哲人为王:商业领袖会从研读经典作品中获益

IT IS hard to rise to the top in business without doing an outward-bound course. You spend a precious weekend in sweaty activity—kayaking, climbing, abseiling and the like. You endure lectures on testing character and building trust. And then you scarper home as fast as you can. These strange rituals may produce a few war stories to be told over a drink. But in general they do nothing more than enrich the companies that arrange them.

没有参加过户外课程很难成为公司高层。你搭上宝贵的周末时间挥汗如雨——参加划独木舟、爬山、绳降之类的活动。你忍受那些考验意志和增进互信的讲座。然后你溜回家，要多快有多快。这些奇怪的仪式可以成为战斗故事作为喝酒时的谈资，但总的来说除了让安排这些互动的公司更充实一些，它们别无它用。

It is time to replace this rite of managerial passage with something much more powerful: inward-bound courses. Rather than grappling with nature, business leaders would grapple with big ideas. Rather than proving their leadership abilities by leading people across a ravine, they would do so by leading them across an intellectual chasm. The format would be simple. A handful of future leaders would gather in an isolated hotel and devote themselves to studying great books. They would be deprived of electronic distractions. During the day a tutor would ensure their noses stay in their tomes; in the evening the inward-bounders would be encouraged to relate what they had read to their lives.

是时候把这些管理进阶礼换成更强大的内省课程了。商业领袖们不是和自然对抗，而是要和大问题们交锋。要展现领导能力，他们不是要带领团队跨过真正的深沟，而是带领他们跨越智识上的鸿沟。形式可以很简单。几个未来领袖们找个单独的酒店，聚在一起研究经典书籍。不让他们用电子产品避免其干扰。白天老师确保大家静心读书寸步不离；晚上鼓励内省学习者们讲述如何把读到的东西与生活联系起来。

It is easy to poke fun at the idea of forcing high-flying executives to read the classics. One could play amusing games thinking up titles that might pique their interest: “Thus Spake McKinsey”, or “Accenture Shrugged”, perhaps. Or pairing books with personality types: “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” for a budding Donald Trump and “Crime and Punishment” for a budding Conrad Black. Or imagining what Nietzschean corporate social responsibility would look like. Or Kierkegaardian supply-chain management.

强迫这些明日之星阅读经典，这很容易遭到取笑。会有人起些搞笑的书名：比如《麦肯锡如是说》或者《埃森哲耸耸肩》。或者把书和性格类型配对：比如《生命之歌》给正在崭露头角的唐纳德·特朗普，《罪与罚》给刚出道的康拉德·布莱克。或者想象一下尼采公司的社会责任会是什么样，或者是克尔凯郭尔式的供应链管理。

Then there are practical questions. Surely high-flyers are decision-makers rather than cogitators? And surely they do not have time to spend on idle thought? However, a surprising number of American CEOs studied philosophy at university. Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, was a philosophy postgraduate at Oxford University and briefly contemplated becoming an academic before choosing the life of a Billionaire instead. Anyway, executives clearly have enough time on their hands to attend gabfests such as Davos, where they do little more than recycle corporate clichés about “stakeholders” and “sustainability”. Surely they have enough time for real thinkers.

接下来就是些实际问题了。这些成功人士一定是决策制定者而非深思熟虑者吗？他们真的没时间在空闲时间思考吗？不过，美国的首席执行官里在大学修过哲学的人数会让你吃惊。领英创始人之一里德·霍夫曼是牛津大学哲学研究生，他成为亿万富翁之前有一小段时间想着成为学者。不管怎样，主管们显然有足够时间去参加达沃斯这样冗长的会议，除了回收利用下“利益相关者”和“可持续发展”这样的陈词滥调也干不了什么。他们当然有足够的时间留给真正的思想家们。

Inward-bound courses would do wonders for “thought leadership”. There are good reasons why the business world is so preoccupied by that notion at the moment: the only way to prevent your products from being commoditised or your markets from being disrupted is to think further ahead than your competitors. But companies that pose as thought leaders are often “thought laggards”: risk analysts who recycle yesterday’s newspapers, and management consultants who champion yesterday’s successes just as they are about to go out of business.

内省课程会对“思想领导力”有奇效。商业世界现在太关注这样的观念：想要你的产品不被别人商品化，你的市场不被颠覆，唯一办法是你比竞争对手之前想得更远，这么想是有理由的。但摆出思想领袖模样的公司经常是“思想后进生”：要不是是炒昨天新闻冷饭的风险分析师，或者是停留在昨日辉煌马上要歇菜的管理顾问。

The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all this noise and listen to a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides’s hymn to Pericles than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China from reading Confucius than by listening to “culture consultants”. Peter Drucker remained top dog among management gurus for 50 years not because he attended more conferences but because he marinated his mind in great books: for example, he wrote about business alliances with reference to marriage alliances in Jane Austen.

成为真正的思想领袖的唯一方法是无视这些噪音，只听几个伟大思想家是怎么说的。要了解领导力，读一读修昔底德对伯里克利的赞美诗要比你从一千个领导力专家那里学到的多得多。要在中国做生意，读一读孔子远比你从“文化顾问”那儿了解得多。彼得·德鲁克50年来一直是管理大师中的泰斗不是因为他参加了更多会议，而是因为他把自己的思想浸淫在伟大著作中：举例来说，他写商业盟约的时候就提到了简·奥斯汀的婚姻盟约。

Inward-bound courses would do something even more important than this: they would provide high-flyers with both an anchor and a refuge. High-flyers risk becoming so obsessed with material success that they ignore their families or break the law. Philosophy-based courses would help executives overcome their obsession with status symbols. It is difficult to measure your worth in terms of how many toys you accumulate when you have immersed yourself in Plato. Distracted bosses would also benefit from leaving aside all those e-mails, tweets and LinkedIn updates to focus on a few things that truly matter.

内省课程要做的比这更重要：它们为明日精英们提供精神支柱和避难所。明日精英们会冒险过于沉迷于物质上的成功，以至于忽视家庭或者违法犯罪。以哲学为基础的课程会帮助主管们客服对社会地位标志的沉迷。当你沉浸在柏拉图的思想中就很难用你积累了多少玩具来衡量你的价值了。注意力分散的老板们可以把所有电子邮件、推特和领英的更新扔在一边，聚精会神研究一些真正重要的事情，这对他们有好处。

Looking for answers

寻找答案

The business world has been groping towards inward-bound courses for years. Many successful CEOs have made a point of preserving time for reflection: Bill Gates, when running Microsoft, used to retreat to an isolated cottage for a week and meditate on a big subject; and Jack Welch set aside an hour a day for undistracted thinking at GE. Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School was so shocked at how many of his contemporaries ended up divorced or in prison that he devised a course called “How will you measure your life?”. It became one of HBS’s most popular courses and provided the basis of a successful book.

商业世界对内省课程的摸索已经有些年头了。许多成功的首席执行官们都努力为内省留出时间：比尔•盖茨在管理微软的时候，曾经花一周时间退居偏僻村舍思考大问题；杰克•韦尔奇在GE每天拿出一个小时不被干扰地思考。哈佛商学院的克莱顿•克里斯坦森震惊于他同龄人最终离婚或者入狱的数量，从而开设了一门课程叫做“你要如何衡量你的人生？”这成为哈佛商学院最受欢迎的课程之一，也成为他同名畅销书的基础。

“Mindfulness” is all the rage in some big corporations, which have hired coaches to teach the mix of relaxation and meditation techniques. Big ideas are becoming as much of a status marker in high-tech hubs as cars and houses are in the oil belt. Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley investor, holds conferences of leading thinkers to try to improve the world. David Brendel, a philosopher and psychiatrist, offers personal counselling to bosses and recently penned a blog for the Harvard Business Review on how philosophy makes you a better leader. Damon Horowitz, who interrupted a career in technology to get a PhD in philosophy, has two jobs at Google: director of engineering and in-house philosopher. “The thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder,” he says, they are “the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.”

“正念”在一些大公司里非常流行，它们雇来教练教授结合了放松和冥想的技巧。宏大思想正成为高科技中心的标识，就像油气带上的汽车和房子。硅谷投资家皮特·泰尔召集思想领袖们开会讨论怎样让世界变得更好。哲学家兼精神病专家大卫•布伦德尔为老板们提供个人咨询，他最近在《哈佛商业评论》上开设了博客讨论哲学如何帮你成为更好的领导。达蒙·霍洛维茨中断了他在科技产业的工作，转而去考哲学博士，他在Google有两份工作：工程总监和内部哲学家。“我们这个产业的思想领袖不是那些呆呆地埋头苦干，一步一个脚印走上职业阶梯的那种人，”他说，他们是“会发掘机会并建立独特视角的那些人。”

Inward-bound courses would offer significant improvements on all this. Mindfulness helps people to relax but empties their minds. “Ideas retreats” feature the regular circus of intellectual celebrities. Sessions on the couch with corporate philosophers isolate managers from their colleagues. Inward-bound courses offer the prospect of filling the mind while forming bonds with fellow-strivers. They are an idea whose time has come.

内省课程会极大地改善所有这些。正念帮助人们放松并排空思想。“思想静修”在知识名人圈里占据重要位置。公司哲学家们的心理治疗课程把经理们和员工隔开。内省课程提供这样的前景，给思想充电的同时与增强和共同奋斗的同事之间的纽带。这种想法的时代已经来临了。