Books about business and tech figures aren’t my usual fare, but hey, I had the opportunity to read a translation-in-progress and those don't come around every day, ‘seize the carp’ and all that. This particular carp was quite slippery, and I’m not sure what I think of Chang. The standard model is that he is a brilliant visionary, whose idea of building a foundry that would only build other people’s designs showed immense foresight and wisdom. But Chang tells us that he focussed solely on manufacturing (at least in part) because 1980s Taiwan just didn’t have the economic capacity for any other part of the process. This suggests an alternative model: Chang was a not-particularly-talented semiconductor executive who lucked out by building a pure-play foundry right at the moment that fabless was taking off. This doesn’t seem right either (it doesn’t explain why nobody’s been able to replicate TSMC elsewhere, especially given the geopolitical incentives!) and I’m sure the truth involves synthesising these two models; but I don’t know how to synthesise them, and this biography didn’t help much. There’s a lot of score-settling and self-aggrandisement in here, and (relatedly) far too many pages given over to Chang’s time at Texas Instruments—not that interesting.
很開心張忠謀選擇中文做為自傳的主要語言,得以讓台灣讀者搶先閱讀。下冊內容主要放在德儀25年的職涯,以及從美國到台灣、赴了「與命運的約會」,將台積電從無到有,一手建立起晶圓代工帝國的艱辛過程。裡面不是讚嘆自己的豐功偉業,而是他本人藉由「簡單的字句,真實的情感」道來一路的艱辛歷程。尤其是他在德儀無怨無悔的付出,是我最佩服的;後期就算因公司決策錯誤,錯失研發半導體的黃金時期,乃至於張忠謀不受公司重用,流轉於各個部門之間,仍不輕言放棄,都可看出張忠謀對於栽培他的公司仍有一份情誼在。這種毅力,也許就是能將台積電發展成世界級公司的關鍵吧!也讓我想到Nike創辦人Phil Knight的自傳,裡面不說大話,而是原汁原味呈現公司壯大之前所經歷的各種失敗。Steve Jobs說過:「You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.」套句台灣人的說法:無論中間經歷多少成功、失敗、挫折、艱辛,也許這一切都是最好的安排!