Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate. by Walter Isaacson.

沃尔特·艾萨克森（Walter Isaacson）在乔布斯去世六个月后，作为他畅销传记的作者，确定了每位CEO都可以尝试效仿的做法。

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.

他的传奇是创业创造神话的宏大叙述：史蒂夫·乔布斯于 1976 年在父母的车库里共同创办了苹果公司，1985 年被迫离职，1997 年回归拯救公司于濒临破产之际，到他于 2011 年 10 月去世时，已将其发展成为全球最有价值的公司。在此过程中，他帮助改造了七个行业：个人计算机、动画电影、音乐、手机、平板计算、零售店和数字出版。因此，他与托马斯·爱迪生、亨利·福特和沃尔特·迪士尼一起，属于美国伟大创新者的殿堂。这些人都不是圣人，但在他们的个性被遗忘很久之后，历史将铭记他们如何将想象力应用于技术和商业。

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

“那些疯狂到认为自己可以改变世界的人，才是真正能够改变世界的人。”

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

—苹果的“与众不同”广告，1997 年

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.

自从我关于乔布斯的传记出版以来，数不胜数的评论者试图从中提取管理经验教训。其中一些读者很有洞察力，但我认为许多人（尤其是那些没有创业经验的人）过于关注他个性中的粗糙边缘。我认为乔布斯的本质在于，他的个性与他的商业方式密不可分。他的行为就像正常规则对他不适用一样，他带入日常生活的激情、强度和极端情感也是他倾注于所创造产品中的东西。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.

我最后一次见到他时，在我完成大部分书稿后，我再次问他为什么对人们如此苛刻。“看看结果，”他回答说。“我和这些都是聪明人合作，他们中的任何一个如果真的感到被虐待，都可以在其他地方找到顶尖工作。但他们没有。”然后他停顿了几秒，几乎带着怀旧的语气说：“而且我们完成了一些惊人的事情。”确实，在过去的十多年里，他和苹果公司取得了一系列的成功，超过了现代任何其他创新公司的成就：iMac、iPod、iPod nano、iTunes Store、Apple Stores、MacBook、iPhone、iPad、App Store、OS X Lion——更不用说每一部皮克斯电影。在他与最后的疾病作斗争时，乔布斯身边围绕着一群忠诚的同事，他们多年来受到他的启发，还有一位非常爱他的妻子、姐妹和四个孩子。

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·乔布斯身上真正的教训必须通过观察他实际完成的事情来得出。我曾经问过他，他认为自己最重要的创造是什么，想着他会回答 iPad 或 Macintosh。相反，他说是苹果公司。他说，创建一个持久的公司比创造一个伟大的产品要困难得多且重要得多。他是如何做到的？商学院在一个世纪后仍会研究这个问题。以下是我认为他成功的关键。

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.”

当乔布斯在 1997 年回到苹果时，苹果正在生产一系列随机的计算机和外设，包括十几种不同版本的 Macintosh。在几周的产品评审会议后，他终于受够了。“停止！”他大喊。“这太疯狂了。”他抓起一个马克笔，赤脚走到白板前，画了一个二乘二的网格。“这就是我们需要的，”他宣称。在两个列的顶部，他写下“消费者”和“专业”。他将两行标记为“桌面”和“便携”。他告诉团队成员，他们的任务是专注于四款优秀的产品，每个象限一个。所有其他产品都应该被取消。现场一片震惊的沉默。但通过让苹果专注于只制造四款计算机，他拯救了公司。“决定不做什么和决定做什么一样重要，”他告诉我。“这对公司和产品都是如此。”

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.”

在他使公司恢复正轨后，乔布斯开始每年带着他的“前 100 名”员工进行一次 retreat。在最后一天，他会站在白板前（他喜欢白板，因为它们让他完全掌控局面，并且能够集中注意力），问道：“我们接下来应该做的 10 件事是什么？”人们会争先恐后地想把自己的建议列入名单。乔布斯会把它们写下来，然后划掉他认为愚蠢的建议。经过一番争论，团队会提出一个 10 项的清单。然后乔布斯会删去底部的七项，并宣布：“我们只能做三项。”

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.

专注是乔布斯个性中根深蒂固的特质，并且经过他的禅修训练得到了磨练。他毫不留情地过滤掉他认为的干扰。同行和家人有时会感到沮丧，因为他们试图让他处理他们认为重要的问题——法律问题、医疗诊断。但他会冷冷地盯着对方，拒绝转移他那如激光般的专注，直到他准备好。

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.

在他生命的最后阶段，乔布斯在家中接待了拉里·佩奇，后者即将重新掌控他共同创办的谷歌公司。尽管他们的公司之间存在争执，乔布斯仍愿意提供一些建议。他回忆道：“我强调的主要是专注。”他告诉佩奇：“弄清楚谷歌长大后想成为什么。现在一切都很杂乱。你想专注于哪五个产品？把其他的都去掉，因为它们在拖累你。它们让你变成了微软。它们导致你推出的产品虽然合格，但并不出色。”佩奇采纳了这个建议。在 2012 年 1 月，他告诉员工们专注于少数几个优先事项，比如 Android 和 Google+，并让它们“美丽”，就像乔布斯所做的那样。

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.

乔布斯的禅宗般的专注能力伴随着一种相关的本能，即通过专注于事物的本质并消除不必要的组成部分来简化事物。“简单是最终的复杂”，苹果公司的第一本营销手册宣称。要理解这意味着什么，可以将任何苹果软件与微软Word进行比较，后者不断变得更加丑陋和杂乱，带有不直观的导航带和侵入性功能。这是对苹果追求简单之美的提醒。

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.

乔布斯在大学辍学后夜班工作于雅达利时学会了欣赏简单。雅达利的游戏没有说明书，必须足够简单，以至于一个嗑药的新生也能弄明白。其《星际迷航》游戏的唯一说明是：“1. 投入 25 美分。2. 避免Klingons。”他对设计简单性的热爱在 1970 年代末参加的阿斯彭研究所的设计会议上得到了提升，该校园采用包豪斯风格，强调干净的线条和没有繁琐或干扰的功能性设计。

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 cost $15. Hovey complied.

当乔布斯访问施乐的帕洛阿尔托研究中心并看到一台具有图形用户界面和鼠标的计算机设计时，他着手使设计更加直观（他的团队使用户能够在虚拟桌面上拖放文档和文件夹）和简单。例如，施乐的鼠标有三个按钮，售价为 300 美元；乔布斯去了一家当地的工业设计公司，告诉其创始人之一的迪恩·霍维，他想要一个简单的单按钮模型，售价为 15 美元。霍维同意了。

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.”

工作旨在通过征服复杂性而非仅仅忽视它，来实现简单性。他意识到，实现这种深度的简单性将产生一种机器，感觉上是以友好的方式向用户让步，而不是挑战他们。“这需要很多努力，”他说，“才能使某样东西变得简单，真正理解潜在的挑战并提出优雅的解决方案。”

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.”

在苹果公司的工业设计师乔尼·艾夫（Jony Ive）身上，乔布斯找到了在追求深层而非表面简单性方面的灵魂伴侣。他们知道，简单性不仅仅是一种极简风格或去除杂乱。为了消除螺丝、按钮或多余的导航屏幕，必须深刻理解每个元素所扮演的角色。“要真正简单，你必须深入探讨，”艾夫解释道。“例如，要在某个产品上没有螺丝，你可能最终会得到一个非常复杂且难以理解的产品。更好的方法是深入理解简单性，了解它的所有方面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 界面时，乔布斯在每次会议上都试图寻找减少杂乱的方法。他坚持认为，用户应该能够在三次点击内找到所需的内容。例如，一个导航屏幕询问用户是想按歌曲、专辑还是艺术家搜索。“我们为什么需要那个屏幕？”乔布斯质问道。设计师们意识到他们并不需要。“有时我们会为用户界面问题绞尽脑汁，而他会问，‘你们考虑过这个吗？’”iPod 团队的负责人托尼·法德尔说。“然后我们都会说，‘天哪。’他会重新定义问题或方法，我们的小问题就消失了。”有一次，乔布斯提出了最简单的建议：让我们去掉开关按钮。起初团队成员感到震惊，但随后他们意识到这个按钮是多余的。设备如果不被使用会逐渐关闭电源，而在重新使用时会立即启动。

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，当乔布斯看到一组杂乱的 iDVD 提议导航屏幕时，这个应用允许用户将视频刻录到光盘上，他跳起来在白板上画了一个简单的矩形。“这是新的应用，”他说。“它只有一个窗口。你把视频拖到窗口里。然后点击那个写着‘刻录’的按钮。就这样。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.

在寻找适合颠覆的行业或类别时，乔布斯总是问谁在制造比应该更复杂的产品。2001 年，便携式音乐播放器和在线获取歌曲的方式符合这一描述，导致了 iPod 和 iTunes Store 的出现。接下来是手机。乔布斯在会议上会抓起一部手机，愤怒地（正确地）指出，没有人能弄清楚一半功能的使用，包括地址簿。在他职业生涯的末期，他将目光投向了电视行业，该行业已经使得人们几乎不可能简单地点击一个设备来观看他们想要的内容。

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，实现简单性的最佳方法是确保硬件、软件和外部设备无缝集成。例如，一个连接到 Mac 的 iPod 和 iTunes 软件的 Apple 生态系统，使设备更简单，同步更顺畅，故障更少。更复杂的任务，例如创建新播放列表，可以在计算机上完成，从而使 iPod 的功能和按钮更少。

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.”

乔布斯和苹果公司对用户体验负起了端到端的责任——这是很少有公司做到的。从 iPhone 中 ARM 微处理器的性能到在苹果商店购买手机的行为，客户体验的每个方面都紧密相连。1980 年代的微软和过去几年的谷歌采取了更开放的方法，允许各种硬件制造商使用他们的操作系统和软件。这有时被证明是更好的商业模式。但乔布斯坚信这是一种（用他的技术术语来说）更糟糕产品的配方。“人们很忙，”他说。“他们有其他事情要做，而不是考虑如何整合他们的计算机和设备。”

Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved.

身处苹果生态系统就像走在乔布斯所爱的京都禅园中一样美妙。

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.

乔布斯对他所称的“整个小部件”承担责任的部分原因源于他非常强的控制欲。但这也源于他对完美和制作优雅产品的热情。当他考虑在其他公司平庸的硬件上使用优秀的苹果软件时，他会出现荨麻疹，甚至更糟；他同样对未经批准的应用程序或内容可能污染苹果设备的完美感到过敏。这种方法并不总是能最大化短期利润，但在一个充满劣质设备、难以理解的错误信息和恼人的界面的世界中，它导致了令人惊叹的产品，带来了愉悦的用户体验。身处苹果生态系统中，可能就像走在乔布斯所爱的京都禅园中一样美妙，而这两种体验都不是通过崇拜开放的祭坛或让百花齐放而创造的。有时候，处于一个控制狂的掌控之中是件好事。

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.”

创新公司的标志不仅在于它首先提出新想法。它还知道如何在发现自己落后时实现跨越。当乔布斯打造原版 iMac 时，这种情况发生了。他专注于使其在管理用户的照片和视频方面变得有用，但在处理音乐时却落后了。使用 PC 的人们正在下载和交换音乐，然后刻录自己的 CD。iMac 的插槽驱动器无法刻录 CD。“我觉得自己像个傻瓜，”他说。“我以为我们错过了机会。”

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.

但他并没有仅仅通过升级 iMac 的 CD 驱动器来赶上潮流，而是决定创建一个集成系统，以改变音乐产业。最终的结果是 iTunes、iTunes Store 和 iPod 的结合，使用户能够比其他任何设备更好地购买、分享、管理、存储和播放音乐。

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.

在 iPod 取得巨大成功后，乔布斯几乎没有时间去享受它。相反，他开始担心可能会危及它的因素。一个可能性是手机制造商会开始在他们的手机中添加音乐播放器。因此，他通过创造 iPhone 来侵蚀 iPod 的销售。“如果我们不自我侵蚀，别人就会，”他说。

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在 1980 年代初设计原始的 Macintosh 时，他的指示是要让它“疯狂伟大”。他从未谈论利润最大化或成本权衡。“不要担心价格，只需指定计算机的能力，”他对原始团队的领导者说。在与 Macintosh 团队的第一次静修中，他在白板上写下了一条格言：“不要妥协。”最终产生的机器成本过高，导致乔布斯被苹果公司驱逐。但正如他所说，Macintosh 也“在宇宙中留下了印记”，加速了家用计算机革命。从长远来看，他找到了正确的平衡：专注于让产品出色，利润自然会随之而来。

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.”

约翰·斯卡利（John Sculley）在 1983 年至 1993 年期间管理苹果公司，他是一位来自百事可乐的市场和销售高管。在乔布斯离开后，他更关注利润最大化而非产品设计，苹果逐渐衰退。“我对公司衰退的原因有自己的理论，”乔布斯告诉我：“他们制造了一些伟大的产品，但随后销售和市场人员接管了公司，因为他们是能够提升利润的人。‘当销售人员掌控公司时，产品人员就不那么重要了，很多人只是选择退出。’这在斯卡利接管苹果时发生了，这是我的错，而在Ballmer接管微软时也发生了。”

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.”

当乔布斯回归时，他将苹果的重点重新放回到创新产品的制造上：活泼的 iMac、PowerBook，接着是 iPod、iPhone 和 iPad。正如他所解释的：“我的热情是建立一个持久的公司，让人们有动力去制造伟大的产品。其他一切都是次要的。当然，盈利是很重要的，因为这使你能够制造伟大的产品。但产品，而不是利润，才是动力。斯卡利将这些优先级颠倒了，目标变成了赚钱。这是一个微妙的区别，但最终意味着一切——你雇佣的人，谁被晋升，会议中讨论的内容。”

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!’”

当乔布斯带着他原来的麦金塔团队进行第一次撤退时，一名成员问他们是否应该进行一些市场调研，以了解客户想要什么。乔布斯回答：“不，因为客户在我们展示之前不知道他们想要什么。”他引用了亨利·福特的话：“如果我问客户他们想要什么，他们会告诉我，‘一匹更快的马！’”

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.”

深切关心客户需求与不断询问他们想要什么是截然不同的；这需要对尚未形成的欲望有直觉和本能。“我们的任务是去理解那些尚未写在页面上的东西，”乔布斯解释道。他没有依赖市场调研，而是磨练了自己对同理心的理解——对客户欲望的深刻直觉。他在印度学习佛教时，作为一名辍学生，培养了对直觉的欣赏——这种感觉基于积累的经验智慧。“印度乡村的人们不像我们那样使用智力；他们更依赖直觉，”他回忆道。“直觉是一种非常强大的东西——在我看来，比智力更强大。”

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。他制作了他和他的朋友想要的产品。例如，2000 年有很多便携式音乐播放器，但乔布斯觉得它们都很无聊，作为一个音乐爱好者，他想要一个简单的设备，可以让他在口袋里装下千首歌曲。“我们是为自己制作 iPod 的，”他说，“当你为自己、最好的朋友或家人做某事时，你不会敷衍了事。”

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.

乔布斯（臭名昭著的）推动人们去做不可能之事的能力，被同事们称为他的“现实扭曲场”，这个名字来源于《星际迷航》中的一集，其中外星人通过纯粹的精神力量创造了一个令人信服的替代现实。一个早期的例子是，当乔布斯在雅达利上夜班时，他推动史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克创造了一个名为《Breakout》的游戏。沃兹说这需要几个月的时间，但乔布斯盯着他，坚持说他能在四天内完成。沃兹知道那是不可能的，但他最终还是做到了。

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.”

那些不认识乔布斯的人将现实扭曲场解读为欺凌和撒谎的委婉说法。但与他共事的人承认，这种特质虽然令人恼火，却使他们能够完成非凡的壮举。因为乔布斯觉得生活中的普通规则不适用于他，他能够激励团队以极少的资源改变计算机历史的进程，这些资源远远少于施乐或 IBM。“这是一种自我实现的扭曲，”原 Mac 团队成员德比·科尔曼回忆道，她曾因最能抵抗乔布斯而获得过一年最佳员工奖。“你做到了不可能的事情，因为你没有意识到这不可能。”

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，乔布斯走进了正在开发 Macintosh 操作系统的工程师拉里·肯扬的隔间，抱怨启动时间太长。肯扬开始解释为什么缩短启动时间是不可能的，但乔布斯打断了他。“如果能拯救一个人的生命，你能找到办法把启动时间缩短 10 秒吗？”他问。肯扬承认他可能可以。乔布斯走到白板前，展示了如果有五百万人使用 Mac，每天多花 10 秒钟启动，那么一年就会增加大约 3 亿小时——相当于每年至少 100 个生命。几周后，肯扬让机器的启动时间缩短了 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.

当乔布斯设计 iPhone 时，他决定希望其表面是坚固的、抗刮擦的玻璃，而不是塑料。他与康宁的首席执行官温德尔·威克斯会面，威克斯告诉他，康宁在 1960 年代开发了一种化学交换工艺，导致了他们所称的“大猩猩玻璃”。乔布斯回复说，他希望在六个月内获得一批大猩猩玻璃。威克斯表示，康宁并没有生产这种玻璃，也没有这样的能力。“不要害怕，”乔布斯回答道。这让威克斯感到震惊，因为他不熟悉乔布斯的现实扭曲场。他试图解释说，虚假的自信无法克服工程挑战，但乔布斯一再表明他不接受这个前提。他盯着威克斯，毫不眨眼。“是的，你可以做到，”他说。“想明白这一点。你可以做到。”威克斯回忆说，他惊讶地摇了摇头，然后打电话给康宁在肯塔基州哈罗兹堡的工厂经理，该工厂一直在生产 LCD 显示器，并告诉他们立即全职转向生产大猩猩玻璃。“我们在六个月内完成了，”他说。“我们把最优秀的科学家和工程师都投入其中，我们就是让它运作起来。”因此，iPhone 或 iPad 上的每一块玻璃都是由康宁在美国制造的。

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.

乔布斯早期的导师迈克·马克库拉在 1979 年给他写了一份备忘录，强调了三个原则。前两个是“同理心”和“专注”。第三个是一个尴尬的词，“归因”，但它成为了乔布斯的关键信条之一。他知道人们会根据产品或公司的呈现和包装形成看法。“迈克教会我，人们确实会以封面来判断一本书，”他告诉我。

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.

当他在 1984 年准备发售 Macintosh 时，他对盒子的颜色和设计非常执着。同样，他亲自花时间设计和重新设计包裹 iPod 和 iPhone 的珠宝般的盒子，并在这些专利上列出了自己的名字。他和艾夫认为，拆包是一种像戏剧一样的仪式，预示着产品的辉煌。“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，”乔布斯说。

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，乔布斯使用机器的设计来“暗示”一个信号，而不仅仅是为了功能。例如，当他在回到苹果后创建新的、富有趣味的 iMac 时，他看到了一种由艾夫设计的，顶部有一个小凹陷把手的设计。这更多是符号学上的，而不是实用的。这是一台台式电脑。并不是很多人真的会随身携带它。但乔布斯和艾夫意识到，很多人仍然对电脑感到畏惧。如果有一个把手，这台新机器就会显得友好、恭敬，并且随时为人服务。把手暗示了可以触摸 iMac 的许可。制造团队反对额外的成本，但乔布斯只是宣布：“不，我们要这样做。”他甚至没有试图解释。

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.

在他创造的几乎所有产品的发展过程中，乔布斯在某个时刻“按下暂停键”，并回到了设计板，因为他觉得它不够完美。这种情况甚至发生在电影《玩具总动员》上。当购买了电影版权的迪士尼团队和杰夫·卡森伯格推动皮克斯团队使它更具锋芒和黑暗时，乔布斯和导演约翰·拉塞特最终停止了制作，并重写了故事，使其更加友好。当他即将推出苹果商店时，他和他的商店大师罗恩·约翰逊突然决定将一切推迟几个月，以便商店的布局可以围绕活动而不仅仅是产品类别重新组织。

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。最初的设计是将玻璃屏幕嵌入铝制外壳中。一个星期一的早晨，乔布斯去找了艾夫。“我昨晚没睡，”他说，“因为我意识到我根本不喜欢它。”艾夫感到沮丧，立刻意识到乔布斯是对的。“我记得感到非常尴尬，因为他不得不提出这个观察，”他说。问题在于，iPhone 应该完全围绕显示屏，但在当前的设计中，外壳与显示屏相竞争，而不是让位。整个设备感觉过于男性化，任务驱动，效率高。“伙计们，你们在这个设计上拼搏了九个月，但我们要改变它，”乔布斯告诉艾夫的团队。“我们都得加班，周末也要工作，如果你们愿意，我们可以发一些枪，这样你们现在就可以杀了我们。”团队没有退缩，反而同意了。“这是我在苹果公司最自豪的时刻之一，”乔布斯回忆道。

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.

在乔布斯和艾夫完成 iPad 时，发生了类似的事情。某一时刻，乔布斯看着模型，感到有些不满意。它似乎不够随意和友好，无法轻松拿起并迅速带走。他们需要传达出可以用一只手、随意抓取的感觉。他们决定底边应该稍微圆润，这样用户就会觉得可以轻松抓起，而不是小心翼翼地抬起。这意味着工程团队必须设计出必要的连接端口和按钮，放置在一个薄而简单的边缘上，轻微向下倾斜。乔布斯推迟了产品发布，直到可以进行更改。

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.

乔布斯的完美主义甚至延伸到了看不见的部分。作为一个小男孩，他曾帮助父亲在后院建造围栏，他被告知在围栏的背面和正面一样需要小心。“没人会知道，”史蒂夫说。他的父亲回答：“但你会知道。”真正的工匠即使在靠墙的橱柜背面也会使用好的木材，他的父亲解释说，他们在围栏的背面也应该这样做。对完美有如此热情是艺术家的标志。在监督 Apple II 和 Macintosh 时，乔布斯将这个教训应用到了机器内部的电路板上。在这两种情况下，他都让工程师们回去调整芯片，使其整齐排列，以便电路板看起来好看。这对 Macintosh 的工程师们来说似乎特别奇怪，因为乔布斯已下令机器要严密封闭。“没人会看到 PC 板，”其中一位抗议道。乔布斯的反应和他父亲一样：“我希望它尽可能美丽，即使它在盒子里。一个伟大的木匠不会在橱柜的背面使用劣质木材，即使没人会看到它。”“他们是真正的艺术家，”他说，“应该以那样的方式行事。一旦电路板重新设计，他让工程师和其他麦金塔团队的成员签名，以便可以刻在机壳内部。“真正的艺术家会签名他们的作品，”他说。

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.”

乔布斯以不耐烦、易怒和对周围人的严厉而闻名。但他对待人们的方式，尽管不可取，却源于他对完美的热情和只与最好的人合作的愿望。这是他防止他所称的“傻瓜爆炸”的方式，在这种情况下，经理们过于礼貌，以至于平庸的人感到舒适地留在身边。“我不认为我对人们粗暴，”他说，“但如果某件事糟糕，我会当面告诉他们。诚实是我的职责。”当我问他是否可以在更友好的情况下获得相同的结果时，他说也许可以。“但这不是我，”他说。“也许有更好的方式——一个绅士俱乐部，我们都穿着领带，用这种婆罗门语言和天鹅绒密码交流——但我不知道那种方式，因为我来自加利福尼亚的中产阶级。”

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.”

他的暴风雨般的虐待行为真的有必要吗？可能没有。他本可以用其他方式激励他的团队。“史蒂夫的贡献本可以在没有那么多关于他恐吓人们的故事的情况下实现，”苹果的联合创始人沃兹尼亚克说。“我喜欢更有耐心，不发生那么多冲突。我认为公司可以是一个好的家庭。”但他接着补充了一句无可否认的真理：“如果麦金塔项目是按照我的方式进行的，事情可能会一团糟。”

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.

重要的是要认识到，乔布斯的粗鲁和粗犷伴随着激励他人的能力。他给苹果员工注入了持久的热情，激励他们创造突破性的产品，并相信他们能够完成看似不可能的事情。我们必须根据结果来评判他。乔布斯有一个紧密团结的家庭，在苹果也是如此：他的顶尖员工往往比其他公司（包括那些由更温和的老板领导的公司）留得更久，忠诚度更高。那些研究乔布斯并决定模仿他粗犷风格的首席执行官，如果不理解他产生忠诚的能力，就会犯下危险的错误。

“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.”

“多年来我学到，当你有真正优秀的人时，你不需要过于呵护他们，”乔布斯告诉我。“通过期望他们做出伟大的事情，你可以让他们做到伟大的事情。问问那个 Mac 团队的任何成员。他们会告诉你，这一切都是值得的。”他们大多数人都这样说。“他在会议上会大喊，‘你这个混蛋，你从来没有做对过任何事情，’”德比·科尔曼回忆道。“然而，我认为自己是世界上最幸运的人，能够和他一起工作。”

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.”

尽管身处数字世界，或者说正因为他深知其可能带来的孤立感，乔布斯始终坚信面对面会议的重要性。“在我们这个网络时代，人们容易认为想法可以通过电子邮件和 iChat 来发展，”他告诉我。“这太疯狂了。创造力来自自发的会议，来自随机的讨论。你偶然遇到某人，问他们在做什么，你说‘哇’，很快你们就会产生各种想法。”

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.”

他让皮克斯大楼的设计旨在促进意外的相遇和合作。“如果一座建筑不鼓励这种情况，你将失去很多创新和偶然性带来的魔力，”他说。“所以我们设计了这座建筑，让人们走出办公室，在中央中庭与他们可能不会见到的人交流。”前门、主楼梯和走廊都通向中庭；咖啡馆和邮箱都在那里；会议室有窗户可以俯瞰中庭；而 600 个座位的剧院和两个小放映室也都通向那里。“史蒂夫的理论从第一天起就奏效了，”拉塞特回忆道。“我不断遇到几个月没见过的人。我从未见过一座如此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.”

乔布斯讨厌正式的演示，但他喜欢自由奔放的面对面会议。他每周都会召集他的执行团队，随意讨论想法，而每个星期三下午，他也会和市场营销及广告团队进行同样的交流。幻灯片展示被禁止。“我讨厌人们用幻灯片演示来代替思考，”乔布斯回忆道。“人们会通过制作演示来应对问题。我希望他们能够参与进来，在桌子上讨论，而不是展示一堆幻灯片。知道自己在说什么的人不需要 PowerPoint。”

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.

乔布斯的热情应用于大大小小的问题。一些首席执行官擅长愿景；另一些则是知道细节决定成败的管理者。乔布斯兼具这两者。时代华纳首席执行官杰夫·比沃克表示，乔布斯的一个显著特征是他能够并渴望设想总体战略，同时也关注设计的微小细节。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管理用户所有音乐、视频、照片和内容的“数字中心”，因此让苹果进入了个人设备业务，推出了 iPod，随后是 iPad。在 2010 年，他提出了继任策略——“中心”将转移到云端——苹果开始建设一个巨大的服务器农场，以便用户的所有内容都可以上传，然后无缝同步到其他个人设备。但即使在他规划这些宏伟愿景时，他也在为 iMac 内部螺丝的形状和颜色而烦恼。

“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.

“我小时候一直认为自己是一个人文学科的人，但我喜欢电子，”乔布斯在决定合作撰写传记的那天告诉我。“然后我读到我的一个英雄，宝丽来公司的埃德温·兰德说过的话，关于能够站在人文与科学交汇点上的人的重要性，我决定这就是我想做的。”就好像他在描述自己生活的主题，越是研究他，我越意识到这确实是他故事的本质。

No one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation.

在我们这个时代，没有人能像他一样将诗歌和处理器结合在一起，从而激发创新。

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.

他将人文学科与科学、创造力与技术、艺术与工程连接在一起。确实有更伟大的技术专家（沃兹尼亚克、盖茨），也有更优秀的设计师和艺术家。但在我们这个时代，没有人能像他一样将诗歌与处理器以一种激发创新的方式紧密结合。他凭借对商业战略的直觉感受做到这一点。在过去十年的几乎每一次产品发布会上，乔布斯都会以一张展示人文学科与技术街交汇处标志的幻灯片结束。

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.

当一个强大的人格同时具备人文学科和科学的感觉时所能产生的创造力，是我在对富兰克林和爱因斯坦的传记中最感兴趣的地方，我相信这将是 21 世纪构建创新经济的关键。这是应用想象力的本质，这也是人文学科和科学对任何希望在未来拥有创造性优势的社会至关重要的原因。

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.

即使在临终时，乔布斯仍然瞄准了颠覆更多行业。他设想将教科书转变为艺术创作，任何拥有 Mac 的人都可以制作和创作——这是苹果在 2012 年 1 月宣布的。他还梦想着为数字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。这些无疑也会到来。尽管他无法亲眼见证这些成果，但他的成功法则帮助他建立了一家公司，这家公司不仅会创造这些和其他颠覆性产品，还将站在创造力与技术的交汇点上，只要乔布斯的 DNA 在其核心中持续存在。

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 20 世纪 60 年代末从旧金山湾区发源的两场伟大社会运动的产物。第一场是嬉皮士和反战活动家的反文化运动，以迷幻药物、摇滚音乐和反权威主义为特征。第二场是硅谷的高科技和黑客文化，充满了工程师、极客、电子迷、电话黑客、赛博朋克、爱好者和车库企业家。在这两者之上，还有各种通往个人启蒙的路径——禅宗和印度教、冥想和瑜伽、原始尖叫疗法和感官剥夺、埃萨伦和 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.

这些文化的混合体出现在斯图尔特·布兰德的《全地球目录》等出版物中。它的第一封面上是从太空拍摄的著名地球照片，副标题是“获取工具”。其基本哲学是技术可以成为我们的朋友。乔布斯——一个集嬉皮士、叛逆者、精神追求者、电话黑客和电子爱好者于一身的人——是这个理念的支持者。他特别喜欢 1971 年出版的最后一期，当时他还在高中。他把它带到大学，然后带到他辍学后居住的苹果农场公社。他后来回忆道：“最后一期的封底是一张清晨乡间小路的照片，如果你足够冒险，可能会在上面搭便车。下面是这样一句话：‘保持饥饿，保持愚蠢。’”乔布斯在他的职业生涯中始终保持着饥饿和愚蠢，确保他个性中的商业和工程方面始终与他作为艺术家、吸食迷幻药、追求启蒙的叛逆者时期的嬉皮士非从众一面相辅相成。 在他生活的每一个方面——他约会的女性、他应对癌症诊断的方式、他经营生意的方式——他的行为反映了所有这些不同线索的矛盾、交汇和最终综合。

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.”

即使在苹果公司变得企业化的过程中，乔布斯在其广告中仍然坚持着他的叛逆和反文化特质，仿佛在宣告他内心依然是一个黑客和嬉皮士。著名的“1984”广告展示了一位叛逆女性，她在思想警察的追赶下，挥舞着大锤砸向奥威尔式的老大哥的屏幕。当他重返苹果时，乔布斯帮助撰写了“Think Different”广告的文案：“致那些疯狂的人。那些不合群的人。那些叛逆者。那些麻烦制造者。那些方孔里的圆钉……”如果还有人怀疑他是否在有意或无意地描述自己，他在最后几句中消除了这种疑虑：“虽然有些人把他们视为疯狂的人，但我们看到的是天才。因为那些疯狂到认为自己可以改变世界的人，正是那些能够做到的人。”

A version of this article appeared in the April 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.

本文的一个版本出现在 2012 年 4 月的《哈佛商业评论》上。