists and engineers on it, and we just made it work.” As a result, every piece of glass on an iPhone or an iPad is made in America by Corning.

当乔布斯在设计iPhone时,他决定要把它的脸变成一个坚硬的、防刮的玻璃,而不是塑料。他会见了康宁公司的首席执行官温德尔几周,他告诉他康宁公司在20世纪60年代开发了一种化学交换过程,最终导致了它所称的“Gorilla玻璃”。乔布斯回答说,他想在6个月内要一批大型的大猩猩玻璃。几周的时间里,康宁公司并没有制造这种玻璃,而且没有这种能力。不要害怕,乔布斯回答说。这几周令人震惊,不熟悉乔布斯的现实扭曲力场。他试图解释,一种虚假的自信不会克服工程上的挑战,但乔布斯一再表明,他不接受这个前提。几周后,他目不转睛地盯着他。“是的,你可以做到,”他说。把你的注意力放在它周围。你能做到。几周的回忆中,他惊讶地摇了摇头,然后打电话给位于肯塔基州哈罗兹堡的康宁公司的经理们,他们一直在做液晶显示器,并告诉他们立即转换成全职生产大猩猩玻璃。“我们在不到6个月的时间里就完成了,”他说。我们把最好的科学家和工程师放在上面,我们只是让它发挥作用。
因此,iPhone或iPad上的每一块玻璃都是由康宁公司生产的。

8.灌输( Impute )

Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people do judge a book by its cover,” he told me.

1979年,乔布斯早期的导师迈克·马尔库拉(MikeMarkkula)给他写了一张便条,要他恪守三条原则。前两条是“共鸣”和“专注”,第三条有点怪,叫“灌输”,但它已成为乔布斯最重要的信条之一。他知道,人们都是根据产品或公司的呈现和包装方式,对它们做出评判的。他对我说:“迈克告诉我,人们是根据封面来评判一本书的。”

When he was getting ready to ship the Macintosh in 1984, he obsessed over the colors and design of the box. Similarly, he personally spent time designing and redesigning the jewellike boxes that cradle the iPod and the iPhone and listed himself on the patents for them. He and Ive believed that unpacking was a ritual like theater and heralded the glory of the product. “When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product,” Jobs said.

1984年,当他准备推出麦金塔电脑时,他痴迷于盒子的颜色和设计。同样,他亲自花时间设计和重新设计了iPod和iPhone的珠宝盒,并将自己列入了专利。他和我相信,拆开包装是一种像戏剧一样的仪式,预示着产品的荣耀。乔布斯说,当你打开iPhone或iPad的盒子时,我们希望这种触觉体验为你对产品的感知定下基调。

Sometimes Jobs used the design of a machine to “impute” a signal rather than to be merely functional. For example, when he was creating the new and playful iMac, after his return to Apple, he was shown a design by Ive that had a little recessed handle nestled in the top. It was more semiotic than useful. This was a desktop computer. Not many people were really going to carry it around. But Jobs and Ive realized that a lot of people were still intimidated by computers. If it had a handle, the new machine would seem friendly, deferential, and at one’s service. The handle signaled permission to touch the iMac. The manufacturing team was opposed to the extra cost, but Jobs simply announced, “No, we’re doing this.” He didn’t even try to explain.

有时候,乔布斯利用产品设计来“灌输”一种信号,而不只是作为一项功能。比如,乔布斯回归苹果后,开始设计新的iMac。他看到伊夫在电脑顶部设计了一个凹进去的小提手。这种设计与其说是为了实用,还不如说是作为一种符号。iMac是台式机,不会有很多人拎着它到处走的。但乔布斯和伊夫知道,还是有很多人对电脑打怵。如果有一个提手,电脑就显得对用户友好,感觉上就是给人提供服务的。有了提手,就意味着用户可以触碰电脑。生产团队反对增加成本,而乔布斯就一句话:“不行,就这样做。”连解释都没有。

9.力求完美( Push for Perfection )

During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. That happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg and the team at Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar team to make it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally stopped production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to delay everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized around activities and not just product categories.

几乎在开发每一种产品时,乔布斯都会在某个时刻“按下暂停键”,回过头去看最初的设计,因为他觉得产品不够完美。设计iPhone时,最初设计是把玻璃屏幕嵌在一个铝制外壳内。某个星期一早晨,乔布斯找到伊夫,说:“昨晚我睡不着,我发现我并不喜欢这个设计。”让伊夫感到沮丧的是,他马上意识到乔布斯是对的。iPhone的焦点应该是在显示屏上,而按照当时的设计,外壳有抢风头之嫌,没有突出显示屏。而且,整个机子太过男性化,太注重任务和效率。乔布斯对伊夫的团队说:“伙计们,我知道你们为这个设计苦干了整整九个月,但我们不得不做出改动。我们大家都得加夜班,周末也不能休息,如果你们想要的话,可以给你们几把枪,把我们都干掉。”结果,谁也没有叫嚣,大家同意了。乔布斯回忆说:“那是我在苹果最感骄傲的时刻之一。”

The same was true for the iPhone. The initial design had the glass screen set into an aluminum case. One Monday morning Jobs went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said, “because I realized that I just don’t love it.” Ive, to his dismay, instantly saw that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation,” he says. The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in its current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. The whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want, we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled.

iPhone也是如此。最初的设计将玻璃屏幕设置为铝制外壳。一个星期一的早晨,乔布斯去看了艾维。“我昨晚没睡,”他说,“因为我意识到我就是不喜欢它。”令他沮丧的是,我立刻发现乔布斯是对的。他说,我记得他不得不做观察,感到非常尴尬。
问题是,iPhone本应该是关于显示器的,但在目前的设计中,这个案例与显示器竞争,而不是离开了。整个设备感觉太男性化、任务驱动、高效。“伙计们,在过去的9个月里,你们为了这个设计而牺牲了自己,但我们将会改变它,”乔布斯告诉艾维的团队。我们都得在晚上和周末工作,如果你愿意,我们可以分发一些枪支,这样你就可以杀了我们。这个团队没有放弃,而是同意了。乔布斯回忆说,这是我在苹果最自豪的时刻之一。

A similar thing happened as Jobs and Ive were finishing the iPad. At one point Jobs looked at the model and felt slightly dissatisfied. It didn’t seem casual and friendly enough to scoop up and whisk away. They needed to signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. They decided that the bottom edge should be slightly rounded, so that a user would feel comfortable just snatching it up rather than lifting it carefully. That meant engineering had to design the necessary connection ports and buttons in a thin, simple lip that sloped away gently underneath. Jobs delayed the product until the change could be made.

类似的事情也发生在乔布斯和艾维完成iPad的时候。有一次,乔布斯看了看模型,觉得有点不满意。它看起来不那么随意和友好,可以把它舀起来,然后把它带走。
他们需要发出信号,你可以用一只手抓住它,一时冲动。他们认为,底部的边缘应该是稍微圆的,这样用户就会觉得很舒服,只是把它拿起来,而不是小心地把它举起来。这意味着工程必须在一个薄而简单的嘴唇上设计必要的连接端口和按钮,在下面轻轻地倾斜。乔布斯推迟了产品的生产,直到做出改变。

Jobs’s perfectionism extended even to the parts unseen. As a young boy, he had helped his father build a fence around their backyard, and he was told they had to use just as much care on the back of the fence as on the front. “Nobody will ever know,” Steve said. His father replied, “But you will know.” A true craftsman uses a good piece of wood even for the back of a cabinet against the wall, his father explained, and they should do the same for the back of the fence. It was the mark of an artist to have such a passion for perfection. In overseeing the Apple II and the Macintosh, Jobs applied this lesson to the circuit board inside the machine. In both instances he sent the engineers back to make the chips line up neatly so the board would look nice. This seemed particularly odd to the engineers of the Macintosh, because Jobs had decreed that the machine be tightly sealed. “Nobody is going to see the PC board,” one of them protested. Jobs reacted as his father had: “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” They were true artists, he said, and should act that way. And once the board was redesigned, he had the engineers and other members of the Macintosh team sign their names so that they could be engraved inside the case. “Real artists sign their work,” he said.

乔布斯追求完美,甚至连那些看不到的部位都不马虎。当他还是个小男孩的时候,他帮助他的父亲在他们的后院建了一道篱笆,他被告知,他们必须像在前面一样,在篱笆的后面使用同样多的护理。没有人会知道,史蒂夫说。他的父亲回答说,但你会知道的。他的父亲解释说,一个真正的工匠会用一块很好的木头,即使是在橱柜的背面,也要用在墙上,他们也应该在篱笆的后面做同样的事情。这是一个艺术家的标志,他对完美有着如此强烈的热情。在监督设计苹果II型机和Mac机时,他要求工程师重新整理芯片布局,使线路板看起来整洁、美观。他的这种做法尤其让Mac机的工程师觉得不可理解。乔布斯说:“就算它是在机箱里面,我也希望它尽可能漂亮。伟大的木匠是不会在橱柜背面用烂木料的,即便没有人会看到。”他说,大家都是真正的艺术家,就应该这样去做。线路板重新设计后,他让工程师和Mac团队其他成员签名,然后把名字刻在机箱内部。“真正的艺术家都会在自己的作品上签名。”他说。

10.只容忍A级人才( Tolerate Only "A" Players )

Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” he said, “but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest.” When I pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, he said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.”

乔布斯对身边的人缺乏耐心、脾气暴躁、态度严厉,是出了名的。不过,他待人接物的方式虽然不值得称道,却也是源于他追求完美,以及只希望与最优秀的人共事。他这样做,是为了防止出现他所说的“庸人泛滥”:如果管理者太过彬彬有礼,平庸之辈就会如鱼得水、碌碌无为。他说:“我并不认为自己对人残暴,但如果有什么事搞砸了,我会当面讲出来的。讲实话,是我的职责。” 当我追问他是否能在更好的时候得到同样的结果时,他说也许是这样。“但我不是我,”他说。也许有一个更好的方式,一个绅士俱乐部,我们都戴着领带,用这种婆罗门语言和天鹅绒的代码说话,但我不知道,因为我是来自加州的中产阶级。

Was all his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not. There were other ways he could have motivated his team. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing folks,” Apple’s cofounder, Wozniak, said. “I like being more patient and not having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family.” But then he added something that is undeniably true: “If the Macintosh project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess.”

他的暴风雨和虐待行为是必要的吗?可能不会。还有其他的方法可以激励他的团队。苹果公司的联合创始人沃兹尼克说,乔布斯的贡献本可以在没有那么多关于他的恐怖故事的报道中做出。我喜欢更有耐心,没有那么多的冲突。我认为一家公司可以是一个好家庭。但随后他又添加了一些不可否认的事实:如果Macintosh项目是按照我的方式运行的,那么事情可能就会一团糟。

It’s important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be more loyal than those at other companies, including ones led by bosses who were kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide to emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty make a dangerous mistake.

乔布斯虽然粗鲁、严厉,但很会激励人。他让员工充满了激情,使他们致力于创造突破性的产品,并相信自己能够完成看似不可能完成的任务。我们必须用结果来评判他。乔布斯的家庭关系紧密,苹果内部也一样:相比其他公司,包括那些老板更为友善、更为平和的公司,乔布斯的顶尖人才往往在公司待的时间更长,也更忠诚。有些CEO研究了乔布斯后,决定像他一样要严厉对待员工,却不明白乔布斯是如何让员工建立忠诚的,因此他们这样做是很危险的。

“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs told me. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.” Most of them do. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalls. “Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

“多年来,我了解到,当你有真正优秀的人才时,你就不必为他们生孩子,”乔布斯告诉我。通过期待他们做伟大的事情,你可以让他们做伟大的事情。
询问任何一个Mac团队的成员。他们会告诉你,这是值得的。他们中的大多数。
“他会在一次会议上大喊大叫,你这个混蛋,你从来没有做过正确的事,”德比科尔曼回忆道。然而,我认为自己是世界上最幸运的人,与他共事过。

11.面对面交流( Engage Face-to-Face )

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

尽管他是数字世界的一员,或许因为太了解数字世界会让人产生孤立感,所以,乔布斯认为面对面交流非常必要。在皮克斯办公楼的设计上,他要求能促进意外碰面和协作。他说:“如果办公楼不利于这一点,你就会失去很多创新的机会,失去突发奇想的魔力。于是,我们在设计办公楼时,要能够让员工走出办公室,到中庭来,与平时见不到的人不期而遇。”

He had the Pixar building designed to promote unplanned encounters and collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium; the café and the mailboxes were there; the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it; and the 600-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalls. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

他拥有皮克斯大楼,旨在促进无计划的邂逅和合作。他说,如果一栋建筑不鼓励这种情况,你就会失去很多创新和由意外发现引发的魔力。所以我们设计了这个建筑,让人们离开他们的办公室,在中庭和他们可能看不到的人混在一起。前门和主楼梯和走廊都通向中庭;咖啡馆和邮箱都在那里;会议室里有窗户向外看;还有600个座位的剧院和两个较小的放映室。拉塞特回忆说,史蒂夫的理论从第一天起就开始了。几个月来,我一直在找那些我没见过的人。我从来没有见过一个能促进合作和创造力的建筑。

Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

乔布斯不喜欢正正经经的报告,他更喜欢面对面的自由交流。每周他都会召集管理团队,不设正式的议程,就让大家谈谈各种想法。每周三下午,他也会召集营销和广告团队做这样的事。乔布斯不允许使用幻灯片。他说:“我讨厌人们用幻灯片作报告,不进行思考。知道自己在讲些什么的人,是不需要PowerPoint(ppt)的。

12.兼顾大局和小节( Know Both the Big Picture and The Details )

Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design. For example, in 2000 he came up with the grand vision that the personal computer should become a “digital hub” for managing all of a user’s music, videos, photos, and content, and thus got Apple into the personal-device business with the iPod and then the iPad. In 2010 he came up with the successor strategy—the “hub” would move to the cloud—and Apple began building a huge server farm so that all a user’s content could be uploaded and then seamlessly synced to other personal devices. But even as he was laying out these grand visions, he was fretting over the shape and color of the screws inside the iMac.

事无巨细,乔布斯都会积极投入。有些CEO善于做长远规划,有些则明白贵在细节,而乔布斯两者兼顾。乔布斯的一个显著特点是,他能够并希望设想宏伟战略,同时又能关注设计的细枝末节。例如,在2000年,他提出了一个宏伟的愿景,即个人电脑应该成为一个数字中心,用来管理所有用户的音乐、视频、照片和内容,从而让苹果进入个人设备业务,包括iPod和iPad。在2010年,他提出了一个后续战略——中心将转移到云端,苹果开始建立一个庞大的服务器群,让所有用户的内容都可以上传,然后无缝地同步到其他个人设备上。但是,即使在他展示这些宏伟的愿景时,他也在为iMac内部的螺丝的形状和颜色而烦恼。

13.融合文理( Combine the Humanities with The Sciences )

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me on the day he decided to cooperate on a biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he was describing the theme of his life, and the more I studied him, the more I realized that this was, indeed, the essence of his tale.

当我还是个孩子的时候,我总是认为自己是一个人文学科的人,但我喜欢电子学,乔布斯在他决定合作写传记的那天告诉我。然后我读到我的一位英雄,宝丽来的埃德温兰德,谈到了那些能够站在人文和科学交叉路口的人的重要性,我决定这就是我想做的。就好像他在描述他生命的主题,我对他的研究越多,我就越意识到这确实是他故事的本质。

He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.

乔布斯贯通了文理、创造力和技术、艺术和工程。虽然在技术上胜过他的不乏其人(如沃兹尼亚克和盖茨),也有比他更优秀的设计师和艺术家,但在我们这个时代,能够创造性地将诗意和处理器连接在一起的,可以说无人能出其右。而且,他对商业战略还具有直觉的洞察力。在过去10年的每一次产品发布会上,乔布斯以一张幻灯片结束了,这张幻灯片显示了自由艺术和科技街道的交叉路口。

The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences exists in one strong personality was what most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to building innovative economies in the 21st century. It is the essence of applied imagination, and it’s why both the humanities and the sciences are critical for any society that is to have a creative edge in the future.

在我对富兰克林和爱因斯坦的传记中最感兴趣的是,当一种强烈的个性中融汇了人文和科学,创造力就会迸发出来。这是21世纪打造创新经济的关键所在。这是应用想象力的精髓,也是对于任何想在未来拥有创新优势的社会来说,人文和科学都至关重要的原因所在。

Even when he was dying, Jobs set his sights on disrupting more industries. He had a vision for turning textbooks into artistic creations that anyone with a Mac could fashion and craft—something that Apple announced in January 2012. He also dreamed of producing magical tools for digital photography and ways to make television simple and personal. Those, no doubt, will come as well. And even though he will not be around to see them to fruition, his rules for success helped him build a company that not only will create these and other disruptive products, but will stand at the intersection of creativity and technology as long as Jobs’s DNA persists at its core.

即使在他即将去世的时候,乔布斯也把目光投向了更多的行业。他曾设想将教科书转变为艺术创作,任何有Mac电脑的人都能设计出苹果在2012年1月宣布的产品。他还梦想着为数码摄影制作神奇的工具,以及让电视变得简单和个性化的方法。毫无疑问,这些人也会来。尽管他不会看到成果,他的规则成功帮助他建立一个公司不仅将创建这些和其他破坏性产品,但将站在十字路口的创造力和技术只要s DNA持续的核心工作。

14.求知若渴,虚心若愚( Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish )

Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

史蒂夫•乔布斯是上世纪60年代末从旧金山湾地区传出的两大社会运动的产物。
第一个是嬉皮士和反战积极分子的反主流文化,他们以迷幻药、摇滚音乐和反独裁主义为标志。第二个是硅谷的高科技和黑客文化,充斥着工程师、极客、线头、烧杯、网络朋克、业余爱好者和车库企业家。这两种方式都是通往个人启蒙禅和印度教的各种途径,冥想和瑜伽,原始的尖叫疗法和感官剥夺,Esalen和est。

An admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled: “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands.

在斯图尔特布兰德的整个地球目录等出版物中发现了这些文化的混合。它的第一个封面是从太空拍摄的著名的地球照片,它的副标题是对工具的访问。其基本理念是,技术可以成为我们的朋友。那些成为嬉皮士、叛逆、精神追求者、电话打者和电子爱好者的工作,都是一个粉丝。他尤其受到了最后一个问题的影响,这个问题是1971年,当时他还在上高中的时候。他带着它去了大学,然后又去了苹果农场公社,在那里他辍学了。他后来回忆道:“在他们最后一期的封底上,有一张清晨乡间小路的照片,如果你喜欢冒险的话,你可能会发现自己搭便车到了。”下面的文字是:求知若渴,虚心若愚。在他的整个职业生涯中,乔布斯一直践行着这句话:在他的个性中,除了商业和工程成分,还要有嬉皮士反对循规蹈矩的那一面——这是他在追求艺术、吸食毒品、追求心灵启迪的叛逆时期形成的。在他人生的每个方面,包括他约会过的女人、对待癌症诊断的方式、运营企业的方式等,他的行为都反映出了这样一种变化:从冲突、合流,到最终所有这些不同方面的融合。

Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its ads, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippie at heart. The famous “1984” ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think Different” ads: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…” If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

即使在成立苹果公司后,乔布斯也在公司广告中流露出自己叛逆和反文化的个性,就像是在宣告他内心仍是一个黑客、一个嬉皮士。重返苹果后,乔布斯帮助撰写了“非同凡想”(ThinkDifferent)广告的文案:“向那些疯狂的家伙们致敬,他们特立独行,他们桀骜不驯,他们惹是生非,他们格格不入……”说到这里,如果还有人不相信他是在讲他自己,那么文案中最后几句话或许可以消除这种疑虑:“或许他们是别人眼里的疯子,但他们却是我们眼中的天才。因为只有那些疯狂到以为自己能够改变世界的人,才能真正改变世界。”

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