【原】Day 30: American royalty

英语共读 2020-12-04

展开全文

Saturday

各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第十四章THE FOUNDER’S PARADOX。

There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistakenthe crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth.

现实生活中没有代表自由主义社区的高尔特峡谷，人也无法脱离社会。相信自己具有不依赖他人的神圣能力并不能表明个体的强大，而是表明你把人们的崇拜或嘲弄错认为事实。

思考问题

What do you think? For some fallen stars, death brings resurrection.

你如何看待，有些陨落的明星，死亡会给他们带来重生。

01 AMERICAN ROYALTY

美国王族

Celebrities are supposedly “American royalty.” We even grant titles to our favorite performers: Elvis Presley was the king of rock. Michael Jackson was the king of pop. Britney Spears was the pop princess.

说到“美国王族”，应该就是名人吧。我们会将这个称号给予我们最喜爱的明星：埃尔维斯·普雷斯利是摇滚之王，迈克尔·杰克逊是流行乐之王，布兰妮·斯皮尔斯是流行乐公主。

Until they weren’t. Elvis self-destructed in the 70s’ and died alone, overweight, sitting on his toilet. Today, his impersonators are fat and sketchy, not lean and cool. Michael Jackson went from beloved child star to an erratic, physically repulsive, drug-addicted shell of his former self; the world reveled in the details of his trials. Britney’s story is the most dramatic of all. We created her from nothing, elevating her to superstardom as a teenager. But then everything fell off the tracks: witness the shaved head, the over and under-eating scandals, and the highly publicized court case to take away her children. Was she always a little bit crazy? Did the publicity just get to her? Or did she do it all to get more?

他们一直享有这些称号，除非他们已名不副实。埃尔维斯在20世纪70年代时开始自毁，身体发胖，在卫生间里孤独离世。今天，其模仿者均大腹便便，而非细瘦精干。迈克尔·杰克逊从备受欢迎的童星变成了性格怪异、厌恶自己肤色、嗜毒成瘾的人，全世界都对其案件审理的细节津津乐道。布兰妮的故事最为戏剧化。她一举成名，少女时期就被捧为巨星。之后所有的事情都脱离了轨道：曝光的光头形象、暴食节食的丑闻、备受关注的孩子抚养权案件。她总是这样疯癫吗？还是因为媒体关注了她？或者她想借此炒作？

For some fallen stars, death brings resurrection. So many popular musicians have died at age 27—Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, for example—that this set has become immortalized as the “27 Club.” Before she joined the club in 2011, Amy Winehouse sang: “They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, ‘No, no, no.’ ” Maybe rehab seemed so unattractive because it blocked the path to immortality. Perhaps the only way to be a rock god forever is to die an early death.

有些陨落的明星，死亡会给他们带来重生。许多著名音乐家死于27岁——例如摇滚女星詹尼斯·乔普林、吉他大师吉米·亨德里克斯、人们乐队主唱吉姆·莫里森、涅槃乐队主唱科特·柯本，这些“27俱乐部”成员因为死亡而被人们永远铭记。2011年加入该俱乐部之前，英国著名R&B歌手艾米·怀恩豪斯唱道：“他们想让我戒毒，我说，‘不，不，不’。”或许戒毒不够有魅力，因为它阻碍了通往永恒的道路。也许想要成为永远的摇滚之神，唯一的方法就是英年早逝。

More recently, Bill Gates has shown how highly visible success can attract highly focused attacks. Gates embodied the founder archetype: he was simultaneously an awkward and nerdy college-dropout outsider and the world’s wealthiest insider. Did he choose his geeky eyeglasses strategically, to build up a distinctive persona? Or, in his incurable nerdiness, did his geek glasses choose him? It’s hard to know. But his dominance was undeniable: Microsoft’s Windows claimed a 90% share of the market for operating systems in 2000. That year Peter Jennings could plausibly ask, “Who is more important in the world today: Bill Clinton or Bill Gates? I don’t know. It’s a good question.”

最近，比尔·盖茨证明了被高度关注的成功可以带来高度集中的攻击。盖茨具备典型的创始人特质：他既是笨手笨脚的书呆子式的大学辍学生，一个局外人，优势全球最富有的局内人。他刻意选择怪异的眼镜以装扮得与众不同吗？还是由于无药可救的愚笨，怪异的眼镜选择了他？我们无从得知。但其独霸市场的地位毋庸置疑：2000年，微软的Windouws占据操作系统90%的市场份额。那时，著名新闻主播彼得·詹宁斯可能会产生疑问：“当今世界是比尔·克林顿重要，还是比尔·盖茨重要？我不清楚。这是个好问题。”

The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t limit itself to rhetorical questions; they opened an investigation and sued Microsoft for “anticompetitive conduct.” In June 2000 a court ordered that Microsoft be broken apart. Gates had stepped down as CEO of Microsoft six months earlier, having been forced to spend most of his time responding to legal threats instead of building new technology. A court of appeals later overturned the break-up order, and Microsoft reached a settlement with the government in 2001. But by then Gates’s enemies had already deprived his company of the full engagement of its founder, and Microsoft entered an era of relative stagnation. Today Gates is better known as a philanthropist than a technologist.

美国司法部都没有止于这一问题，他们还展开了调查，并以”反竞争行为“为由起诉了微软。2000年6月法庭要求微软拆分。盖茨早在半年前就从微软首席执行官位置上退下来，被迫花费大量时间来应对法律威胁而非创造新技术。微软上诉，法庭撤回了拆分的判决，2001年微软和政府达成和解。但那时盖茨的对手已经成功阻止了他这位创始人全情投入地管理公司，微软由此进入相对低迷的时期。现在盖茨以慈善家而非技术专家闻名于世。

02 THE RETURN OF THE KING

王者归来

Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates’s dominance, Steve Jobs’s return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company’s founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.

正当法律攻击结束了比尔·盖茨的主导地位，史蒂夫·乔布斯重回苹果，证明了其作为公司创始人无可替代的价值。某种程度上，史蒂夫·乔布斯和比尔·盖茨截然相反。乔布斯是艺术家，更喜欢较为封闭的体系，花时间构思超越别人的优秀产品；盖茨则是生意人，保持产品的开放性，想要主导世界。但他们既是局内人又是局外人，都创立了自己的公司，并推动其取得了无人能及的成就。

A college dropout who walked around barefoot and refused to shower, Jobs was also the insider of his own personality cult. He could act charismatic or crazy, perhaps according to his mood or perhaps according to his calculations; it’s hard to believe that such weird practices as apple-only diets weren’t part of a larger strategy. But all this eccentricity backfired on him in 1985: Apple’s board effectively kicked Jobs out of his own company when he clashed with the professional CEO brought in to provide adult supervision.

从大学辍学的乔布斯常常光着脚走路，也不洗澡，但他也是受人崇拜的局内人。他刻意魅力十足，也可以疯狂无比，或许由其心情而定，或许由其谋略而定；餐餐只吃苹果的怪习很难说不是大策略的一部分。1985年这些怪诞行为却适得其反：乔布斯与请来督导公司的职业首席执行官发生冲突后，苹果董事会将乔布斯逐出了他自己的公司。

Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals. When he was hired as interim CEO of Apple in 1997, the impeccably credentialed executives who preceded him had steered the company nearly to bankruptcy. That year Michael Dell famously said of Apple, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Instead Jobs introduced the iPod (2001), the iPhone (2007), and the iPad (2010) before he had to resign in 2011 because of poor health. By the following year Apple was the single most valuable company in the world.

12年后乔布斯重返苹果，证明了为何公司的第一要务——创新新价值——不能简化为公式，交由职业经理人照章执行。1997年他被任命为苹果的临时首席执行官，而之前无可挑剔、备受信赖的前任首席执行官差点儿使公司濒临倒闭。那一年，迈克尔·戴尔评论苹果的名言是：“换成我会做什么？我会关闭公司，然后将钱退还给股东。”相反，乔布斯推出了IPod音乐播放器（2001年）、iPhone手机（2007年）、iPad平板电脑（2010年）。2011年，他因身体状况不得不辞职。2012年，苹果成为全球最有价值的公司。

Apple’s value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. This hints at the strange way in which the companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more “modern.” A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons.

苹果的价值重要依赖于某个人的个人愿景。这表明公司创造新技术所运用的这种奇怪方式通常与封建君主制很像，而不是我们想象中的更“现代”的组织。独树一帜的创始人能做出权威决策，激发员工强烈的忠诚度，提前做出未来几十年的规划。自相矛盾的是，有训练有素的专业人士组成的毫无人情味的官僚机构虽能够长久持续下去，却鼠目寸光。

The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.

公司应该汲取的教训是企业离不开创始人。对于创始人看似极端怪异的行为，要有更大的容忍度，我们需要靠非同寻常的人来领导公司，取得大的飞跃，而非限于小的进步。

The lesson for founders is that individual prominence and adulation can never be enjoyed except on the condition that it may be exchanged for individual notoriety and demonization at any moment—so be careful.

创始人应该汲取的教训是不要沉醉于自己的声望和他人对自己的追捧，否则，会使自己臭名远播，或是被妖魔化——因此，要小心行事。

Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them.

总而言之，不要高估自己的个人能力。创始人的重要性并非源于自身工作带来的价值，事实上，优秀的创始人能使公司的每个人各展所长。我们需要独特的创始人并不意味着我们需要崇拜美国小说家艾茵·兰德笔下那些不依赖周围任何人的“行动领导者”。

The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

创始人最大的危险是对自己的神话过于肯定，因而迷失了方向。同样，对于公司，最大的危险是不再相信创始人的神话，错把不信神话当作一种智慧。