《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 7 Luck

• “I wanted to tell you that I’m feeling really good about Pixar’s first animated film,” “It’s called Toy Story and it will be another year before it’s finished. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’ll be unlike anything anybody has ever seen before. Disney is considering making it the big holiday release next year.”
  他对创造Great的事物，真是非常有热情

• WHEN PEOPLE LIST the many industries that Steve is said to have revolutionized, they often include the movies, since Pixar brought a whole new art form to the big screen. I’m not of that mind. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull are the men who brought 3-D computer graphics to the movies, and revived the art of animated storytelling.
  我也认同

• Just as significant for the trajectory of his life is what he learned by watching Lasseter, Catmull, and their incredibly talented employees cobble together their magic. At Pixar, especially when the company started down the path of actually making movies, Steve started absorbing an approach to management that helped make him much more effective when he returned to Apple in 1997. These are the years where his negotiating style gained new subtlety—without losing its ballsy brashness. This is when he first started understanding the meaning of teamwork as something that’s far more complicated than simply rallying small groups—without losing his capacity to lead and inspire. And this is where he started to develop patience—without losing any of his memorable, and motivating, edge.
  极大解释了我的疑惑
  原来不是Next，而是在皮克斯，乔布斯学会了更多

• Ed Catmull has thought a lot about the role luck plays at a great company, and how businesspeople manage that luck. It’s all in the preparedness, he says, and in creating a culture that can adapt to the unexpected. “These things are always going to happen. What separates you is your response,” he says. Steve responded well, and that’s in part because of his greatest piece of luck: getting to work with Lasseter and Catmull.

• Hence Lasseter’s ultimatum when Disney’s Peter Schneider tried for a third time to lure him back to Burbank: the only way that he would ever work with Disney again was for Disney to make a movie with Pixar. To his everlasting credit, Schneider took him seriously, and summoned Catmull to his offices in Burbank. He told Catmull that he thought it was time for Pixar to make its own movie, for Disney. Catmull suggested that all Pixar was really ready for was a half-hour television special. Schneider scoffed: if Pixar could deliver thirty minutes of great entertainment, it could deliver seventy-five minutes. Catmull gulped, and then agreed.
  这就是机会啊！！！

• Lasseter, Catmull, and everyone else at Pixar, on the other hand, fully realized that making a movie for Disney was probably their only chance to survive as a company. The negotiations were their last stand, and their fate was in the hands of Steve. Catmull and Lasseter were very comfortable with this. For years, Steve had been the point man on Pixar’s negotiations. “He was tough,” remembers Lasseter. “He’d walk into the room and say, ‘Which one of you has the authority to buy our computers?’ If they said no one, he would just dismiss them. ‘I only want to negotiate with someone who can make the deal,’ he’d say, and leave. We always said that Steve would take a hand grenade, toss it into the room, and then walk in. He’d get everyone’s attention right away.’ ”
  乔布斯的谈判能力，哈哈哈

• But putting Katzenberg and Jobs in the same room held potential for catastrophe. Both men had powerful egos, and both were accustomed to getting their way. Katzenberg believed he’d be the next president of Disney, and took full responsibility for the successes of his animators. Smart, overbearing, difficult to work for, and yet somehow likable, Katzenberg also shared Steve’s certainty and faith in his own opinions. When he walked into the first negotiating session with Pixar, in a conference room near his office, he plopped a basket full of Disney baby toys in front of Steve, who’d recently been at Laurene’s side for the birth of Reed. It was a gift, but it was also a clear sign of who held the keys to the vault.
  好优雅的给压力方式，哈哈哈

• “They make the mistake of not appreciating technology,” he told me. “They don’t have a clue.” Katzenberg, who of course knew far more than Steve about the animation business, disagreed. “I was not interested in Pixar’s technology,” Katzenberg told me a few years later. “I was interested in Lasseter’s storytelling. Luxo the lamp had more emotion and humor in a five-minute short than most two-hour movies.” He was sanguine at best about the potential cost savings. “The idea that this technology is a new business model for animation is bullshit. Good luck with that! The artists and storytellers will want to continue to grow the technology, so this year’s technology will be obsolete in ten years.” Katzenberg was right, of course. No matter how much technology you throw at the art of making an animated movie, a good one will always be expensive.
  至少在动画电影这里，科技不会最关键的，最关键的是Story

• The repeated failures made Catmull wonder if he’d ever really wanted to sell. “I could see why it would happen. Some of the deals made sense. It wasn’t the dream we’d wanted, but you’re trying to keep things going,” he remembers. But nothing worked out. “Afterward, I’m thinking, What was that all about? Was he just looking for confirmation that he’d done something right?” Catmull came to think that Steve might have been subconsciously sinking each deal out of loyalty to Pixar. “He had this sense of what it means to be loyal and to give your word. As I was getting to know Steve more, I could see how this interplayed in complex ways. Not that Steve ever psychoanalyzed himself.”

• The four men became the core of what Catmull calls the Brain Trust—a collection of Pixar writers, directors, and animators who provide constructive criticism to the director of every Pixar movie. It’s a unique idea—the Brain Trust has no authority whatsoever, and the directors are only asked to listen and deeply consider the advice of its members. It became a powerful tool, helping to reshape movies like The Incredibles and Wall-E. But Steve was never a part of it. Catmull kept him out of those discussions, because he felt that Steve’s big personality would skew the proceedings.
  所以，乔布斯除了出钱和出面去谈判和去领奖，真的没啥特殊的贡献，哈哈哈

• In fact, things with Disney would get so difficult that after a disastrous screening one Friday late in 1993, Schneider shut down production. For three months, Lasseter and his cowriters recused themselves to draft a new version of the script. During that time Steve and Catmull ensured that the production crew stayed together and got paid. And once Toy Story swung back into production, Jobs fought for more money to accommodate the changes made necessary by the new script. His battles with Katzenberg over the budget were intense, but eventually he and Catmull were able to wheedle a bit more cash out of Disney.
  为自己团队，去争取更多的预算和资源

• “Watching our collaboration, seeing us make ourselves better by working together, I think that fueled Steve,” says Lasseter. “I think that was one of the key changes when he went back to Apple. He was more open to the talent of others, to be inspired by and challenged by that talent, but also to the idea of inspiring them to do amazing things he knew he couldn’t do himself.”

• “I liked him from the moment I met him,” Steve told me once about Ed. He found him an intellectual match. “Ed is a quiet guy, and you could mistake that quietness for weakness—but it’s not, it’s strength. Ed’s really thoughtful, and really, really smart. He’s used to hanging around really smart people, and when you’re around really smart people you tend to listen to them.”
  在真正聪明的人旁边，你会学习习惯去倾听

• And he could explain his managerial decisions with a sincerity, depth of feeling, and rationality that Steve respected. Ed had made it a point for years to try to hire people who he felt were smarter than he was, and the effort showed. “The collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people I have ever witnessed,” Steve told me. For all that he gained from knowing Catmull, however, Steve never quite acknowledged to Ed how much he had learned from him. “The closest he got,” says Catmull, “is that he said he valued what I did, and knew it was very different from what he did.”
  这么说，好像确实，乔布斯对于那些自己真正学习了很多的人，倒是不怎么评论
  而可能像Alan Kay这样比较浅度的，可能提及会比较多

• “Steve and I never argued,” he says. “We had disagreements; I won several and he won several. But even early on, when he wasn’t particularly skilled at dealing with relationships, I always felt that he was talking about a topic, not about who was right or who was wrong. For a lot of people, their egos are tied up in an idea and it gets in the way of learning. You have to separate yourself from the idea. Steve was like that.”
  就事论事地讨论

• The two men would eventually know each other and work together for twenty-six years. Catmull says he saw enormous changes over the years, but allows that this, too, was something Steve would never acknowledge. “I look at Steve as someone who was actually always trying to change, but he didn’t express it in the same ways as others, and he didn’t communicate with people about that. He really was trying to change the world. It didn’t come across as him being personally introspective.”
  乔布斯的著名广告词，People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

• Steve was exploring a radical idea: taking Pixar public after Toy Story’s premiere, which was scheduled for Thanksgiving. So on the first night, after the kids were asleep and Laurene had headed to bed early, Steve stayed up till four in the morning explaining stock options to John and his wife, Nancy. “I mean, I went to CalArts. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. So he gave us Business 101 about stock, how it works, why companies sell it, what’s beneficial for people, how you are then beholden to stockholders and have to do earnings reports, all that stuff. He talked about IPOs, getting ready for it, stock options. He just laid it all out.”
  这点倒很不像乔布斯作风，哈哈

• “You drive to and from Pixar on these roads in that car?” Steve said. Lasseter sheepishly nodded. “Okay. No, no, no, no. No, that just won’t do.”
  “Steve,” said Lasseter, “I’ve got to be honest, I can’t afford a new car right now. We just bought this house and it’s far more than we can afford. I just can’t do it now.”
  “I think what he was thinking,” Lasseter told me, “was, ‘Oh my God, I bet the farm on this guy, and he’s driving that crap car … if a truck hits him—dink!—he’ll be dead.’ ”
  “Okay,” Steve said, “we’ll figure something out.”
  When Lasseter got his next paycheck, it contained a small bonus. “You have to use this to buy a new car,” Steve told him. “It has to be safe, and I have to approve it.” John and Nancy picked out a Volvo, and Steve approved.
  非常暖心！！！

• This kind of attention to detail fascinated Steve. He loved the narrative and visual mosaics that Lasseter was able to assemble for each Pixar movie, and over the years he came to admire the way the animators outdid themselves with each and every film. He and Lasseter paired a child’s curiosity with an obsessive attention to detail. At Pixar, Steve was seeing how the two could be combined into the slow, successful, and patient development of a work of art that would live long beyond its creators.
  作品能活的比作者更久

• A few weeks before Pixar’s IPO, Steve took Lasseter to an early dinner at one of his favorite Japanese restaurants, Kyo-ya, in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. “Afterwards, we were standing outside out on the curb, talking for the longest time,” remembers Lasseter. “We had to have been there at least an hour, just talking about stuff. I was telling him I was nervous, that I was kind of scared of the IPO. I wished that we could wait for the second movie. And he did that thing, where he kind of looks off, and he said, ‘You know, when we make a computer at Apple, what’s its life span? About three years? At five years, it’s a doorstop. But if you do your job right, what you create can last forever.’ ”
  好忧伤，但也好真实
  一台好的电脑，生命期可能只有三年，五年，但一部好的皮克斯动画，生命周期可以是永久

• BY LATE 1994, Steve stopped shopping the company around. He didn’t want to give up control of what was clearly going to become a very interesting enterprise with the release of Toy Story. But he didn’t really understand just how big things could get until he attended a press conference for Disney’s new animated film, Pocahontas, in New York City on February 1, 1995. It wasn’t just any old press conference; it was held in a huge tent in Central Park, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that the June 10 premiere of Pocahontas would occur right there—in the park, free, for up to one hundred thousand people. And the premiere was just the appetizer—Disney’s marketing campaign for the hand-drawn Pocahontas would add up to more than $100 million.
  电影/动画的制作确实是这样的，前期投入巨大，后期持续维护，能获得一个非常长的生命周期

• They immediately learned that Pixar was, at least at that point, a long shot for a successful IPO. Its financial performance to date was pretty dismal—it had accumulated losses of $50 million over the years, while generating little revenue. Its potential revenue stream seemed limited and risky. Pixar was largely dependent on one company, Disney, which was the sole licensee of CAPS technology and which would return to Pixar a mere 12.5 percent of box-office revenues of any movies they might make and market together. Moreover, Pixar seemed to move at a snail’s pace, having already spent nearly four years on a movie that still wasn’t finished. The movie business itself was notoriously unpredictable. And finally, the company relied on the creative ideas of a very few people, like Lasseter and Stanton, who had good reputations but no significant track record.
  1）失血、收入少； 2) 过于依赖单一客户； 3）新动画制作缓慢； 4）依赖一小群人的创意，具有不可预测性

• Steve had his own misgivings about Toy Story’s commercial potential, mainly based upon what he was hearing from Disney’s marketers. “Disney came to do a big presentation to us about the marketing,” remembers Lasseter. “They told us they had a big promotional plan with Sears. Steve looks around the room and goes, ‘Has anybody in this room been into a Sears lately? Anybody.’ No one raises a hand. ‘Then why are we making a deal with Sears? Why are we not going for products we like? Can’t we be doing a deal with Rolex? Sony high-end audio equipment?’ And their answer was basically, ‘Um, um, this is what we do!’ He poked holes in every one of their ideas. He was just so logical. Why associate ourselves with products we can’t stand?” (In the end, the most prominent sponsor would turn out to be Burger King.)
  可能乔布斯心中，另一个喜欢的品牌是劳力士

• When it was over, Steve told me that the Pixar board of directors hadn’t even seen this much of the movie. I took that with a grain of salt. (Lasseter later told me that Steve showed it to everyone: “He was impossible!” Steve’s friend Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, said he saw eleven different versions.) Steve quickly turned from me to the kids. He was busy conducting market research, Steve Jobs–style. “Whaddya think?” he asked the girls. “Is it as good as Pocahontas?” Greta and Fernanda nodded vigorously. “Well, then, is it as good as The Lion King?” Fernanda pondered for a beat, then replied, “I won’t be able to make up my mind until I see Toy Story five or six more times.”
  我也喜欢孩子们的这个回答

• After Netscape’s IPO, Pixar didn’t seem quite so wispy a bet. Robertson, Stephens, a San Francisco investment bank, agreed to underwrite the IPO and filed a prospectus with the SEC in October. Steve decided to push his luck even further, and set the date for Pixar’s IPO on November 29, 1995, merely one week after Toy Story’s debut. If the movie had flopped, the IPO would have been a disaster, and all Steve’s efforts to get Pixar onto more secure financial footing would have been for naught.
  乔布斯内心对自己非常自信！！！

• And Pixar’s IPO the following week was a blockbuster as well, raising $132 million and giving the company a market capitalization of $1.4 billion. Lasseter, Catmull, Steve, and other Pixarians gathered to follow the affair from Robertson, Stephens’s offices in downtown San Francisco. Shortly after the opening bell, when the stock was trading above the $22-per-share price that the bank had established, Catmull saw Steve pick up the phone in an office to the side. “Hello, Larry?” Steve said into the handset, once his pal Ellison was on the line. “I made it.” Steve, who owned 80 percent of the company, was a billionaire.
  原来乔布斯和Larry关系这么好
  皮克斯上市后的第一通朋友电话，是打给Larry的，也难怪

• WHILE STEVE DID enjoy comparing notes and playing games with Ellison, who at the time was one of the very richest men in the world (and still is), money wasn’t what thrilled Steve about Pixar. What thrilled him was to once again play a part in the creation of a successful and profoundly beautiful product that employed brilliant new technology that had seemingly unlimited potential. He loved that once again he was an architect of what the world could not help but recognize as a remarkably creative enterprise. Steve hadn’t felt that way for what had seemed like eons. Not since the introduction of the Macintosh eleven years earlier.
  乔布斯真正开心的是，创造出能激发人创造力的产品、打造这样的公司

• The incredible success of Toy Story, and of Pixar in general, had a huge personal significance for Steve as well. He always wanted to make products that he both loved and found useful. That’s part of the reason that things never seemed quite so magical at NeXT; unlike Bill Gates, Steve couldn’t throw himself completely into the creation of a product that suited a particular market but that didn’t thrill him personally. The NeXT computer and the subsequent software products were admirable, and elegantly beautiful in their own ways, but they were aimed at institutions rather than people. With Toy Story, for the first time in his life, he had a hand in the creation of a product that a young family like his own could enjoy as well. Laurene was pregnant with daughter Erin, the second of their three children. Steve reveled in the fact that Toy Story was something that his kids could enjoy, and even their kids as well.
  感动常在佳能，这也是我们觉得关注人、关注人心如此重要的原因

• Toy Story also gave Steve back his confidence. He and I spoke several times in the months after the IPO, and I could tell he was beyond ecstatic about the way things had gone. He talked about what had happened at Pixar—and about his role in its success—with real pride. He was generous in giving large stock grants to Catmull and Lasseter, and he personally handed out bonus paychecks of an extra month’s pay to all Pixar employees in December. Sure, some of them grumbled that they hadn’t received higher stock grants. And sure, Steve claimed more credit for Pixar’s sudden success than he deserved. But even Alvy Ray Smith, the original partner of Catmull who had left after clashing with Steve, later admitted that Pixar could not have succeeded without him. “We should have failed,” Alvy told one interviewer. “But it seemed to me that Steve just would not suffer another defeat. He couldn’t sustain it.”
  让自己牢记，Make Something Wonderful.