2003-05-29 Steve Jobs.You never know what’s around the next corner.
Speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business
在斯坦福大学商学院的演讲
“You never know what’s around the next corner.”
“你永远不知道下一个拐角处会有什么。”
On May 29, 2003, Steve gave a talk to MBA students about his experience as CEO of Pixar and Apple. Two years later, he would deliver his seminal Stanford commencement address on the same campus.
2003 年 5 月 29 日，史蒂夫在 MBA 学生面前发表了关于他作为皮克斯和苹果首席执行官的经历的演讲。两年后，他将在同一校园发表他具有开创性的斯坦福大学毕业典礼演讲。
Pixar is a very different kind of company than Apple. Apple is a company that has new products every few weeks. It’s a company where you make ten important decisions a day, but if some of them are wrong, most of them are not terribly hard to correct a few months down the road.
皮克斯是一家与苹果截然不同的公司。苹果是一家每几周就推出新产品的公司。在这里，你每天要做出十个重要决策，但如果其中一些决策是错误的，通常在几个月后纠正起来并不会太困难。
Pixar is a company that has one new product a year, at best. That’s the holy grail for us: to have a movie a year, and we are just about there. As CEO, you make a few important decisions a quarter—maybe three—but they are very hard to change if you decide you want to change them.
皮克斯是一家每年最多只有一部新产品的公司。这对我们来说是圣杯：每年都有一部电影，我们快要实现这个目标了。作为首席执行官，你每个季度做出几项重要决策——可能是三项——但如果你决定想要改变它们，这些决策是非常难以更改的。
So, they are very, very different sides of the spectrum. However, you can look at Apple and say Apple is the most creative of the technology companies, and you can look at Pixar and say Pixar is by far the most technical of the creative companies, and in that sense, maybe they are striving for some ideal in the middle, coming from different ends of the spectrum.
所以，它们是非常非常不同的光谱两端。然而，你可以看苹果，认为苹果是科技公司中最具创意的，而你可以看皮克斯，认为皮克斯无疑是创意公司中最具技术性的，从这个意义上说，也许它们正在追求某种理想，来自光谱的不同端点。
If we [Apple] come up with a dozen innovations in a year, we can maybe advertise four or five of them. We can’t advertise more than that because, even if we had all the money in the world, the customer would get very confused with all these messages coming at them on TV. What do you do with the other half-dozen innovations you come up with? You know: six, seven, eight, nine, ten innovations? You have to communicate those with the customer at the point of sale. And it [the existing distribution channel] was not capable of that. So we decided to start our own. So that’s why we got into retail.
如果我们（苹果公司）在一年内推出十几项创新，我们也许可以为其中的四五项做广告。我们不能做更多的广告，因为即使我们有世界上所有的钱，顾客也会被电视上出现的所有这些信息弄得晕头转向。你会如何处理你想出的其他半打创新呢？你知道：六、七、八、九、十项创新？你必须在销售点与客户沟通这些创新。而它（现有的分销渠道）无法做到这一点。因此，我们决定自己创业。这就是我们进入零售业的原因。
We did things a little differently. Our goal in retail was not just to sell to the 5 percent of people who own our products today; it was to go for the other 95. And we decided they would not drive ten miles to look at an Apple Store if they weren’t at all interested in buying our products.
我们的做法有些不同。我们在零售方面的目标不仅仅是向目前拥有我们产品的 5% 的人销售，而是向其他 95% 的人销售。我们决定，如果他们对购买我们的产品一点兴趣都没有，就不会驱车 10 英里去苹果专卖店看一看。
巴菲特有同样的说法，有相似习惯的会走到一起。
We decided we had to ambush them. What that meant was that we had to go to high-traffic locations and put stores there. They [customers] didn’t have to take the risk of driving ten miles to find out they weren’t interested. They just had to take the risk of walking ten feet because they were walking by anyway, and they knew they could escape rapidly if it was something they hadn’t wanted. So we paid extra money for great locations and put them on great streets like University Avenue [in Palo Alto] and the A [-grade] malls across the country. And the real estate we’ve got is just A+.
我们决定要伏击他们。这意味着我们必须去人流量大的地方开店。他们（顾客）不必冒着驱车十英里的风险去发现自己不感兴趣。他们只需冒着走十英尺的风险，因为他们反正都会经过，而且他们知道，如果是他们不想要的东西，他们可以迅速逃离。因此，我们花了更多的钱，在帕洛阿尔托的大学大道和全国各地的 A 级购物中心等好地方选址。我们拥有的房地产就是 A+。
I learned this at Pixar: technology companies and content companies have absolutely no understanding of each other. None. It’s worse than you’d ever imagine. In Silicon Valley, most people think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes. Really. They really do.
我在皮克斯学到了这一点：技术公司和内容公司完全不了解对方。完全不了解。情况比你想象的还要糟糕。在硅谷，大多数人认为创意过程就是一群三十出头的人坐在沙发上，喝着啤酒，想着笑话。真的是这样。他们真的这么认为。
And yet I’ve watched people at Pixar making these films, and they work as hard as I’ve seen anybody in a technology company ever work. The creative process is as disciplined as any engineering process I’ve ever seen in my life. And they’re as passionate about it as any technical person I’ve ever seen.
然而，我看到皮克斯的员工在制作这些电影，他们的工作强度不亚于我所见过的任何一家科技公司的员工。他们的创作过程和我见过的任何工程技术过程一样严谨。他们的热情也不亚于我见过的任何技术人员。
On the other hand, the content companies have no appreciation of the creative process in the technical companies. They think that technology is something that you write a check for and buy. That’s it. And they do not understand that there’s a wide, dynamic range of capability and elegance. They don’t understand the creativity in the process. So these are like ships passing in the night.
另一方面，内容公司对技术公司的创意过程不屑一顾。他们认为，技术就是写张支票买来的东西。仅此而已。他们不明白，技术的能力和优雅程度有一个广泛、动态的范围。他们不了解过程中的创造性。因此，这些就像黑夜中驶过的船只。
The most important lesson I ever learned was that you have to hire people better than you are. […] In normal life, the difference in dynamic range from average to best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good: rarely. So the difference between an average meal in downtown Palo Alto tonight and the best one—maybe it’s two to one. Flight home, if you’re going home for the holidays: 50 percent difference. Rental cars, breakfast cereals. I don’t know, pick one.
我学到的最重要的一课是，你必须雇佣比你更优秀的人。 […] 在正常生活中，从平均水平到最佳水平的动态范围差通常是 30%、40%、50%。好两倍：很少见。因此，今晚在帕洛阿尔托市中心的一顿普通餐和最好的一顿之间的差距——也许是二比一。回家的航班，如果你是为了假期回家：差距 50%。租车、早餐谷物。我不知道，随便选一个。
But I saw that Woz [Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak]—one guy—having meetings in his head could run circles around two hundred engineers at Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought, “Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first.
但我看到沃兹（苹果联合创始人史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克）——一个人——在脑海中开会，能够轻松超越惠普的两百名工程师。这就是我所看到的。我想，“哇。”起初我并没有真正理解。
Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten years to actually try to put it into practice. Because you’d try to hire and find those people. And they’re really hard to find. And everyone says they are all prima donnas. But it turns out that when they work with each other, they’re not prima donnas. They really like it. The first time I tried to build that organization—that was the Mac team. And it really worked. I saw a team of fifty people do something that literally hundreds, or thousands, of people at other companies couldn’t do. And so I’ve since then always tried to find really great people who love what they are doing and are extremely good at it. And sometimes they have experience, and sometimes they’re really young. They’re diamonds in the rough—and you hire them and take chances on them. But that’s been the most important lesson I’ve learned in business: that the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives—and to try to find those really great people who really love what they do.
然后我开始理解这一点。实际上，我花了大约十年的时间来尝试将其付诸实践。因为你会尝试招聘并找到那些人。而且他们真的很难找到。每个人都说他们都是自我中心的人。但事实证明，当他们彼此合作时，他们并不是自我中心的人。他们真的很喜欢这样。我第一次尝试建立那个组织——就是 Mac 团队。它真的奏效了。我看到一个五十人的团队做了一些其他公司数百或数千人无法做到的事情。因此，从那时起，我一直努力寻找那些热爱自己所做事情并且非常优秀的人。有时他们有经验，有时他们真的很年轻。他们是潜力股——你雇佣他们并冒险。但这是我在商业中学到的最重要的教训：人们的动态范围远远超过我们在正常生活中遇到的事情——要努力寻找那些真正热爱自己工作的人。
I was basically fired from Apple. And that was really hard. So I’m sure I learned a lot from that. [Audience laughs.] I did. I did learn a lot from that. And as a matter of fact, there would have been no Pixar if that hadn’t happened. Life’s funny in this way. Sometimes your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses. Sometimes your greatest adversities, you learn the most from. I don’t know.
我基本上是被苹果公司解雇的。这真的很难。所以我相信我从中学到了很多。[观众笑] 我确实从中学到了很多。事实上，如果没有那件事，就不会有皮克斯。生活在这方面很有趣。有时候你最大的优点也是你最大的缺点。有时候你从最大的逆境中学到的东西最多。我不知道。
But there wouldn’t be a Pixar if it hadn’t been for that. But life is funny, you know? I never would have thought I’d end up back at Apple, but here I am. So it’s a circus world, and you never know what’s around the next corner.
但如果没有那件事，就不会有皮克斯。但生活就是这么有趣，你知道吗？我从来没想过我会回到苹果公司，但我现在就在这里。所以这是一个马戏团的世界，你永远不知道下一个拐角会有什么。
People say you learn more from failures than you do from successes, and that’s probably true. And I’ve made more mistakes than most people I know. But getting older does that [helps you grow] too. You get married. You know, you have a family. And your perspective starts to change on things.
人们说你从失败中学到的比从成功中学到的更多，这可能是对的。我犯的错误比我认识的大多数人都多。但变老也会让你成长。你结婚了。你知道，你有了家庭。你的观点开始在某些事情上发生变化。
When I was young, if I had to fire somebody, I didn’t think—to be honest, I didn’t think twice about it. When you get a little older, and maybe you have kids, you realize that the person you have to fire—even if they totally screwed up, they should be fired, you should have fired them months ago, anyone else would have fired them last year—even so, you realize that that person is going to have to go home to their wife and their children and tell them they got fired today and that they don’t have a job anymore. You realize that.
当我年轻的时候，如果我必须解雇某人，我并不考虑——说实话，我根本没有考虑过。随着年龄的增长，也许你有了孩子，你意识到你必须解雇的人——即使他们完全搞砸了，他们应该被解雇，你应该在几个月前就解雇他们，其他人去年就会解雇他们——即便如此，你意识到那个人必须回家告诉他们的妻子和孩子，他们今天被解雇了，已经没有工作了。你意识到了这一点。
So part of it is nothing that you do yourself, no accomplishments you achieve. It’s just the process of getting older and kicked around, and maybe a little wiser in the process. That’s, more than anything, probably what it is.
所以这部分并不是你自己做的事情，也不是你取得的成就。这只是变老和经历挫折的过程，也许在这个过程中变得稍微聪明一些。这大概就是最重要的。
[When I returned to Apple in 1997,] the individual contributors were phenomenal. And I asked a lot of these guys, “Why did you stay?” And they said, “Because we bleed six colors.” I heard that from a lot of people—there were six colors in the old Apple logo. It was management that was a problem. So we actually got rid of most of the management team and promoted a lot of these young people into management positions.
[当我在 1997 年回到苹果时，]个别贡献者非常出色。我问了很多这些人，“你们为什么留下来？”他们说，“因为我们为六种颜色而奋斗。”我从很多人那里听到过这个——旧苹果标志有六种颜色。问题在于管理层。因此，我们实际上解雇了大部分管理团队，并将许多年轻人提升到管理职位。
And what I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. [Audience laughs.] It’s true. It’s a lot of work, and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you care about.
我发现，理智的人都不想当经理。[观众笑。] 这是真的。这是一项繁重的工作，而且你不能做有趣的事情。但当经理的唯一好理由就是为了不让其他傻瓜当经理——从而毁掉你关心的团队。
Really. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything to not have your group destroyed by that again. And you will even step up and be the manager yourself, even though you don’t want to do that.
真的。如果你经历过糟糕的情况，遇到过糟糕的管理，你会不惜一切代价避免你的团队再次被摧毁。即使你不想这样做，你也会主动成为经理。
And I talked a few hundred people into doing that. And 90, over 90 percent of them have turned into extraordinary managers. Extraordinary. So that’s what saved Apple, those people right there. And it’s been one of the great experiences of my life to have the privilege of working with them.
我说服了几百个人去做这件事。超过 90%的人变成了卓越的管理者。卓越。所以，这就是拯救苹果的那些人。能够与他们合作是我一生中最伟大的经历之一。
There’s a lot of management techniques. I’m sure you study a lot of management techniques. When I was younger, it was management by objective. It’s all a crock. They’re all after-the-fact management techniques: “You’ve failed, and I know that because we are going out of business tomorrow.” All after the fact. “You’ve ruined this department; all the good people have left. So now I’m firing you.” “You’ve accomplished none of your objectives.” It doesn’t work.
有很多管理技巧。我相信你研究了很多管理技巧。当我年轻的时候，目标管理是主流。这都是废话。它们都是事后管理技巧：“你失败了，我知道，因为我们明天就要倒闭。”全都是事后才说。“你毁了这个部门；所有优秀的人都离开了。所以现在我要解雇你。”“你没有完成任何目标。”这行不通。
And a really smart guy I met a long time ago who used to teach at Disney University—Walt Disney recruited him to run Disney University, actually—he told me about his point of view, which I’ve remembered to this day. He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.
我很久以前遇到的一个非常聪明的人，他曾在迪士尼大学任教——实际上是沃尔特·迪士尼招募他来管理迪士尼大学——他告诉我他的观点，我至今仍记得。他称之为价值观管理。这意味着你找到那些想要和你一样东西的人，然后就让他们自由发挥。
The way I describe it is, let’s say we’re all going to take a trip together. The first thing is to figure out where we all want to go. The worst thing is if we all decide we want to go to different places. You can never manage it. [Pointing] You want to go to New Orleans. You want to go somewhere else. I want to go to San Francisco. You want to go to San Diego.
我描述的方式是，假设我们要一起去旅行。第一件事是弄清楚我们都想去哪里。最糟糕的是如果我们都决定想去不同的地方。你永远无法管理它。[指着] 你想去新奥尔良。你想去别的地方。我想去旧金山。你想去圣地亚哥。
It doesn’t work. Right? 它不管用。对吧？
But if we all want to go to San Diego, that’s the key. Then we can argue about how to get there. [Pointing] You think it’s better to walk. You think it’s better to take a plane. You think it’s better to take a train. We’ll figure that [part] out. Because if I say, “I want to take a train to San Diego,” and somebody goes, “That’s really stupid! It will take three days! We can fly and be there in an hour,” I’ll go, “Oh. OK.” Because, actually, I want to go to San Diego. So if I can get there in an hour [flying], I’ll ditch my idea about the train.
但如果我们都想去圣地亚哥，那就是关键。然后我们可以争论怎么去那里。[指着] 你认为走路更好。你认为坐飞机更好。你认为坐火车更好。我们会搞清楚这一部分。因为如果我说：“我想坐火车去圣地亚哥，”而有人说：“那真的很愚蠢！要花三天时间！我们可以飞一个小时就到，”我会说：“哦，好吧。”因为实际上，我想去圣地亚哥。所以如果我能一个小时内到达[飞行]，我就会放弃我关于火车的想法。
That’s what management by values is. It’s finding people with passion that want to go to San Diego—who want to go to the same place you want to go to! Right? That’s the key.
这就是价值观管理。就是要找到有激情、想去圣地亚哥的人--他们想去的地方和你想去的地方一样！对不对？这就是关键所在。
And so, what happened at Apple was that Apple’s goals used to be to make the best personal computers in the world. And then the second goal was to make a profit so we could keep on doing number one. Right?
所以，苹果发生的事情是，苹果的目标曾经是制造世界上最好的个人电脑。第二个目标是盈利，以便我们能够继续做第一件事。对吗？
What happened was that, for a time, those got reversed: “We want to make a bunch of money, and so, OK, to do that, we’re going to have to make some good personal computers.” But it didn’t work. It never works. And so things start to fall apart.
发生的事情是，曾经这些情况发生了逆转：“我们想赚很多钱，因此，好吧，为了做到这一点，我们必须制造一些好的个人电脑。”但这并没有成功。它从来没有成功过。因此事情开始崩溃。
Those subtle changes in values can mean everything. The higher up in the organization they are, the more pervasive influence they have. So if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re going to get there. So that each generation can argue anew about the best way to get to San Diego, and they’re not just taking your footsteps on how you got there. You see what I’m saying? But all the people want to go to the same place.
那些微妙的价值变化可能意味着一切。它们在组织中的地位越高，影响力就越广泛。因此，如果你想保留某样东西，你需要有一个足够好的地方可以去，那个地方的焦距足够长，以便能够随着时间的推移而存活下来，大家都能达成共识——而不是规定你将如何到达那里。这样每一代人都可以重新争论到达圣地亚哥的最佳方式，而不仅仅是沿着你到达那里时的足迹。你明白我的意思吗？但所有人都想去同一个地方。
And that’s one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar: that recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people—that’s half the battle.
这也是我在苹果和皮克斯工作时的口头禅之一：招聘是最重要的事情。找到合适的人，就等于成功了一半。
Well, thank you guys for the chance to be with you. I appreciate it very much.
谢谢你们给我这个机会和你们在一起。我非常感激。
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