谷歌女高管步步领先的秘诀
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尽量选择与最聪明的人共事 梅耶尔1999年毕业于斯坦福大学（Stanford），此时正值第一次互联网泡沫破灭的高峰期，当时的她面临着一个问题：在14个工作邀请中做出选择。 她说，她试着在曾经做出的所有最好的决定中总结出相同的思路。这些决定包括：就读斯坦福大学，把专业从儿科神经学改为象征系统学，花一个夏天在人工智能领域工作，另一个夏天在苏黎世银行业工作。 她说：“我总是尽量选择与最聪明的人共事。”她补充道，她最终选择了谷歌公司。当然，这个初创公司取得的成功，她选择加盟这家公司的主要因为还在于，她知道这个团队可以使自己的编程能力得到大幅提升。 不要等到完全准备好了才行动 她从威斯康星州迁往加利福尼亚州就读大学，把专业改为象征系统学。“我自己都无法描述这个专业，更不用说向我父母说清楚了。”梅耶尔用实践证明告诉自己，她可以在没有准备好的情况下取得成功。她说，她经历的最大考验发生在她就读斯坦福大学期间在瑞士度过的那个夏假。 那天她去购买食品，突然之间就茅塞顿开。“第一天，我去商店购物就遇到了麻烦，因为在欧洲购买农产品[与在美国购买农产品]完全不同。”梅耶尔想买葡萄（她在儿时就非常喜欢葡萄，以至于她的父母给她起了绰号“疯狂的葡萄”），但是她不知道如何称重和打印价格标签。 梅耶尔回忆说：“（商店里的）那个女人开始用德语对我大喊大叫。”这或许只是小事一桩，但是“我记得回到公寓时，我问自己，‘想什么呢？我不会说德语，我在这里甚至连买东西都不会。’” “不等完全做好准备就开始行动，这正是鞭策自己、让自己成长的好时机，”她说她现在意识到了这一点。“身处困境、感到不自在的时候，别忘了问自己，‘来吧，看看这一次我又能学到什么东西？’” 《财富》杂志的帕特里夏•塞勒斯在结束对梅耶尔的采访时，提醒读者关注IBM新任CEO吉尼•罗曼提10月份在出席最具影响力商界女性峰会时说过的话：“成长与舒适无法共存。”梅耶尔对此一定深以为然。 译者：乔树静/汪皓 |
Surround yourself with the smartest people possible. Mayer graduated from Stanford in 1999, amidst the height of the first tech bubble, when she had a good problem on her hands: 14 job offers. What to do? She says she looked for the common thread of all the best decisions she had made: going to Stanford, changing her major from pediatric neuroscience to symbolic systems, spending a summer working in artificial intelligence and another in banking in Zurich. "I always surrounded myself with the smartest people I could find," she say. She settled on Google, she adds, because she knew the team there would help her coding skills grow a lot, regardless of the startup's success. Do something you're a little unready to do. Moving from Wisconsin to California for college and then changing her focus to symbolic systems --"a major I couldn't really describe myself, let alone to my father"--Mayer proved to herself that she could do things before she felt ready. Her biggest test, she says, came during her summer in Switzerland while she was a student at Stanford. And her A-ha moment came while shopping for food, of all things. "The first day, I went to the grocery store and got in trouble because, it turns out, you buy produce in Europe completely differently [than in America]." Mayer simply wanted to buy grapes (a fruit she so loved as a kid that her family nicknamed her "The Grape Ape"), but she couldn't master the process of weighing the fruit and printing the price sticker. "This woman just started yelling at me in German," Mayer recalls. The moment may seem trivial, but "I remember going back to my apartment and just being like, 'What was I thinking? I don't speak the language, I can't even buy produce here." "When you do something you're not ready to do, that's when you push yourself and you grow," she says she now realizes. "It's when you sort of move through that moment of discomfort of, 'Wow, what have I gotten myself into this time?'" Fortune's Pattie Sellers closed the interview with Mayer by reminding the audience of wisdom that Ginni Rometty, IBM's (IBM) new CEO, shared at the Most Powerful Women Summit in October: "Growth and comfort do not co-exist." Mayer would surely agree. |
