当代最伟大的12位企业家

1. 史蒂夫•乔布斯

公司名称：苹果公司

销售额：1,082亿美元

市值：5,460亿美元

员工人数：63,300

建议：拒绝小组座谈会和市场调研。

    尽管史蒂夫•乔布斯在对待那些全身心为他工作的人时有点不顾情面，苛刻至极，但他仍是我们这个时代企业家的标杆。他深具远见，鼓舞人心，才华横溢，却又反复无常。

    或许，关于乔布斯最让人惊异的事实是，他认为市场调研和小组座谈会只会限制人的创新能力。当被问到苹果公司推出iPad之前进行了多少市场研究时，乔布斯的著名回答是：“完全没做过。消费者们没义务知道他们想要什么。如果消费者从来没有见过哪怕有一点点近似的东西，很难（让他们）告诉你他们到底想要什么。”

    事实上，真正让苹果公司如此与众不同的是乔布斯的直觉，他有着雷达一样敏锐的感觉，能够感知新兴科技及其结合有望产生的“伟大至极”产品。对于去年于56岁英年早逝的乔布斯而言，直觉绝非本能。它是“连点成线”，正如他在斯坦福大学（Stanford）毕业典礼演讲中所述，这段经常被人引用的话闪现了互异的人生经历和科技变革之间的关系。

    完全可以想见，如果乔布斯高度依赖消费者研究，就不会有苹果公司后来的热卖产品，从麦金塔电脑（Macintosh）到iPod，再到iTunes。

    凑巧的是，乔布斯推出麦金塔电脑当天，《大众科学》（Popular Science）的一位记者曾经问他，苹果公司进行了怎样的市场研究、确保这款电脑有市场。乔布斯以近乎生气的语调反问：“亚历山大•格雷汉姆•贝尔发明电话机前做过市场调研吗？”

1. Steve Jobs

Company:Apple

Sales: $108.2 billion

Market Value: $546 billion

Employees: 63,300

Advice: Say no to focus groups and market research.

    Though he could be abusive and mean-spirited to people who threw themselves into their work on his behalf, Steve Jobs has been our generation's quintessential entrepreneur. Visionary. Inspiring. Brilliant. Mercurial.

    Perhaps the most astonishing fact about Jobs was his view that market research and focus groups only limited your ability to innovate. Asked how much research was done to guide Apple when he introduced the iPad, Jobs famously quipped, "None. It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want. It's hard for [consumers] to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it."

    Instead, it was Jobs' own intuition, his radar-like feel for emerging technologies and how they could be brought together to create, in his words, "insanely great" products, that ultimately made the difference. For Jobs, who died last year at 56, intuition was no mere gut call. It was, as he put it in his often-quoted commencement speech at Stanford, about "connecting the dots," glimpsing the relationships among wildly disparate life experiences and changes in technology.

    It's a safe bet to assume that none of Apple's blockbuster products, from the Macintosh to the iPod and iTunes, from the iPhone to the iPad, would have come about if Jobs had relied heavily on consumer research.

    Fittingly enough, on the day Jobs launched the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked him what type of studies Apple had conducted to ensure there was a market for the computer. In a nearly offended tone, Jobs retorted, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?"