Jim Collins, the bestselling author of the management classics Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, has a wonderful phrase to describe an essential characteristic of great leaders: deep restlessness. Collins applies the phrase to Steve, one of the two great leaders who inspire him the most (the other is Winston Churchill, the great English politician who was prime minister during most of World War II, from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955). Collins believes this restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and self-motivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meaningful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one’s entire life.
自己何其有幸，在不到30的年纪，就能感受到乔布斯的心境“The things he was trying to do,” says Collins, “were always hard. Sometimes those things beat him up. But the response to fighting through that suffering can be tremendous personal growth.”
被困难激励！！“One of the things I’ve always felt,” Steve told me, “is that if you’re going to be creative, it’s like jumping up in the air; you want to make damn sure the ground is going to be there when you get back.”
APPLE DID NOT have a formal research and development unit per se. Steve didn’t like the idea of relegating all forward-looking tinkering to a separate area that somehow wasn’t beholden to the people leading his most important product development efforts. Instead, research projects flowered in pockets all around the company, many of them without Steve’s blessing or even awareness. They’d come to Steve’s attention only if one of his key managers decided that the project or technology showed real potential. In that case, Steve would check it out, and the information he’d glean would go into the learning machine that was his brain. Sometimes that’s where it would sit, and nothing would happen. Sometimes, on the other hand, he’d concoct a way to combine it with something else he’d seen, or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an entirely different project altogether. This was one of his great talents, the ability to synthesize separate developments and technologies into something previously unimaginable. It’s a talent that he would call on to decide what came next.
有趣，自下而上地创新“Everybody carried two devices. A cellphone and an iPod,” Cue recalls, patting both front pockets of his jeans. “We knew you could add iTunes to a phone and it would be almost like an iPod. It was mostly a software problem. We looked around at the industry, and in early 2004 we settled on working with Motorola, which at the time completely dominated the handset business with its RAZR flip phone. Everybody had one.”
The ROKR project was controversial from the start, for one simple reason: most people at Apple didn’t like the idea of collaborating with other companies. The iPod hardware team, especially, led by Tony Fadell, couldn’t stomach the notion of ceding the development of what they had started to call “musicphones” to the traditional handset industry. And the more Motorola showed them of its plans for the ROKR, the more certain they became that licensing their precious iPod and iTunes software had been a mistake. While Motorola had certainly built sleek and beautiful phones in the past, the company seemed hopeless when it came to designing software that could replicate the simplicity of Apple’s iPods. To Apple’s whiz kids, Motorola’s approach seemed all but inept. The Illinois company assigned separate teams of programmers to build different software components, like a directory of contacts, text messaging, and a crude Internet browser that could only display stripped-down mobile versions of websites. Nothing about these features was as intuitive as the iPod screen interface, and trying to combine the efforts of disparate, disjointed teams led to a hopeless muddle. Steve became so exasperated with Motorola’s work that he asked Fadell to develop his own prototypes for an Apple cellphone, the first featuring music and the second focusing on video and photos.
注意这里乔布斯的产品优先级，第一是包含音乐，第二是视频和照片Ironically, two other projects that started out having nothing to do with cellphones would come to have the greatest impact on Steve’s decision about what Apple would pursue next. One of these was called Project Purple. It was a skunkworks effort Steve had ordered up to devise a new approach to what was proving to be an elusive “form factor” for personal computing: an ultralight, portable device that resembled a tablet or a clipboard, with an interactive touch screen. The concept had thwarted Microsoft’s best researchers and engineers for years, but Steve believed that his guys could make headway where others had failed. There simply had to be a more direct and intuitive way for users to interact with a computer than a keyboard and a mouse. Preferably it would be something he could use anywhere, even when sitting on the toilet.
所以其实产品Boss，或者说CEO，让底下的人，往哪些新方向去探索，也至关重要，毕竟小朋友可能看不到更多视野In the early 1990s, a handful of startup entrepreneurs, along with researchers in the R&D labs of several computer makers, hit upon the idea that they might be able to reconfigure touch-screen technology into something they dubbed “pen computing.” Their idea was that users would mimic the actions of a mouse by working directly on the screen of a portable computer with a special stylus. They believed that drawing or writing directly on a screen was so natural and familiar that it would be the best way for people to interact with their computers. This was the nascent technology that John Sculley had counted on to make the Apple Newton MessagePad the next big wave in personal computing when it was introduced in 1993. The Newton failed, of course, partly because its handwriting recognition was embarrassingly inaccurate. Microsoft tried for two decades to make something of pen computing in tablet versions of the PC, but to no avail. The only somewhat successful stab at the genre was Palm’s Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA). But the small device was never intended to be a full-featured computer, and its success was fleeting.
对于新技术的探索，非常值得，尽管时间长度可能会很长Academics and even some forward-looking digital artists took the touch-screen concept in a different direction. In the early 1980s, they started experimenting with technology that allowed for the use of more than just one fingertip to manipulate computer images on a screen. These so-called “multi-touch” interfaces were profoundly different. Performed with combinations of fingers or hands, gestures and coordinated motions could control the screen with far more dexterity than a mouse. You could move icons and files around, or enlarge and shrink images on the screen. You had the tactile illusion of physically interacting with the image on the screen. Seeing the potential, researchers at IBM, Microsoft, Bell Labs, and elsewhere experimented with their own multi-touch projects.
Apple’s Greg Christie had been one of the key designers and software engineers of the ill-fated Newton. He had gotten over his romance with pen computing, but he had steadily followed all the multi-touch research efforts in academia and the tech industry. He hoped that partnering with Ording, who had joined Apple in 1998 and who had worked on the iPod’s scroll-wheel user interface as well as on OS X, might lead the way to make multi-touch the distinguishing technology for a serious new computer. They believed it might serve as the basis for a whole new kind of user interface.
从失败里学习，并持续监测新技术的发展，坚信自己认为正确的方向Having five different projects sprout up around similar technological possibilities wasn’t unusual at Apple. Steve didn’t issue a “Let there be the iPad” command one day, and wake up the next to find the whole enterprise devoting itself to his single wish. Instead, the place was always bubbling with possibilities. His most important job was to sort through them and imagine how they could point the way to something entirely new.
所以项目探索的方向，不是天马行空的探索10个不同的项目，而是基于同样的目标，探索类似的发散方向“I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work.”
Steve conducted his research with the same inquisitiveness he applied to understanding what would make a great new product. He scoured the globe for other options, and made surreptitious trips to see doctors in Seattle, Baltimore, and Amsterdam. He was interested primarily in dietary treatments that might work, and alternative cures that meshed more with his inclination toward an organic lifestyle. But he also talked to many expert mainstream doctors. At one point he even convened a conference call where he was able to discuss his cancer with at least a half dozen of the best cancer doctors in the United States.
有好奇心RECOVERING FROM A radical abdominal surgery is hellish. A massive incision like Steve’s generally guarantees a lengthy and difficult convalescence, mainly because so much soft tissue and muscle must heal without too much stress or stretching at a location where your body bends and flexes every time you sit or stand. As Steve tersely told me, “The healing process really sucked.” At first, he could hardly move without unleashing a cascade of pain radiating out from his gut all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. When he finally got home from the two-week hospital stay, it was all he could do to sit upright in a rocking chair. He didn’t like his painkillers, because they dulled his brain. Still, he was determined to get back to the office before the end of September.
原来承受了这么多痛苦Many of us would react to a disease like Steve’s by taking it slow at the office or by tackling a “bucket list” of things we’ve always wanted to do. Steve became even more focused on work. “He was doing what he loved,” recalls Laurene. “If anything, he doubled down.” So he spent much of that seven-week convalescence thinking deeply about Apple, the computer business, and the trajectory of digital technology. He assembled an ambitious to-do list of what he wanted to accomplish once he returned to the office. “When he came back from that surgery he was on a faster clock,” remembers Tim Cook. “The company is always running on a fast-moving treadmill that doesn’t stop. But when he came back there was an urgency about him. I recognized it immediately.”
无比感动啊！！！
生病后，加倍努力去工作，为世界去创造The first thing Steve did was spend time with each member of the executive team, catching up on what was going on and explaining to each how he intended to approach his work going forward. He told them that he would now focus even more of his attention on things like product development, marketing, and the retail stores, and less attention on manufacturing, operations, finance, and human resources matters. He knew he had less stamina than before, although that wasn’t easy to detect. Moreover, his doctors were keeping him on a short leash, he told them, insisting that he come in for regular checkups to make sure he was healing properly and monitoring for any other signs of cancer. He did not tell his senior staff that the cancer had likely spread, nor that he was going to have to endure rounds of chemotherapy. But he had come to accept that his business life would never again be like what it was, and he wanted them to know how that might change things at Apple. When he was done catching up, he turned his attention back to the big decision, which now seemed more urgent than ever. What would come next?
这里可以看出乔布斯紧急状况下的优先级管理
优先的：产品，Marketing, 实体店
稍后的：制造，运营，财务，人力资源Fadell’s musicphone prototypes, which he worked on all through 2004, were far more interesting. His first version incorporated the iPod’s distinctive thumb-wheel interface as a sort of dialer. Steve liked Fadell’s moxie, but there was an obvious problem. The thumb-wheel that worked so elegantly on the iPod turned out to be a serious hindrance on a musicphone. While it was fine for scrolling through a list of music or contacts, “thumb-dial” was awkward for actually dialing a new phone number. It was a gimmick. This prototype aimed too low with its technology and user interface design. Fadell’s second prototype, which did away with the thumb-wheel and put more emphasis on being a video player, showed great imagination, and was a manifestation of Fadell’s irrepressible ambition. It couldn’t overcome an external problem—the cellular networks of that time weren’t fast or reliable enough to provide consistent video streams. Even though Fadell’s videophone could have been produced within a year with the right telecom partner, Steve chose not to go ahead. This prototype had aimed too high, since it depended upon cellular infrastructure that was not yet in place.
注意最后的产品决策，非常有意思Greg Christie and Bas Ording, meanwhile, had spent several months in 2004 putting together and playing with a rather funky, but working, prototype of a multi-touch screen. The pair projected the live video image of a computer screen on a touch-sensitive surface the size of a conference room table. Using two hands, you could “move” folders around, activate icons, shrink and enlarge documents, and “scroll” around the screen horizontally and vertically with somewhat intuitive dexterity. The multi-touch gestures they had contrived to do all of this were rudimentary at this point, but “Jumbotron,” as design chief Jony Ive eventually dubbed their prototype, was intriguing enough to offer a sense of how engaging it would be to control a touch-screen computer with your fingers. Ive, who had become a self-appointed scout for game-changing user interface technologies in Apple’s own labs, had been following Christie and Ording’s work all along and was mesmerized when he saw the Jumbotron demo in action. He wanted Steve to see this. He believed Apple could make multi-touch the basis of a new kind of device, and he believed it should be a tablet computer.
STEVE, TOO, HAD been thinking that Apple’s next step would probably involve some kind of fundamental reconfiguration of the traditional personal computer. He had always been leaning toward making a tablet. That’s why he gave the green light to Project Purple in the first place. But shortly after he returned from surgery, during one of their regular brainstorming walks around the Apple campus, Steve told Jony Ive that he was beginning to think differently. “Steve wanted to shelve the project,” Ive recalls. “I was so surprised because I was so excited about it. But one of the observations he made—and this is classically brilliant Steve—was that, ‘I don’t know that I can convince people that a tablet is a product category that has real value. But I know that I can convince people they need a better phone.’ ” This suggestion wasn’t made in glorious ignorance of the engineering it would require. He knew absolutely that building a phone was much, much harder than doing a tablet, because it had to be so small, and because it had to be a good phone and a good computer and a good music player. What he really wanted was to try to sell a whole new category of device. That, to him, was worth the risk.
When Steve finally checked out the Jumbotron multi-touch demonstration prototype by Greg Christie and Bas Ording, “he was completely underwhelmed,” says Ive. “He didn’t see that there was any value to the idea. And I felt really stupid because I had perceived it to be a very big thing. I said, ‘Well, for example, imagine the back of a digital camera. Why would it have a small screen and all of these buttons? Why couldn’t it be all display?’ That was the first application that I could think of on the spot, which is a great example of just how early this was. Still he was very, very dismissive. It was another example of one of those times when what he says and the way he says it is not personal. You could take it that way, but it wasn’t.”
产品idea非常脆弱，非常脆弱After mulling over multi-touch for a few days, however, Steve changed his mind. Perhaps multi-touch really was the user-interface leap he had been looking for. He started to pick the brains of people he respected. He called Jony to talk about it further. He conferred with Steve Sakoman, another former Newton and Palm engineer who now worked for Avie Tevanian as the VP of software technology, and who had been pushing for Apple to make the move into phones. And he wanted to hear what the iPod guys thought about multi-touch, since they’d already built the two musicphone prototypes. He asked Tony Fadell to come check out the Jumbotron, since he had the hardware engineering expertise to judge what it might take to build such a technology into a much smaller device that could be mass-produced. Once he saw it, Fadell agreed that the technology was really interesting, but allowed that it wouldn’t be easy to shrink that demo the size of a Ping-Pong table down to something functional that could fit into a pocket-sized device. So Steve gave him exactly that challenge. “You’ve figured out how to blend music and a phone,” he told Fadell. “Now go figure out how to add this multi-touch interface to the screen of a phone. A really cool, really small, really thin phone.”
先喊软件副总裁，再喊硬件副总裁
原来是这样的工作流，学习到了！！！In hindsight, it’s clear that seeing Christie and Ording’s multitouch demo was an epiphany for Steve, one that was not all that different from his first visit to Xerox PARC twenty-five years earlier. Helping people interact more directly and intuitively with intelligent devices was the central factor in creating a new genre of smart mobile gadgets. The Mac had been a radical new conception of the user interface for a computer, and the iPod’s thumb-wheel had been a user interface breakthrough as well. Multi-touch had the same potential as the Mac’s GUI. But he’d have to move quickly.
All this decision making took place in late January 2005. It was hardly the only big thing going on Apple—after all, at MacWorld Steve had unveiled the Mac Mini computer, the iPod Shuffle, and a new suite of personal productivity applications called iWork, which he hoped would compete directly with Microsoft Office. But the cellphone project quickly became the main topic of discussion when he and Jony met, as they did almost every day now. They would have lunch together three or four times a week, and take long walks afterward kicking around ideas for solving such mundane-sounding problems as how to keep a touch screen from reacting to contact with your ear when you are talking on the phone, or which materials to use so that your screen wouldn’t get all scuffed when sitting in your pocket alongside keys and loose change. Steve would sometimes go back to Jony’s design lab and sit there for hours, watching designers tinker with prototypes, or else the two of them would stand together at the whiteboard, drawing and modifying each other’s design ideas. They were two kindred spirits, and Steve would now collaborate more closely with Jony than he ever had with Woz or Avie or Ruby or even Ed Catmull and John Lasseter.
抓住机会，全力以赴As he brainstormed with Jony, and as Fadell’s team started to get going on a real design, Steve became increasingly confident. Creating a wholly new kind of mobile phone wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it would turn out to be even more daunting than the original Macintosh project. But Steve was certain he could negotiate a good deal with a telephone company, now that he’d gained some experience from the ROKR deal. He felt sure that his team could master the software and engineering challenges. He began to have the sense that if it all panned out, this new gadget might be the biggest-selling electronic product of all time. It wasn’t just going to be a phone, nor was it going to be a phone that was a media player. It was going to be a full-blown computer, too. That meant it would also be a smartphone, one that was perpetually connected to the Internet. The easiest part was coming up with a name for it: iPhone, of course.
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