可以翻译为集成式创新。基本是在中秋假期读完的，今年的第一本英文书。作者是Square的创始人，非常有个性，关于企业家、创新这个维度的思考非常值得借鉴，道理朴实简单，却又非常有用。难能可贵的是还分别从美洲银行、宜家和西南航空三个案例上做了深度分析，你会发现，顶级优秀公司的相似性要更大：集中于解决一个真正的难题，通过集成式创新的方式成就伟大公司。有机会值得反复读。按惯例做些摘录如下。
What happened at Square was no accident; it fit a pattern. It’s a pattern that repeats in a shockingly regular manner. Patterns are funny things, for you can see them your entire life without ever noticing them. But once you finally notice, they appear everywhere. When I learned to notice this pattern, it was like finally seeing the world in three dimensions—I was still looking at the same objects, but now everything had depth. My enhanced vision revealed even more patterns. Patterns that have changed the world.
成功是有模式的，毋庸置疑，这也是此书最难能可贵的地方，就是反复讲这一点。
One of these patterns often appears in businesses whose aim is to square up—bring fairness to a previously unfair system.This problem-solution-problem chain repeats until you end up with a collection of both independent and interlocking inventions. Or you fail.
解决难题。
Entrepreneurs are rare, extremely so. But their skill set is not so uncommon, and I believe it to be something you already possess. It comes down to making a single choice: taking on a problem nobody else has ever solved and doing whatever it takes to solve it. The first step is finding a problem that is perfect for you.
Maps are for tourists and not explorers.
My target was always the same: some famous businessperson. Entrepreneurship was not taught in school at the time.
When the word entrepreneur first puttered across the Atlantic by steamship in the late nineteenth century, it described a special type of person: a risk taker who reshaped an industry through innovation. Joseph Schumpeter described entrepreneurs as revolutionaries and “wild spirits.” They were outcasts living on the edge of civilization, doing things that hadn’t been done.
But today all businesspeople are considered entrepreneurs, which is like calling all tourists explorers. Using the terms of business to describe entrepreneurship is like calling a tornado a strong wind. In fact, a good way to understand the original meaning of the word entrepreneur is to substitute the word crazy.
商人和企业家完全是两件事，就像旅游者和探险者的差异那么大。企业家是探险者，更为稀缺，也不是学校里教出来的，企业家是要去探险、解决问题，要有动物精神。
A perfect problem has a solution, but not a solution that exists yet. Happily, there is no way to prove that a problem is unsolvable.We can, of course, prove that a problem is solvable by solving it. Normally, the smart thing to do is to find someone else who had a similar problem and do what they did. Copying solutions is smart, but it doesn’t work for some problems.
问题总会有解决方案。好在这个世界是没人能证明某些问题无解的，但是你也可以通过解决它来证明有解。
Everyone at the company agreed that we needed to change, but I couldn’t get anyone to actually do anything differently. They said yes with their words, but no with their work.
表态很好，却不行动，真是国内外都差不多。做事很难，混事容易。
I didn’t know if anyone else was already working on this, but I sure wanted to. And once Jack heard me out, he wanted to as well. We knew nothing about the world of payments, but we were diving in. When I asked him about the credit card industry, his advice was simple and direct: “Only believe half of what people tell you, and always follow the money.” Even without the gun, this sounded like good advice.
Their profit margin from small businesses was forty-five times higher than from billion-dollar corporations.Small businesses pay forty-five times more than the giants do. We had identified a big problem and a good reason to start a company. Our “140 Reasons” slide had a miraculous effect on our VC meetings. Most VC pitches are nothing but sunshine and graphs moving up and to the right.
有趣的创业故事，两个完全和支付行业无关的人，发现了行业里存在的巨大不公平和空白，给投资人重点讲述140种失败的原因，还被反复认可。为什么？最核心的就是这个问题必须被解决，解决后的市场机会足够大，不得不参与。有价值的问题，本身价值不亚于答案。
The end of a market is like a border that nobody is able to cross, a line that separates those who can participate from those who are excluded. Beyond this area is also uncontested ground, which is quite strange. Every other part of a market has cutthroat competition.Experienced companies from the upper part of the market rarely attempt to do business at the very lowest end.
无形的边界让一侧的市场竞争激烈到无以复加，另一侧却空无一人，多么巨大的机会呢。特别是低端市场，很多大公司不愿意参与。
OUR decision to square up the world of credit cards for merchants who had been excluded meant that we had to leave much of the established market behind. The existing market provided resources only to replicate existing solutions. Within this border, we could copy but not create.But if copying is impossible, then you are outside the proverbial city wall and the game changes.Entrepreneur is not the only word that has lost its original meaning; another such word is outlaw.
This problem-solution-problem chain continues until eventually one of two things happens: either you fail to solve a problem and die, or you succeed in solving all the problems with a collection of both interlocking and independent innovation. This successful collection is what I call an Innovation Stack.
Solving that problem forced us into a world where we had to invent. We didn’t choose invention, but we chose a problem where invention was the only solution. Our Innovation Stack resulted from our original decision to serve people outside the existing market.
解决未能解决的问题，自然是需要创新的，毕竟现有办法其实是解决不了的。创新是条必由之路。
One price, a percentage of the transaction, for everyone, at all times. No hidden fees.
No Contracts. We didn’t lock customers into a three-year contract like every other processor; we let them leave any time.
Free is a magic price: you never have to explain free. Low price is such a common element in a strong Innovation Stack.
Square broke every speed record in the industry. Traditional credit card processors took several days to pay, which was absurd. Square grew 10 percent every week for two years without advertising
By taking that risk on our own balance sheet, Square was able to massively simplify the sign-up. Putting our balance sheet at risk before our customers’ also gave us the freedom to bet on millions of small merchants that the banks would not otherwise trust.
Expanding into a market that doesn’t exist entails an entire series of changes.Keep in mind, we were not trying to be innovative; we happily copied any preexisting solutions we could find. The only reason those other components of Square’s system are not listed above is that they were common practice in the industry.
Square集成式创新的一些点，这部分书里面讲的比较详细，值得反复读。
Starvation is opening a coffee shop where nobody drinks coffee. Predation is Starbucks moving in next door.
Then the doorbell rang and Jeff Bezos delivered a severed horse head via free two-day shipping. We discovered that Amazon had copied our hardware (albeit as a black rectangle), had undercut our price by 30 percent, and was offering live customer support.
饿死和被扑食是两种不同的体验。亚马逊低价进入这个市场无疑是后者。
Focusing on the opposite of your subject is often easier than focusing on the subject itself.
芒格式的忠言，反着想，总是反着想。
Copy what everyone else does. This formula works even in hypercompetitive industries and is actually not that complicated. In other words, you don’t have to invent a thing. Virtually all businesses work this way. Find an established market and copy what someone else is already doing. Now all you need to do is carve out a bit of the existing market for your new company, maybe add some small improvements that make your operation better: lower price, better product, closer location, faster shipping, or English-speaking customer service. Building a business within a preexisting market is done every day.
Copy在此处我更多理解为复制，而不是抄袭。复制是这个社会运行的常态，存量市场大都如此。
In fact, the opposite of entrepreneurship is a fundamental component of life itself.Every living thing is a copy of something else and can usually copy itself. Every bug, bacterium, and blue whale began as a copy of some similar parent. We may not know how life began, but we sure know how life continues: replication. We are born from copying and born to copy.Copying is nature’s answer to entropy. If the world could not replicate successful creatures, there would be no life. We copy because it is how we survive, and we are very good at it。
复制其实是天性，生而有之的东西。这么理解起来，和创新相对应，感觉思维焕然一新。创新不是为了区别于抄袭，区别于复制；创新首先就不是复制，是为了解决问题，过程中有需要就复制，不拘一格。
The first type is the motivation we all know—let’s call this perseverance. Perseverance powers us to finish tasks, to get going and keep going.The second type of motivation, however, applies only to entrepreneurs and artists and is rarely discussed—let’s call this audacity. Audacity is the reason you decide to leave the city and attempt something that has never been done. Audacity is generally frowned upon, or at best respected in hindsight if and when you succeed. We have no glowing nouns for people who reject our trusted ways.
有毅力、有勇气——企业家精神非常基础的要求。
Giant explosion or a trip to Wisconsin, it all depends on how you use it.
道理很简单，汽油当时用做爆炸物还是燃料，主要看怎么用。人也如此。
Columbus got his ships and his crew, and ultimately a day when all the banks close. He had nobody to copy, but his actions changed the world.* Columbus was an entrepreneur!
History is basically selection bias in written form. Innovation Stacks are rare, but when they do occur they create organizations with massive impact and longevity. No surprise, then, that the history books are full of examples. Looking back in time I saw so many examples of entrepreneurship it was overwhelming.
哥伦比亚是真正的企业家，历史中学习和探求，寻找集成式创新的案例。
Study a successful tech company in any particular industry and it is hard to separate out the effects of the technology. This is why I laugh when people copy Google’s management practices. Twenty billion dollars of free cash flow fixes a lot of managerial mistakes. Google may have the best management in the world, but how do you control for the fact that the company can also fund its own space program?
这段很有意思，和Google学管理需要思考：google是因为管理好才发展好的么？哈哈
“I had many tearful nights when I sensed that the very existence of the firm was threatened. That also gave birth to a greater determination to fight and find ways out,” Kamprad said. “New problems created a dizzying chance. When we were not allowed to buy the same furniture that others were, we were forced to design our own, and that came to provide us with a style of our own, a design of our own. And from the necessity to secure our own deliveries, a chance arose that in its turn opened up a whole new world to us.”
宜家创始人在危机时刻的感受，正是这段感受迎来了宜家的新生。
Herb had confirmed what I’d identified as the most basic component of entrepreneurship: solving a perfect problem.
Being attacked was very useful to us. It created a warrior spirit. When people knew that we could be out of business next week, our people went into battle,” Herb told me. In other words, the fact that everyone in the company was fighting for the company’s survival helped create an environment where innovation thrived. The resulting Innovation Stack has endured for fifty years.
We replaced that rule book with guidelines for leaders and the first sentence was, ‘Always remember, these are just guidelines and you are free to break them.’ We went from a thousand pages of rules to maybe twenty-two of guidelines.
西南航空创始人Herb的故事：解决大问题、保持战斗精神、文化价值观而不是规则至上。
I was expecting a lesson in how, but Lino gave me a lesson in when. I already knew how—I had been doing the how part right for fifteen years. My problem was when. If you make a shape out of glass that is too hot, you can make the shape, but the glass will just collapse afterward. If the glass is too cold, however, it becomes too stiff and you cannot make the shape in the first place. It’s timing, not technique.
Schools teach how. We learn to copy what works with the emphasis always on the how and not the when.Determining how to perform a task means repeating the steps over and over until you achieve a successful result. Once we learn how to do something, the formal learning usually stops. We then learn how to do the next thing.
I learned to reason logically, but never learned when logic might offend someone. I learned contract law, but never learned when to just shake hands.
Learning when to do something is far more difficult than learning how to do that same thing, if only because we must always learn how first.
时机远比怎么做更重要。学校教许多怎么做的东西，怎么把握时机很少讲，却反而是关键。
There are really only two answers to this question: now or later. Now is often the right answer. In this world of highly similar products, speed is a huge advantage. An important part of timing is being ready when the missing elements suddenly appear.
The decision to wait implies that at some future time you will have to move, so you still have plenty to do. You work on all the other elements of your Innovation Stack so that when the final element exists everything else is ready to go. This is risky.
“It makes me sick and tired to hear what I can’t do. If I know I’m right and can justify myself, I go ahead, I take a chance.”* This quotation captures the attitude of most of the entrepreneurs I have met and studied: the willingness to accept uncertainty as they move forward.
时机的选择上，现在开干永远比晚点再说好。
“They all took one thing out of twenty and said, ‘This is what is going to make us the next Southwest,’ but actually it was our holistic mixture.”
简单复制是无法超越集成式创新的，也无法感受其精髓。
Many companies in established industries study their competitors more closely than they study their customers. This makes sense.In an industry that is growing slowly through incremental innovation, copying is actually a sound strategy.
Innovation Stacks evolve from a focus on the customer. we see a critical difference between an entrepreneurial company and a regular business in its response to an attack. In response to a competitive threat, the regular business should respond to (copy) what the competition does. The entrepreneurial company, in contrast, should maintain the focus on its customers and not change too much in the face of even a direct attack.
Your customers become anchored to your message and conservative toward your competition
竞争策略上究竟是关注竞争对手 还是关注客户的最好回答。慢行业关注竞争对手，及时copy即可；快行业要关注客户，进行集成式创新应对竞争。
Retraining is much more difficult than teaching something new. To retrain people, first you must get them to dislodge their current belief; but people have a strong tendency to think that their beliefs are immutable facts that never change.* So
Linguistic Gravity applies to things that are somewhat similar to what people already understand. Certain words can create the wrong ideas, especially if those ideas are almost, but not quite, correct.
It doesn’t matter how innovative your product is if the customers ignore it. Getting someone’s attention can make all the difference, but the entrepreneurial company has some natural advantages in this battle against the Curse of Knowledge, Linguistic Gravity, and Feedback Failure.
有意思的观点，客户留存的难、语言引力的问题，都要聚焦于客户。
Low price results from a company philosophy to constantly deliver maximum value to the customer. Entrepreneurs strive to keep price as low as possible, while still maintaining the quality of the overall experience. The lowest price, in contrast, requires a comparison with another company selling a similar product or service. A company that values having the lowest price must constantly look over its shoulder to see what the competition is doing.
An audacious entrepreneur sets a low price even when the competition is far more expensive. Does low price still make sense? It does in three important ways: customer trust, corporate alignment, and competitive advantage.
Trust is elusive and subtle even in the case of people we know. It is even more difficult for a company to earn our trust. Strategies for building customer trust can backfire, and those who seek our trust may be least deserving of it. But among the limited tools we do have for building trust, pricing is perhaps the most powerful.
A consistently low price creates trust. This trust can be strong enough for a customer to use a separate airline reservation system, travel hours to buy furniture, or place his or her savings in an upstart bank
Price is part of culture. Every firm I studied used low price not only as a metric to measure, but also as a way to demonstrate how they valued their customers, a value everyone could see reflected on the price tag.
保持低价是一种非常好的企业文化和竞争策略，并不追求最低价格。单纯追求最低价就有点形式化了，保持低价的内涵是倒逼企业家通过集成式创新保持竞争力，提供最大的价值。
The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” Unfair as this situation sounds, Gibson’s words contain a hopeful promise: while only a few of us enjoy the latest cool thing, eventually the future will deliver it to us all. But who will make that delivery?
未来已来。
Humility and audacity are allies. Admitting that one does not know something frees the mind from the constraints of the known world.
Believe it or not, fear, if properly managed, can be a huge advantage. You may as well make the monster under your bed do some cleaning while it’s down there.Not only do entrepreneurs have fear as a companion, sometimes fear is their only companion.
Feedback, especially positive feedback, lags far behind innovation. In other words, if you are doing something truly innovative, you will almost certainly not have any proof when you could really use it
Qualification matters only in the world of copying, not in the world of entrepreneurship.
Among all the entrepreneurs I studied, perseverance, often displayed as stubbornness, seemed to be the most common trait. Entrepreneurial stubbornness is dynamic. One can be stubborn in refusal to change, but one can also be stubborn in action.
Money and fame are weak motivators. We tend to overvalue both commodities because they are easy to measure. You don’t simply choose the problem, the problem must also choose you. In other words, don’t pick some problem that you think other people might have, pick a problem you know you have. When I find the right problem, I no longer feel anger, I feel energy
We also understand the two main reasons people overlook this pattern. First, entrepreneurship is rare: most of the things in our lives are copies of copies. Second, even if we discover something truly new, we lack the words to describe our findings. Entrepreneurship these days just means business.
最后两章关于人性感受的内容尤其精彩。人性、勇气、恐惧、耐心、坚韧。