经理人的短视拖累管理复兴

Where governments have failed to restore previous world growth levels, could a management renaissance do the trick? Noting in a Harvard Business Review blog that a mere 13 per cent of employees worldwide are engaged in their work, with twice as many disengaged or hostile, Richard Straub and Julia Kirby call for a “Great Transformation” that would set the world on a new path to sustainable growth.

各国政府没能让全球经济增长恢复之前的水平，那么管理方式复兴能否办成这件事？理查德•斯特劳布(Richard Straub)和茱莉亚•柯比(Julia Kirby)在《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review)博客上指出，全世界仅13%的雇员投入工作，而两倍于此的雇员在混日子或仇视工作。两人呼吁来一场“大转变”，称这可能让世界走上可持续增长的新道路。

Can we manage our way to prosperity? Some would turn it around and say it is not an option – it is management’s fault that the economy is so limp in the first place. And it is less a case of sulky employees than of zombie managers in the grip of management ideas that refuse to die. Leave aside for the moment the poor management decisions that caused the crisis whose legacy still besets us. Clayton Christensen, holder of the unofficial title of the world’s most influential management thinker, blames managers’ short-termism for companies’ preference for innovation that cuts costs (usually jobs).

我们能否通过变革管理方式实现繁荣？有些人会摇头，说这是不可能的——经济之所以走到眼下的困难境地，追根溯源就是因为管理方式的错误。与其责怪心怀不满的员工，不如责怪那些紧抱陈旧管理思想的死脑筋经理人。暂且不谈导致了这场危机（其烂摊子至今仍在折磨我们）的糟糕管理决策。有“全球最具影响力管理学思想家”之称的克莱顿•克里斯坦森(Clayton Christensen)说，企业之所以青睐于那些能够削减成本（通常意味着削减工作岗位）的创新，应归咎于经理人的短视。

Another academic, William Lazonick, has shown how in recent years many large US corporates have been spending more than their total profits on dividends and share buybacks, leaving precious little for investment or employees. And in The Road to Recovery, City economist Andrew Smithers, hardly a rabid lefty, argues that the recession is not cyclical but structural, and it is caused by the misallocation of investment resources brought about by bonuses and incentives. For Smithers, dismantling the bonus culture that misdirects managers’ investment decisions is the single most important task for economic and social policy today.

另一位学者威廉•莱宗尼克(William Lazonick)则指出，近年来，美国许多大公司在派息和股票回购上的支出超过它们的总利润，使得它们能够用在投资和员工上的资金少之又少。伦敦金融城经济学家安德鲁•史密瑟斯(Andrew Smithers)在《走向复苏之路》(The Road to Recovery)一书中提出，这场衰退不是周期性的，而是结构性的，其诱因是奖金和激励机制导致的投资资源配置不当。在史密瑟斯看来，废除误导经理人投资决策的奖金文化，是当今经济和社会政策的最重要任务。

If this is the case then, the management innovation that is needed will not come from hot new communication and co-ordinating technologies (such as big data, the internet of things or social media). In fact, the reverse. In today’s financialised world, these are more likely to be used to accentuate the job-stripping, winner-takes-all trend already seen with previous techniques like outsourcing and offshoring.

如果是这样，我们需要的管理方式创新将不会来自热门的新通讯和合作技术（比如大数据、物联网或社交媒体）。事实上，恰恰相反。在当今的金融化世界里，这些技术更有可能被用于加快削减工作岗位、赢者通吃的趋势，就像之前的外包和在海外设厂等手段那样。

As Straub writes: “Instead of liberating the creative and innovative energy of employees [ ... ] blind processes and rigid hierarchies still hold them down. In effect, the emergence of a Taylorism of a sort in non-manufacturing business operations has been enabled by digital technology.”

如斯特劳布所写的：“员工的创造力和创新热情仍然没有得到释放……盲目的流程和僵硬的层级制度仍然束缚着他们。事实上，数字技术使得某种泰勒主义在非制造业企业运营中出现。”

As the reference to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” project suggests, managers are still building mass-production organisations fit for the early 20th century, based on hierarchy, standardisation and compliance, rather than flexible, human-centred outfits in which technology is not a threat but a partner of both employees and customers.

正如提及弗雷德里克•温斯洛•泰勒(Frederick Winslow Taylor)的“科学管理”项目所显示的，经理人仍然在构建适合20世纪早期的那种以层级制度、标准化和服从为基础的大规模生产组织，而不是那种灵活、以人为本、让技术成为员工和客户的伙伴而非威胁的组织。

A-list management voices as well as a cohort of younger thinkers and doers, have been calling for the reinvention of management along these lines for years. But nothing much has changed, at least among large established companies – just look at the unreconstructed financial sector. If anything, managers report that short-term pressures are getting worse.

多年来，前沿管理学讨论、以及一批年轻思想家和实践家，一直在呼吁类似的管理学创新，但迄今没有多少改变，至少在老牌大公司里（只用看看未见重整的金融行业就知道了）。如果说有任何改变的话，那就是经理人们称，他们面临的短期压力更大了。

So if this is old news, what is holding things up? What has to change to break the management logjam? Enter the zombies. As Smithers demonstrates, the invisible link between sluggish innovation, cost-cutting, share buybacks, the jobs and pay squeeze, and neo-Taylorism, is management incentives. What locks them all together in a tight, self-reinforcing paradigm is shareholder value – the assertion that the sole purpose of the company is to maximise returns to shareholders.

那么，如果这是个老问题，为何到现在都没有解决？要打破这种管理方面的僵局，有什么是必须改变的？答案是，死脑筋经理人。正如史密瑟斯所展示的，将创新萎靡、成本削减、股票回购、裁员和降低与新泰勒主义联系在一起的，正是管理激励。使得这一切固化为自我强化的紧密范式的是股东价值：企业的唯一存在目的是实现股东回报的最大化。

This idea is embedded deep in official governance codes and it is hard to believe it is both recent – gaining traction only in the 1970s and 1980s – as well as based on a myth. In law, as the redoubtable legal scholar Lynn Stout, among others, has pointed out, shareholders own shares, not companies, which are separate legal persons, and directors’ only fiduciary responsibility is to the company. Shareholders are not principals and managers are not their agents.

这一观念深深地影响了正式的公司治理规范，我们很难相信，它出现的时间其实并不长（上世纪70、80年代才流行起来），并且是基于一个错误的想法。从法律上讲，正如大名鼎鼎的法学家林恩•斯托特(Lynn Stout)等人所指出的，股东拥有的是股票，而不是公司，公司是一个单独的法人，董事只对公司负有受信责任。股东不是企业主，经理人也不是他们的代理人。

The fact that this is a zombie idea does nothing to weaken its hold on the corporate psyche, particularly in the US. As the late London Business School scholar Sumantra Ghoshal explained, the problem is not that we fail to recognise good management practice – it is that bad management theory anaesthetises it.

尽管这一观念十分陈腐，但它对企业心态的影响并未因此减弱，特别是在美国。如已故的伦敦商学院(London Business School)学者苏曼德拉•戈沙尔(Sumantra Ghoshal)所说，问题并不在于我们不知道什么是好的管理实践，而在于坏的管理学理论让我们变得麻木。

So, yes, an era of management-led growth is both feasible and urgently needed. But the renaissance will not flourish unless a stake is driven through the heart of the shareholder-primacy zombie first.

因此，是的，我们能够、也亟须创造一个由管理复兴拉动增长的时代。但只有首先了结那些股东至上的死脑筋经理人，管理方式才会真正复兴。