The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs.pdf
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1、The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobsby Walter IsaacsonHis saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in hisparents 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
2、into the worlds 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 thepantheon of Americas great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford,
3、and WaltDisney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, historywill remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to drawmanagement lessons from it. Some o
4、f those readers have been insightful, but I think that many ofthem (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the roughedges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to hisway of doing business. He acted as if the normal
5、 rules didnt apply to him, and the passion,intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured intothe products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of
6、 the book, I asked him againabout his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smartpeople I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were trulyfeeling brutalized. But they dont.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almos
7、t wistfully,“And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over thepast 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 XLionnot to men
8、tion every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surroundedby an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a veryloving wife, sister, and four children.So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actual
9、lyaccomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking hewould answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making anenduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product.How did he do it? Busi
10、ness schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here arewhat I consider the keys to his success.FocusWhen Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers andperipherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of productre
11、view sessions, hed finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed aMagic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Hereswhat we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeledthe two rows “Desktop” and “Port
12、able.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus onfour great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was astunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved thecompany. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deci
13、ding what to do,” he told me. “Thatstrue for companies, and its true for products.”After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. Onthe last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards, because they gavehim complete control of a si
14、tuation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the 10 thingswe should be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs wouldwrite them downand then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, thegroup would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would
15、slash the bottom seven and announce,“We can only do three.”Focus was ingrained in Jobss personality and had been honed by his Zen training. Herelentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members wouldat times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with is
16、suesa legal problem, a medicaldiagnosisthey considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift hislaserlike focus until he was ready.Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resumecontrol of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even th
17、ough their companies were feuding,Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figureout what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “Its now all over the map. Whatare the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because theyre
18、 dragging youdown. Theyre turning you into Microsoft. Theyre causing you to turn out products that areadequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focuson just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the wayJobs would ha
19、ve done.SimplifyJobss Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things byzeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimatesophistication,” declared Apples first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare anyApp
20、le software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered withnonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Applesquest for simplicity.Jobs learned to admire simplicity when he was working the night shift at Atari as a collegedr
21、opout. Ataris games came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that astoned 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 designconferences he attended at the As
22、pen Institute in the late 1970s on a campus built in the Bauhausstyle, which emphasized clean lines and functional design devoid of frills or distractions.When Jobs visited Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center and saw the plans for a computer that hada graphical user interface and a mouse, he set about
23、making the design both more intuitive (histeam 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 industrialdesign firm and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a
24、 simple, single-buttonmodel that cost $15. Hovey complied.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 asif it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than chal
25、lenging them. “It takes a lot of hard work,”he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come upwith elegant solutions.”In Jony Ive, Apples industrial designer, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for deep rather thansuperficial simplicity. They knew that sim
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