【英文版 04】You Need A Network of Support

【英文版 04】You Need A Network of Support

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So now you know that you have to master theskills of creatives and, of course, have great ideas and you have to master theskills of producers and learn to assess and reduce the market risk of thoseideas. There's one more pitfall that you have to avoid. Many creative ideasfail because the creators failed to build a network of supporters around themwho could really help launch their idea.

大家好,欢迎来到创意思维课。通过前几节课程的学习,我们知道了,如果想要成功进行创新,我们不仅需要掌握创意者的才能、提出绝妙的点子,还需要学会成为一个生产者。此外,我们还要学习如何评估并降低创意的市场风险。在今天这节课上,我们会一起来学习最后一个你们需要注意的创新陷阱,那就是我们常常会忘记要为自己建立一个提供支持的网络,这个支持网络非常重要,它能够在你最终实施这个创意时,为你提供必要的帮助。


If you decide to become an entrepreneur,you'll need a lot of people along the way supporting you, from your family topotential employees, partners, inventors, external advisers, awards committees,influencers, customers and many more that we probably can't even think of rightnow. As you attempt to build your team, you'll be asking people to take a riskon your wild idea and support you. Every person you ask to join or contributeor to keep going to help you bring that idea to life, will be in a position ofjudging you and your idea. And most of them are never going to share thisjudgment with you. They'll undergo this fuzzy decision-making process that theymay not even be consciously aware of, but they're deciding whether or not toinvest more time or money in you. Along with developing your skills as acreator and a producer, you'll need to develop your ability to make it easy forpeople to decide to help you.

如果你决心成为一名企业家,那么在你的创业过程中,你会需要许多来自不同领域的人的支持,这其中包括你的家人、潜在员工、合作伙伴、投资人、外部顾问、网络名人、消费者,还有其他许多现在你根本想不到的人。当你开始尝试建立一个团队时,你其实是在寻找一群愿意为你的创意冒险并且能够为你提供支持的人。那些你希望能够加入团队、或者能在你实现创意的过程中支持你的人,他们其实也会对你和你的创意进行判断,虽然这个过程他们大多不会跟你分享。通常,他们会进行一次粗略的决策,或许连他们自己都没有意识到这一过程,但是他们会在潜意识中决定是否要在你身上投资更多的时间和金钱。因此,我们在创新的过程中,不仅需要学习如何成为一个创意者和生产者,而且还需要不断提高自己的能力,从而让人们更加愿意支持我们。


So there's this legendary story in technologycircles about a man who could have become Bill Gates. His name was GaryKildall.

我接下来讲的这个故事,或许会让你们更清晰地认识到这种能力的重要性。这个传奇故事的主人公是一个原本有机会成为科技界比尔·盖茨的人,他的名字叫做加里·基尔达尔(GaryKildall)。


So it was the summer of 1980, a pivotal timein the history of innovation and technology. You might have to use yourimagination with me on this for a moment, but computers before this time didnot have what we call a graphical user interface or a GUI. You could onlyoperate them with coding and the things that you could do were severelylimited. It was like maybe you could add two plus two. This was before games,spreadsheets, word processors, and of course, also all of the things that wouldlater become like Google Docs, Slack or podcast apps. This moment was a very,very big deal. So Bill Gates at this time, he's 25 years old and IBM is thelargest computing company in the world. IBM was considering making a deal touse Microsoft's revolutionary basic software, but IBM and Microsoft needed onemore thing before they could make a deal. They needed an operating system torun the software on. The only obvious choice for that was Gary Killdall’scompany Digital Research. Digital Research made one of the only viableoperating systems at the time, called CPM. Legend has it that three IBMexecutives visited Kildall at his home to make a deal to use his operatingsystem, CPM. But Kildall was away at the time and had his wife and businesspartner Dorothy in charge of the negotiations.

这个故事发生在1980年的夏天,那是一段在创新和科技历史上极为重要的时间。在那之前,电脑还没有采用像今天这样以图形方式展示的界面,也就是所谓的GUI。你们可以和我一起想象一下,在那时,我们只能通过编码来操作电脑,而且电脑的功能也十分有限。那时的电脑没有游戏,没有电子表格和文字处理器,更不用说一些后来才出现的电子工具,比如谷歌文档(Google Docs)、Slack或者播客软件。因此,那一次革新在电脑历史上确实十分重要。那一年,比尔·盖茨25岁,当时的IBM则是全世界最大的电脑公司。当年,IBM 正在考虑使用微软公司推出的革命性基础软件,但在IBM与微软达成协议之前,他们还需要一个操作系统来运行这个软件。很显然,他们当时的第一选择就是加里·基尔达尔的数字研究公司(DigitalResearch),因为这个公司设计的CPM操作系统,是当时全世界唯一可用的操作系统。据说,当时有三位IBM公司的执行官到基尔达尔的家中去拜访他,希望能够达成协议,使用他的CPM操作系统。但不巧的是,基尔达尔那时并不在家,因此是由他的妻子兼商业合作伙伴多萝西(Dorothy)负责了当时的谈判。


Dorothy balked at signing the non-disclosureagreement, or NDA, that IBM insisted on. So IBM went back to Microsoft andinstead of working with Kildall, the two parties found a way to create asimilar operating system without him.

在谈判过程中,IBM表示,双方必须签署一个保密协议,也就是NDA,但多萝西却拒绝了这个要求,最终,双方没能顺利签署协议。于是,IBM重新找到微软,并且在没有基尔达尔加入的情况下,双方共同想办法重新开发了另一个类似CPM的操作系统。


This story is tragic. It gets me all worked upbecause I feel like it's so unfair. Kildall was a true pioneer of computingtechnology and billions of dollars were made in the decades that followed offof the ideas that he created. But he and his business partner didn't make iteasy for their supporters to help them.

这是一个非常令人遗憾的故事,同时也让我觉得很不公平。毫无疑问,基尔达尔是电脑技术的真正先驱者,但是他想出来的创意却为别人带去了数十亿美元的收益。由于他和他的商业伙伴的失误,让基尔达尔失去了原本可能会帮助他的支持者。


Sadly, less famous versions of this storyhappen all the time. I've even had it happen to me a couple of times. But thoseare more stories for maybe another podcourse.

但是不幸的是,这样的故事其实每天都在发生,我自己也遇到过好几次这样的情况。不过在这节课上,我就不继续向大家分享这些案例了,因为这样的故事实在太多了,如果要把它们全讲一遍,可能得专门另开一门课程才行。


So let's start by understanding how peoplemake decisions to help or not. InThinkingFast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues thatthe brain has two systems for decision making: the fast thinking system and theslow system. The fast thinking system operates when we’re busy multitasking ornot particularly motivated to question our assumptions of the world. This fastsystem is the default. It's what you and I are doing most of the time. Thinkingfast lets us make efficient decisions and lets us prioritize some things overothers instead of being overwhelmed with all of the information that we have toprocess every day. In fast thinking, people sort quickly through informationusing shortcuts based on their existing beliefs and their past experiences.

好了,听完这个故事,相信大家都能感受到获得他人的支持是一件多么重要的事情,那么接下来,就让我们从一本书出发,一起来了解一下人们是如何决定他们要不要为别人提供支持的。《思考,快与慢》这本书的作者丹尼尔·卡尼曼(Daniel Kahneman)是一位诺贝尔奖获得者,他也是一位著名的心理学家,他在书中介绍了人类大脑进行决策时所使用的的两个不同系统,也就是快思考系统和慢思考系统。所谓快思考系统,就是我们同时进行多项工作时大脑所启用的思考系统,在这个过程中,我们并不会认真地质疑自己的推断。快思考系统是我们大脑中默认的思维系统,也就是我们大多数时候所采用的思考方式。这个系统能够帮助我们快速做出决策,筛选优先事宜,从而避免我们的大脑每天处理过多的信息。在快思维过程中,我们会通过已有的观念和过往经验来对信息进行快速分类,这就类似于走了一个大脑思维的捷径。


New ideas are risky and uncertain, and wedon't have a lot of past experience with them. This makes it more cognitivelydemanding to figure out if we want to support them or not. When you're askingfor support for a risky idea from people who are busy with other things andlet's face it, who isn't these days, you're likely asking people to makedecisions in fast thinking mode.

但是,全新的创意往往具有很大的冒险性和不确定性,而我们也并没有充足的过往经验来对新创意迅速作出判断。因此,我们在认知上需要花费更多精力,才能确定自己是否想要支持这个创意。但是如今,大家都变得越来越忙,所以当你想要得到他人的支持,而对方又正好在忙于其他事情的时候,你往往是在要求对方通过快思维作出决定。


Let's go back to that list of some of thepeople who might need to support you, like your family or, say, a talented newrecruit. This person has another job with a high prestige company, and we'llhave to decide to leave it to join you and your unknown company. She'll have tomake a judgment call on whether joining you will pay off for her in the futureor not, even though it's actually impossible to know if you will succeed. Thisis also true for all of the different people. you're going to need to help youalong the way. Understanding how people make decisions about whether you willbe a winner or a loser in the future is really useful for learning how to makeit easy for them to support you.

接下来,让我们回顾一下刚才提到的那些可能会支持你的人,比如说你的家人,或者一位才华横溢的新员工。这个人或许正在另一个有名的大公司工作,现在,他需要作出决定,是继续留在大公司,还是加入你和你不知名的小公司。虽然他不可能预测出你最终究竟能不能成功,但是他依旧需要判断自己加入你的公司能不能在未来为他自己带去更大的好处。这样的决策过程对于所有人来说都是需要经历的。而你,作为一个需要获得帮助的人,如果能够弄清楚大家是如何判断一个人未来是会成功还是失败的,那么你就更有可能说服对方来支持你。


Once you make it to the level of a producerwith your idea, your competition, all the other producers, are all verytalented. They're competing for many of the same support resources that you'llneed: investors, employees, promotion, awards, customers. You have to convinceall these people to support you over your competition.

一旦你将自己的创意发展到了生产阶段时,你的所有竞争者以及其他同样拥有很强能力的生产者们,便会开始和你竞争相同的支持资源,比如投资者、员工、推广、奖项以及客户,因此你需要说服这些持有资源的人,让他们选择支持你而不是你的竞争者。


People will usually make this decision tosupport you or not in the first few minutes of interacting with you. Oncethey've formed an opinion of you as a future winner or a future loser, it'shard to change their mind. What does it mean to get judged as a likely futurewinner or a future loser? The famous venture capitalist, Paul Graham, describeswinners as entrepreneurs who just seem likely to get what they want and arejustifiably confident. While it may sound easy to pull this off if you're anexperienced entrepreneur, it's really not easy to do if you're just starting out.When you're just starting out, you'll sound confident when you tell the truth,and that truth sounds impressive. You first have to convince yourself that youridea is worthy of investment. And once you do that, you'll become moreconfident and you'll be more able to convince others it can help to be a domainexpert in your field, of course. Deep knowledge in your product space alwayssounds more convincing.

通常,这些人会与你聊几分钟,然后他们就会决定是否支持你,而当他们一旦做出了判断,你就很难改变自己在他们心中的形象了。那么,被他们判定为未来可能的成功者或失败者意味着什么呢?按照著名的风险投资家保罗·格雷厄姆(PaulGraham)的说法,真正的成功者通常看起来就胸有成竹,他们往往是看上去很有信心的企业家。当然,如果你是一个经验丰富的企业家,对你而言想要做到这一点或许并不难,但如果你只是一个初次创业者,你可能很难假装自己信心满满。因为,作为一个创业者,你只有在说真话、而且真话的内容会让人印象深刻的时候,你才会显得很有自信。因此,如果你想要成功说服别人,你要首先说服自己,你要相信自己的创意值得被投资。一旦成功做到这一点,你就会更加自信、更容易让别人相信你的创意会成功。当然,如果你是某个领域的专家就更好了,因为产品领域的专业知识听上去往往更有说服力。


Later in this course, I'll introduce you tomore tools to help you see yourself as a future winner, to become moreconfident in your abilities and to make it easy to help others decide tosupport you.

在接下来的课程中,我还会为大家介绍更多的有效方法,这些方法会帮助你们增强自信,并且让你们更轻松地获取他人的支持。


What you heard about in this lesson is thatcontrary to popular belief, professional creatives rarely fail because of alack of good ideas. Good ideas are just the start. The examples in this lessonwere all good ideas, but they had varying degrees of success. We sharedexamples from natural language, Internet search engines, social networks and anoperating system. Early search engines like AltaVista lost market shareadvantages that they had from being early entrants. These teams knew thatsearch was a major opportunity, but they couldn't hold on to their advantage.Google came along, learned from everything they did, and produced a bettersearch engine. The founders of Six Degrees sold their company for a lot of money,but they had the opportunity to build a business that was orders of magnitudelarger. Facebook could see that opportunity and they seized it. Gary Kildallpioneered a new kind of computing technology, but he failed to build thepartnerships that he would need to make it the success that Microsoft wouldbecome.

你在这节课上所听到的观点,或许和普遍的看法并不相同,我在这门课上想要告诉你们的是,专业的创意者其实很少是因为没有好的创意而失败的,相反,一个好创意仅仅只是开始。我在这节课中与大家分享了许多故事,其中的每个人都拥有很好的创意,但并不是每一个人都成功了。我之前分享的例子包括了许多领域,比如自然语言系统、网络搜索引擎、社交网站以及操作系统。早期的搜索引擎,例如AltaVista,他们失去了自己作为开创者所拥有的市场占有优势,这些团队虽然清楚搜索引擎是一个很好的商业机会,但是他们没能把握住自己的优势。于是,谷歌出现了,它学习了早期产品的所有经验,并且建立了一个更好的搜索引擎。Six Degress的创始人将网站卖出了一笔大价钱,但他原本是能够建立一个规模更大的商业帝国的,反而是后来的Facebook发现了这个机会并且最终实现了它。基尔达尔发明了一种全新的电脑科技,但他却没能获得他所需的合作关系,他也因此失去了成为比尔·盖茨的机会。


These examples teach us that if you want to bea Google and not an AltaVista or a Bill Gates and not a Gary Kildall, you needto do three things. You need to drive your idea past the creator stage to theproducer stage. You need to minimize both market and technology risk. And youneed to attract powerful supporters to sustain your momentum. Throughout thispodcourse, you'll learn methods that are used in some of the world's mostcreative organizations. Methods that they use to overcome the very pitfalls thatwe've been talking about so far.

这些例子告诉我们,如果你想要创立谷歌而不是AltaVista,如果你想要成为比尔·盖茨而不是加里·基尔达尔,你需要做到三件事。首先,你需要将自己的创意发展到生产者阶段,其次,你要努力将产品的市场风险和技术风险都最小化,最后,你还需要吸引到有力的支持者,让你的创意保持发展的势头。在我们的课程中,我会带大家一起学习全球最具创意的公司都在运用的思维方法。这些方法能够帮助我们避开到目前为止我提到过的所有创新陷阱。


These methods can be useful to you, whetheryou're just looking for inspiration for what you might want to do in the futureor if you have an idea that you're working on as a side project that you'rehoping will turn into a startup, or perhaps you are leading an innovativeinitiative in your company. In the next lesson, we'll learn about the mindsetof some of the world's top creatives and some tricks to help you emulate them.

无论你是正在为未来想做的事情寻找灵感,还是希望将自己目前的副业转化为一个创业项目,又或者,你正在公司当中领导一项创新提案,这些思维方法都能对你有所帮助。在下一节课中,我们会一起学习世界顶尖创意者们的思维模式,同时我也会为大家分享一些技巧,帮助大家将这些思维方式更好地应用到自己的实践过程中。谢谢你们的收听,我们下次课程再见。


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