独家 | AMD公司华人女CEO：不想活在他人的阴影下

    去年十月，苏姿丰成为一家大型半导体公司的首位女性掌门人。作为超威半导体（AMD）的新CEO，这位经验丰富的技术专家也由此成为《财富》500强企业中仅有的25名女性CEO之一。过去几个月，她一直试图令超威重返盈利轨道，因为超威像英特尔一样，近来也遭受了PC销量下滑的冲击。上周，苏姿丰在拉斯维加斯的CES展上接受了《财富》的独家专访，详解了她的公司复兴计划，她对自己在超威打破女性职业晋升瓶颈的看法，以及她对游戏的热情。

    以下是经过编辑的采访摘要：

    《财富》：你上任已经几个月了。你打算做些什么？你的计划是什么？

    苏姿丰：差不多90天了，感觉非常好。我已经在这家公司工作几年了，在半导体行业也已经摸爬滚打了20多年。运营像超威这样一家公司是非常有意思的。上个季度的大部分时间，我都在路上，花了很多时间见客户、合作伙伴和员工。最有意思的事就是讨论技术，它为什么令人兴奋，为什么重要，我们为什么要做它。我从小就是个“极客”，而现在它成了我的生活。

    我的背景一直是半导体，所以我觉得，生产芯片、看着我们设计的产品进入电子设备，是一件很酷的事。我认为我想为超威建立的愿景就是，我们是一家技术非常先进的公司，而且我们要做的正是未来五年里应用最广的东西。未来联网的设备将达到500亿台，而且也将会有各种不同的设备。比如说，你的PC和汽车都需要计算和虚拟化。那就是我们要做的事情。

    展望未来，你如何让这家公司实现差异化？

    让业务多样化绝对是一件好事。但在我看来，更重要的是产品的应用，以及我们能够促成什么、启发什么。我认为超威正处于最好的时期，因为我们能让客户做一些以前做不了的事情。那并不是公司的历史——我们过去一直被很多人视为第二选择。我认为我们确实需要改变这一点。两年后如果我再坐在这里，你应该会想：“嘿，这么多非常酷的东西都有超威参与。”到那时，超威将不再是位于其它公司之后的第二选择。

    你们正在参与开发哪些非常酷的产品，能举个例子吗？

    比如iMac 5K显示器。它集成了我们现有的全部技术，还有图形和虚拟化等等，而且外形也很漂亮。此外还有游戏机，它是一个具有很大潜能的产品。我家里就有很多游戏机，在家里开假日派对的时候，我们就会玩《舞力全开》（一款由Ubisoft公司开发的“旋律游戏”）。它不是一个对战游戏，而是一种全新的社交方式，而且把科技推到了前沿。我想这就是我希望超威能够享有的声誉——你知道，我们会把很酷的应用推向市场。

    你进入这个行业已经很长时间了，它有什么变化吗？目前似乎有许多公司都更换了掌门人，而且技术变革的速度也非常快。

    变革的速度已经加快了。它不再是按年来计算，你可以在更短的时间周期看到变革。先把管理层更换放在一边——因为每家公司都有管理层变革，那未必是一个主要因素。市场也在发生变化，因为技术的变革实在太快了。想想我们从PC过渡到智能手机和平板电脑再到现在所用的时间，特别是现在这些东西中没有任何一项占统治地位，而是几百种设备都变得很重要，我想这的确是因为这些变化已经加速，它使我们这些搞科技的人变得更聪明了，或者更能预见到下一步会发生什么。因为如果我们今天做出一项技术投资，三年就可以见到效果。所以我们必须能够预测三年后会发生什么。

    我曾开玩笑地说起这一点，但很多人问我，为什么超威没有进入智能手机行业。我说：“这是一个很有意思的问题，但你应该在三年前问我。”你今天问我的问题应该是三年以后什么最重要。这正是为什么我觉得这个行业非常有意思，因为重要的是我们未来要投资什么。

    但目前还是有很多资金投在了移动上，没有进入移动领域是不是一个错误？

    我想这个决定是三年前做出来的。我认为我们必须扬长避短。虽然卖出去的手机的确很多，这也很好，但我们的优势在于计算和虚拟化，所以发挥优势很关键。

    超威同时在两个非常大的市场里博弈（PC和游戏），但没有主宰其中任何一个。这是不是一个问题？

    我对这个问题的看法是，随着公司的进一步发展，我可能会对市场做不同的定义。未来市场将由那500亿台联网设备来定义。所以问题是，未来会不会演变成有很多的应用，需要各种不同的技术满足不同的应用。我认为超威就有一系列不同的技术，可以满足大量应用。它与那种按季度衡量的“小步快走”的变革是不同的。在后者的语境中，你可能会更关注谁赢谁输，或者占了多少市场份额。

    所以你是说，市场的主宰者可能会变，因为市场类别本身可能会变？

    是的。我坚信计算领域的创新仍然处于早期阶段。虽然现在你的手机已经挺不错了，但语音识别和面部识别功能仍然不是很好。所以还有很多的创新要做。

    执掌这家公司是不是你一直渴望做的事情？

    当然这是我一直渴望的。我在麻省理工学院的很多同学都是工程师。然后有一天我开始工作了，我问自己：“为什么这么多麻省理工的博士要给哈佛的MBA打工？”为什么会是这样？另外很多工程师包括我自己都会想：“为什么这些人做的决策这么蠢？”所以自己去当决策人是挺有意思的，这是一个非常美妙的机会。

    你也是第一个执掌一家大型半导体公司的女性。

    我听说了。

    这对你是一个重大的里程碑吗？

    我觉得很光荣。这是因为如果你在我小时候问我，长大了想当什么，我的答案很可能就是这样一份工作。现在我上任刚刚90天，还谈不上能带给这家公司多大的影响。但当你在三年或五年以后评价超威时，如果你觉得这位CEO带来了一些特别的东西，留下了一笔很出色的资产，我就会觉得那是一个很不寻常的评价。那比我现在是不是第一位女性CEO要重要得多。（财富中文网）

    译者：朴成奎

    审校：任文科

    Last October, Lisa Su became the first female leader of a major semiconductor company. As Advanced Micro Devices AMD 1.16% new CEO, the long-time technologist also became one of the 25 women CEOs in the Fortune 500. She has since spent the past few months trying to get the company—which, like larger rival Intel, has suffered from slumping PC sales—back on a path of profitable growth. To explain how she plans to do that (and to share her thoughts on breaking the glass ceiling at AMD and her passion for gaming), Su sat down for an exclusive interview with Fortune this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

    Edited excerpts:

    FORTUNE: You’re a few months in to the job now. What do you hope to do, and what’s the plan?

    Lisa Su:It’s been just about 90 days, and it’s been fabulous. I have been with the company for a couple of years and in the semiconductor industry for over 20 years. It is incredibly fun to run a company like AMD. I’ve spent most of the last quarter on the road. So that’s a lot of time with customers and partners and employees. The most interesting thing is just talking about the technology and why it’s exciting and important and we’re going with it. I grew up as a technology geek, and now I get to live the part for real.

    Semiconductors have always been my background, so building chips and seeing the product of our designs go into devices is really cool for me. I think the vision that I’m trying to establish for AMD is that we are a company with technology that’s really, really leading edge, and we’re going into the most important applications over the next five years. So 50 billion devices will be connected together and there will be all different types of devices. You’ll have PCs and cars and more, and all of them need computing and visualization. That’s what we do.

    How can you differentiate the company going forward?

    Diversifying the business is definitely a good thing. But for me, it’s really about product applications and what we can enable and inspire. I think AMD is at our best when we’re working with a customer and allowing them to do something they couldn’t do before. That is not the history of the company—the history of the company is that we’ve been second source to other people. I think we really need to change that, that’s the nugget I’d like to change. Two years from now if we’re sitting here, you should be thinking, “Hey, these are all the cool things that AMD is in”—not that AMD is a second source to somebody else.

    So what kind of cool things, for example?

    Like the iMac 5K display. It has all of the technology that we can pack and graphics and visualization in a beautiful form factor. Also game consoles—that’s really a product that enables so much. I happen to have lots of game consoles in my house, and for our holiday party we did Just Dance [a “rhythm game” developed and published by Ubisoft]. It’s not a fighter game, but it’s a different way of socializing and bringing technology to the forefront. I think that’s what I’d like AMD to be known for—you know, we bring cool applications to the market.

    You’ve been in the industry for a long time. How has it changed? There seems to be a changing of the guard at a lot of companies at the moment and rapid technology changes.

    The pace of change has increased. It’s not measured on years anymore; you can actually see it in a shorter time scale. Putting management changes aside—because every company has management changes and that’s not necessarily the primary factor—the market is changing and it’s because the technology is changing so fast. If you think about the period of time between when we went from PCs being the center of the universe to smartphones to tablets to now, where it’s not any one of those things but really a collection of hundreds of devices that have become important, I think it’s really because those changes have accelerated that it causes us as technology people to be much smarter or more predictive of what has to happen. Because when we make an investment in technology today it will take us three years to see if it will pay off. So we have to be predicting what will happen three years from now.

    I joke about this but a lot of people ask me why AMD isn’t in smartphones. I say, “That’s an interesting question but you should have asked me that three years ago.” What you should be asking me today is what’s going to be important three years from now. That’s the part of our industry that I think makes it so interesting to be in, because the important money is what are we investing in in the future.

    But there’s still a lot of money in mobile. Was the decision not to be there a mistake?

    I think the decision was one that was made three years ago. And I view it as, you have to play to your strengths. There are a lot of phones that are going to be sold and that’s good. But our strengths are in computing and visualization. So playing to our strengths is key.

    AMD is in two very large markets [PCs and gaming] but not dominant in either. Is that a problem?

    The way I think about it is that I would probably define the markets differently as we go forward. The market is going to be defined by those 50 billion connected devices. So the question is does it end up being that there’s a set of applications where different technologies are satisfying different applications. I think AMD has a set of technologies that can service a broad number of those applications. It’s different than if we’re talking about microscopic changes on a quarterly basis. There you tend to get into who lost and gained a percentage point of market share.

    So you’re saying that who’s going to be dominant could be different because the market categories could be different?

    Yes. I firmly believe that the innovation in computing is still really in its infancy. As good as our phone is today, the speech recognition and the face recognition isn’t very good today. So there’s still plenty of innovation to be had.

    Is running this company something you always aspired to do?

    It’s definitely something I aspired to do. I went to school at MIT with a whole bunch of engineers. And then I started work one day and asked myself, “why do all of these MIT Ph.D.s work for Harvard MBAs?” Why should it be like that? I was one of those engineers who thought, “Why are these people making those dumb decisions?” So it’s fun to be the person making them. This is a fantastic opportunity.

    You’re also the first woman to run a major semiconductor company.

    I’ve heard that.

    Is that a significant milestone to you?

    I think I’m honored by it. I’m honored more by the fact that if you had asked me what I want to be when I grew up, it would have been pretty much here. Just 90 days into a job it’s hard to talk about legacy, but what’s more important to me is that when you grade AMD, whether it’s three years from now or five years from now, you grade it on that this was a fantastic set of assets that she turned into something special. That would be a phenomenal grade to have. So that’s more important than do I happen to be the first [woman] today.