Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and his impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time and on budget. “He could not make trade-offs well,” said Atkinson. “If someone didn’t care to make their product perfect, they were a bozo.” At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981, for example, Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. It was not great—it had a five-inch screen and not much memory—but it worked well enough. As Osborne famously declared, “Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.” Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. “This guy just doesn’t get it,” Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. “He’s not making art, he’s making shit.”

乔布斯这种带刺的行为，一定程度上是受到了两种因素的驱使：一是他的完美主义，二就是，他无法容忍那些为了让产品及时面世或为了压缩成本而作出合理（甚至明智）妥协的人。“他不会在产品上作出妥协，”阿特金森说，“他是个控制欲极强的完美主义者。如果哪个人不愿意把产品做到完美，那他就是笨蛋。”举例来说，1981年的西海岸计算机展销会上，亚当·奥斯本（AdamOsbome）发布了第一款真正意义上的便携式个人电脑。它并不出众——屏幕只有5英寸、内存也不大——但运行状况尚可。正如奥斯本那旬著名的宣言：“够用就好，多出来的功能都是浪费。”乔布斯认为这整个想法都是可怕的，好几天的时间里他都在嘲笑奥斯本。“这家伙就是不明白，”他走在苹果公司的走廊里还反复骂道，“他不是在创造艺术品，而是在制造垃圾。”

One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”

一天，乔布斯走进了拉里·凯尼恩（LarryKenyon）的办公隔间，他是负责麦金塔电脑操作系统的工程师，乔布斯抱怨说开机启动时间太长了。凯尼恩开始解释，但乔布斯打断了他。他问道：“如果能救人一命的话，你愿意想办法让启动时间缩短10秒钟吗？”凯尼恩说也许可以。乔布斯于是走到一块白板前开始演示，如果有500万人使用Mac，而每天开机都要多用10秒钟，那加起来每年就要浪费大约3亿分钟，而3亿分钟相当于至少100个人的终身寿命。“这番话让拉里十分震惊，几周过后，乔布斯再来看的时候，启动时间缩短了28秒，”阿特金森回忆说，“史蒂夫能看到宏观层面，从而激励别人工作。”

The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.” He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

受到乔布斯的影响，麦金塔团队也充满激情地要制造一台完美的产品，而不仅仅是可以赚钱的产品。“乔布斯认为自己是艺术家，他鼓励设计团队的人把自己也当成艺术家，”赫茨菲尔德说，“我们的目标从来都不是打败竞争对手，或者是狠赚一笔，而是做出最好的产品，甚至比最好的还要好一点儿。”乔布斯还带着团队去曼哈顿的大都会博物馆参观蒂芙尼的玻璃制品展览，因为他觉得，大家可以从路易斯·蒂芙尼（LouisTiffany）创造出可以量产的伟大艺术品这个例子中获益匪浅。“我们谈论道，这些玻璃制品并不都是路易斯·蒂芙尼亲手制作的，但他成功地将自己的设计传授给了别人巴德·特里布尔回忆道，“我们对自己说，‘既然我们要制造产品，何不也把它做得漂亮点儿呢？’”

Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not, nor was it justified. There were other ways to have motivated his team. Even though the Macintosh would turn out to be great, it was way behind schedule and way over budget because of Jobs’s impetuous interventions. There was also a cost in brutalized human feelings, which caused much of the team to burn out. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing folks,” Wozniak said. “I like being more patient and not having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family. If the Macintosh project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess. But I think if it had been a mix of both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve did it.”

他所有这些暴躁、恶劣的行为都是必要的吗？也许不是，而且这些行为也并不都是合乎情理的。还有其他方式可以激励他的团队。尽管麦金塔电脑后来被证明是一件伟大的产品，但由于乔布斯的鲁莽干预，它的生产进度已远远落后，预算也严重超支。受到残酷对待的员工在感情上也很受伤，大多数人都已心力交瘁。“史蒂夫用不着让员工如此恐惧也可以为团队作出他的贡献，”沃兹尼亚克说，“我喜欢更加耐心一点儿，不要有那么多矛盾冲突。我觉得一家公司可以像一个和睦的家庭一样。如果麦金塔项目是以我的方式运行的话，事情可能会一团糟。但我想，如果能把我们两人的风格中和一下的话，结果会比只用史蒂夫的方式要好一点儿。”

But even though Jobs’s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. They had T-shirts made that read “90 hours a week and loving it!” Out of a fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly strong urge to impress him, they exceeded their own expectations. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.”

然而，乔布斯的行事风格也有其优势。它给苹果的员工们注入了持久的热情，让他们去创造革命性的产品，也让他们相信，自己可以完成看上去不可能完成的事情。他们制作了T恤，上面写着“我爱每周工作90个小时”。出于对乔布斯的畏惧以及想取悦他的强烈愿望，他们的工作都超出了自己的预想。虽然乔布斯禁止团队为了降低Mac成本或是赶进度而在产品上作出让步，但这也同时阻止了一些看似合理实则粗劣的折中方案。 “多年以来，我认识到，当你拥有真正优秀的人才时，你不必对他们太纵容，”乔布斯后来解释说，“你期待他们做出好成绩，你就能让他们做出好成绩。最初的Mac团队让我知道，最顶级的人才喜欢一起工作，而且他们是不能容忍平庸的作品的。你到那个Mac团队里随便找个人问问。他们会告诉你，那些痛苦都是值得的。”

Most of them agree. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

大多数人确实这么认为。“他会在开会的时候大喊：‘你这个蠢货，你从来就没有把事情做对过。’”黛比·科尔曼回忆道，“类似的事情好像每个小时都会发生。但我还是认为，能够和他并肩作战，我真的是世界上最幸运的人了。”——

注释：

①俄国尼古拉二世时的神秘主义者、俄国沙皇及皇后的宠臣，有高超的催眠术。

②俄国艺术评论家，创办了著名的俄国芭蕾舞团。