《与巨人同行》访谈
原文标题: Interview for In the Company of Giants
背景: 1990年代，当史蒂夫经营NeXT和皮克斯时，两位斯坦福商学院学生赢得了与他共进午餐的慈善拍卖。他们后来为一本介绍科技行业商业领袖的书采访了他。
主题: "面试中有人能做的最糟糕的事是同意我"
核心概念
- 质量没有捷径 (No shortcuts around quality) - 质量始于人
- 20%时间招募 (20% recruiting) - 20%时间用于招募
- A级玩家 (A players) - 寻找顶级人才
- 看结果 (Look at results) - 最终看结果
- 评估潜力 (Evaluate potential) - 对年轻人的评估
- 故意激怒 (Purposely upset) - 面试中故意批评对方
- 最糟的事是同意 (Worst thing is agree) - 最糟的是同意我并屈服
- 理想主义 (Too idealistic) - 有时太理想主义
- 人文艺术视角 (Liberal arts perspective) - 从人文艺术视角看技术
- 工作激励人 (Work motivates) - 是工作而非我激励人
内容
中文翻译
史蒂夫·乔布斯: 你最好有优秀的人，否则你不会尽快把产品推向市场。或者你可能真的很快把产品推向市场，但它会很笨重，没人会买。质量没有捷径，质量始于人。也许有捷径，但我从没聪明到找到任何捷径。
即使现在我仍然花20%的时间招募。我每周花一天时间帮助人们招募。这是你能做的最重要的事情之一。
Q: 如果找到A级玩家如此重要，你怎么能分辨谁是A级玩家谁不是？
SJ: 这是个很难的问题。最终有两条路。如果候选人在职场有一段时间了，你必须看结果。有些人看起来在纸上很好，讲得头头是道，但背后没有结果。他们不能指出突破或他们参与并成功交付的成功产品。最终结果应该引导你找到人。事实上，这就是我如何找到优秀的人。我看好的结果，然后找出谁对此负责。
然而，有时年轻人还没有机会处于有影响力的位置来创造这样的结果。所以在这里你必须评估潜力。这肯定更困难，但潜力的主要属性是智力和快速学习能力。其中很多也是驱动力和激情——勤奋可以弥补很多。
当你招募时，你在掷骰子。不管怎样，你在掷骰子，因为你只有一个小时来评估候选人。我和某人在一起的最长时间是一个小时，我必须然后推荐我们是否雇佣这个人。其他人也会推荐，所以不会只有我一个人，但我还是必须把票扔进帽子里。
最终归结为直觉。当你雇佣更多人并看到他们的表现时，你的直觉会变得更加精确。有些你认为会做得好的人没有，你能感觉到为什么。如果你稍微研究一下，你可能会说，"我以为这个人会做得好，但我忽略了这一点"，或者，"我不认为这个人会做得好，但他们做到了，原因如下。"当你随时间雇佣人时，你的直觉变得更好、更精确。
随时间，我在面试中的挖掘变得更加精确。例如，很多时候在面试中我会故意激怒某人：我会批评他们之前的工作。我会做功课，找出他们做了什么然后说，"天哪，那真的变成了炸弹。那真的变成了笨蛋产品。你为什么做那个？"我不应该在你的书里说这个，但有人在面试中能做的最糟糕的事是同意我并屈服。
我寻找的是有人马上回来说，"你完全错了，原因如下。"我想看人们在压力下的表现。我想看他们是否只是屈服，或者他们是否对他们所做的有坚定的信念、信念和骄傲。偶尔在面试中真的激怒某人看看他们如何反应也是好的，因为如果你的公司是思想的精英统治，有激情的人，你就有有很多争论的公司。如果人们不能在压力下很好地站起来争论，他们可能在这种环境中做得不好。
Q: 你认为在管理方面你的弱点是什么？
SJ: 我不知道。人是整体包裹；你带着困惑接受好的。在大多数情况下，优势和弱点是同一枚硬币的两面。一种情况下的优势在另一种情况下是弱点，然而这个人通常不能切换齿轮。谈论优势和弱点是一件非常微妙的事，因为它们几乎总是同一件事。
我的优势可能是，我一直从人文艺术视角、从人类文化视角看技术。因此，我一直推动通过从其他领域带来洞察来将技术拉向那些方向的东西。一个例子是——用麦金塔——桌面出版：比例间距字体，易用性。Mac上所有的桌面出版东西都来自书籍：排版，那种在计算机领域没人知道的丰富感觉。我认为我的另一个优势是我是人的相当好的判断者，有能力将人们聚集在共同愿景周围。
Q: 那么，你的优势什么时候——品格判断和人文艺术视角——变成你的弱点？
SJ: 在某些情况下，我的弱点是我太理想主义。[我需要]意识到有时最好就是更好的敌人。有时我追求"最好"时应该追求"更好"，结果一事无成或倒退。我并不总是明智地知道什么时候去追求最好，什么时候只去追求更好。有时我被"可能是什么"蒙蔽，相对于"什么是可能的"，是渐进地做还是一蹴而就。平衡理想和实际是我仍然必须注意的。
Q: 就追求最好而言，你有被广泛认为是极具魅力的声誉——总能引出别人最好的一面的人。你如何能够激励你的员工？
SJ: 嗯，我认为——最终，是工作激励人。有时我希望是我，但不是。是工作。我的工作是确保工作尽可能好，并让人们超越他们的最好。但最终是工作激励人。那是把他们绑在一起的东西。
Q: 然而在麦金塔的情况下，你从人们那里得到了巨大的产出。无论工作类型如何，不是每个人都能引出那种承诺。
SJ: 嗯，我不确定我会把那个归因于魅力。CEO工作的一部分是哄骗、乞求、恳求和威胁——做任何必要的事让人们以比他们已有的更大、更深刻的方式看待事物，并做比他们认为自己能做的更好的工作。
当他们尽了最大努力而你觉得不够时，你直接告诉他们："这不够好。我知道你能做得更好。你需要做得更好。现在去做得更好。"
你必须小心地打这些牌。你必须对很多次因为你在 messing with people's lives。但那是工作的一部分。最终，是你创造的环境、同事和工作绑在一起。麦金塔团队，如果你和他们大多数人交谈——我们发货产品十二年后——大多数人仍然会说在Mac上工作是他们生命中最有意义的经历。如果我们从没发货产品他们不会这么说。如果产品没那么好他们不会这么说。麦金塔经历不只是和一群有趣的人去露营。不只是励志演讲者。是每个人都把心放进去的产品，是表达他们深刻欣赏的产品，不知何故，让世界看到。
所以，最终，是工作绑在一起。这就是为什么选择非常重要的事情来做是如此重要，因为很难让人们被激励去做早餐麦片。需要值得做的事。
英文原文
Interview for In the Company of Giants, Make Something Wonderful
Interview for In the Company of Giants
"The worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me."
In the 1990s, when Steve was running NeXT and Pixar, two Stanford Business School students won a lunch with him at a charity auction. They later interviewed him for a book profiling business leaders in technology.
Steve Jobs: You'd better have great people, or you won't get your product to market as fast as possible. Or you might get a product to market really fast, but it will be really clunky and nobody will buy it. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I'm not smart enough to have ever found any.
I spend 20 percent of my time recruiting, even now. I spend a day a week helping people recruit. It's one of the most important things you can do.
Q: If finding the A players is so important, how can you tell who is an A player and who isn't?
SJ: That's a very hard question. Ultimately there are two paths. If a candidate has been in the workplace for a while, you have to look at the results. There are people who look so good on paper and talk such a good story but have no results behind them. They can't point to breakthroughs or successful products that they shipped and played an integral part in. Ultimately the results should lead you to the people. As a matter of fact, that's how I find great people. I look at great results and I find out who was responsible for them.
However, sometimes young people haven't had the opportunity yet to be in a position of influence to create such results. So here you must evaluate potential. It's certainly more difficult, but the primary attributes of potential are intelligence and the ability to learn quickly. Much of it is also drive and passion—hard work makes up for a lot.
When you recruit, you're rolling the dice. No matter what, you're rolling the dice because you've only got an hour to assess the candidate. The most time I spend with somebody is an hour, and I must then recommend whether we hire the person or not. Others will recommend, too, so I won't be the only one, but I'll still have to throw my vote in the hat.
Ultimately it comes down to your gut feeling. Your gut feeling gets refined as you hire more people and see how they do. Some you thought would do well don't, and you can sense why. If you study it a bit you might say, "I thought this person was going to do well, but I overlooked this aspect," or, "I didn't think this person would do well, but they did and here's why." As you hire people over time, your gut instinct gets better and more precise.
Over time, my digging in during an interview gets more precise. For example, many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone: I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, "God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that?" I shouldn't say this in your book, but the worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and knuckle under.
What I look for is for someone to come right back and say, "You're dead wrong and here's why." I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did. It's also good every once in a while to really piss somebody off in an interview to see how they react because, if your company is a meritocracy of ideas, with passionate people, you have a company with a lot of arguments. If people can't stand up and argue well under pressure, they may not do well in such an environment.
Q: What do you think your weaknesses are when it comes to management?
SJ: I don't know. People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can't switch gears. It's a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they're the same thing.
My strength probably is that I've always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I've always pushed for things that pulled technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields. An example of that would be—with the Macintosh—desktop publishing: its proportionately spaced fonts, its ease of use. All of the desktop publishing stuff on the Mac comes from books: the typography, that rich feel that nobody in computers knew anything about. I think that my other strength is that I'm a pretty good judge of people and have the ability to bring people together around common vision.
Q: Well then, when are your strengths—judgment of character and liberal arts perspective—your weaknesses?
SJ: In certain cases, my weaknesses are that I'm too idealistic. [I need to] realize that sometimes best is the enemy of better. Sometimes I go for "best" when I should go for "better," and end up going nowhere or backwards. I'm not always wise enough to know when to go for the best and when to just go for better. Sometimes I'm blinded by "what could be" versus "what is possible," doing things incrementally versus doing them in one fell swoop. Balancing the ideal and the practical is something I still must pay attention to.
Q: In terms of going for the best, you have a widely held reputation of being extremely charismatic—someone who is always able to draw out the best in other people. How have you been able to motivate your employees?
SJ: Well, I think that—ultimately, it's the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it's not. It's the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it's ultimately the work that motivates people. That's what binds them together.
Q: Yet in the case of the Macintosh, you got tremendous output from people. Regardless of the type of work, not everybody can elicit that type of commitment.
SJ: Well, I'm not sure I'd chalk that up to charisma. Part of the CEO's job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times—to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have, and to do better work than they thought they could do.
When they do their best and you don't think it's enough, you tell them straight: "This isn't good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go do better."
You must play those cards carefully. You must be right a lot of the time because you're messing with people's lives. But that is part of the job. In the end, it's the environment you create, the coworkers, and the work that binds. The Macintosh team, if you talk to most of them—a dozen years since we shipped the product—most will still say that working on the Mac was the most meaningful experience of their lives. If we'd never shipped a product they wouldn't say that. If the product hadn't been so good they wouldn't say that. The Macintosh experience wasn't just about going to camp with a bunch of fun people. It wasn't just a motivational speaker. It was the product that everybody put their heart and soul into, and it was the product that expressed their deep appreciation, somehow, for the world to see.
So, in the end, it's the work that binds. That's why it's so important to pick very important things to do because it's very hard to get people motivated to make a breakfast cereal. It takes something that's worth doing.
思考与洞察
- 20%时间招募: 乔布斯花20%时间招募，强调人才的重要性
- 故意激怒面试者: 通过压力测试看候选人如何反应
- 最糟的是同意: 最糟的是同意并屈服，最好的是反驳并坚持
- 优势即弱点: 优势和弱点通常是同一枚硬币的两面
- 太理想主义: 承认有时追求"最好"应该是追求"更好"
- 工作激励人: 不是乔布斯的魅力，而是工作本身激励人
- CEO的工作: 哄骗、乞求、恳求、威胁——做任何必要的事
- 麦金塔的意义: 十二年后团队成员仍认为是最有意义的经历