领导为何难以驱散企业幽灵

Every organisation has ghosts. Not shrieking spooks exactly, but the sort of behavioural ectoplasm that clings to companies long after change has supposedly swept through. Spectres of past successes haunt the board and frighten investors, while staff in pursuit of new goals have to wade through psychomagnotheric slime to get there.

每个组织都有幽灵。并不是那种尖叫着的鬼，而是在变革本应席卷整个公司以后依然阴魂不散的那种行为。过往成功的幽灵会困扰董事会，吓倒投资者，而追求新目标的员工必须艰难地趟过诡异的稠密粘液才能抵达目的地。

Ghost structures and habits are particularly persistent at established companies. Whoever takes over at UniCredit will find some skeletons: the Italian banking group, which just started a search for a new chief executive, goes back nearly six centuries and so, probably, do some of the ways it works. But newer groups also need ghostbusters. Twitter, which continues to tinker with its hierarchy and misfiring model, is a good example of a company still spooked by the spirit that first enlivened it. Exorcists should always be on standby at start-ups, where behaviour that seemed fresh in the first phase of growth often reeks of recklessness by the second or third round of funding.

幽灵架构和习惯在老牌公司尤为顽固。不管由谁来接手意大利裕信银行(UniCredit)，都会找到一些“骷髅”：这家刚刚开始物色一位新首席执行官的意大利银行集团历史悠久，可以追溯到近6个世纪以前，因此，该集团的一些工作方式很可能也那么源远流长。但是较新的企业也需要“捉鬼特攻队”。不断对其层级结构和失灵模式修修补补的Twitter就是一个很好的例子，最初让这家社交媒体焕发活力的魂灵依然徘徊不去。在初创企业，“驱鬼师”应该随时待命，一些在发展的第一阶段显得新鲜的举动，到第二、三轮融资的时候往往会带有鲁莽的感觉。

Two big problems stand in the way of ghostfinders-general. As leaders of the organisation, they were often the champions of the type of behaviour that now holds it back. “We’re asking them to change the things that got them there in the first place,” says Jonathan Trevor of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

有两个大难题会阻碍“搜鬼总长”。身为组织的领袖，他们往往也是正在拖累企业的那种行为的捍卫者。”我们在要求他们改变当初让他们走到今天这个位置的事情，“牛津大学(University of Oxford)赛德商学院(Saïd Business School)的乔纳森•特雷弗(Jonathan Trevor)说。

The second related problem is that outmoded habits are often the same as the ones that knitted the old organisation together. These informal frameworks are sometimes referred to as “truces” — uneasy coalitions between feuding factions, based on embedded routines. End the truce and you end the fragile peace.

第二个关联问题是，过时的习惯往往也就是让旧的组织形成凝聚力的习惯。这些非正式的框架有时被称为“休战协定”——相互争斗的派别建立在深植的惯例之上的不稳定同盟。终结休战协定，你就终结了脆弱的和平。

“Habits become institutionalised: a set of routines, procedures and rules which define us and give us identity,” Sir Anthony Salz wrote in his 2013 report into how Barclays’ business practices went bad. “Everyone defends their identity.”

“习惯变得制度化，形成一套定义我们，赋予我们身份认同的惯例、程序和规则，”安东尼•萨尔斯爵士(Sir Anthony Salz)在其2013年撰写的有关巴克莱(Barclays)商业实践是如何变坏的的报告中表示，“每个人都会捍卫自己的身份。”

You do not have to look far to detect phantoms. In the newspaper business, for all our headline devotion to digitalisation, we cling to the old jargon (sections, pages), defer to old titles, and show a near-pagan devotion to the old print day. There is no real reason why, as a columnist, I should be at my desk as the first edition print deadline nears, but here I almost always am.

你不用看得很远就能察觉幽灵的存在。在报业，尽管我们的标题赞美数字化，但我们依然固守旧的术语（栏目、版面），遵从旧的称号，对旧的印刷日表现出一种近乎宗教的忠诚。作为一个专栏作家，我并没有什么真正的理由应该在第一版付印截止时间临近的时候坐在我的桌子旁，但我几乎总是这样做。

Pressing technological change makes it even more urgent to know how to end the haunting. A pre-internet episode from Citigroup’s history shows how. When John Reed, then chief executive of the banking group, sought to tackle a crisis in commercial real estate that took the company to the brink of collapse, he needed several goes to make the changes that saved it.

紧迫的技术变革让了解如何终结企业“闹鬼”变得更为紧急。花旗集团(Citigroup)发生在互联网时代之前的一幕告诉了我们如何去做。当时担任这家银行集团首席执行官的约翰•里德(John Reed)寻求应对让该行濒临崩溃的商业房地产危机，他做出了几番尝试才实现了拯救花旗的变革。

Despite the depth of the problem, mere exhortation did not work. He had to break the structure — by getting rid of the three executives who oversaw fiefdoms outside his control — and destroy ingrained bad habits.

问题根深蒂固，只靠规劝并不起作用。他必须打破架构，解雇3名负责不在他控制之下的小天地的高管，并且打破根深蒂固的坏习惯。

To cut costs, for instance, he scrapped bonuses, but also forbade staff from using cover sheets on faxes (this was the early 1990s, remember), told them to take taxis not limousines, and started charging for canteen meals. The signal was clear. As he put it in a private memo: “Much of this waste is habit. A style issue of ‘how we have grown to run the place’ . . . We need the courage to change our ways and embrace them.”

比如，为了削减成本，他取消了奖金，但他同时也禁止员工在传真的时候使用封面页（记住，这可是上世纪90年代早期），要求员工打普通出租车而不是加长型豪车，并且开始收取食堂就餐费用。信号很明确。就如他在一篇私人备忘录中所说的：“这样的浪费有很大一部分是习惯。一个“我们如何发展到掌管这个地方”的风格问题……我们需要有勇气改变我们的方式，并拥抱新的方式。”

Mr Reed opened his private correspondence to Sarah Kaplan of Toronto’s Rotman management school for a recent study. She says another important way to kill off zombie habits is to adjust internal incentives.

里德向多伦多罗特曼管理学院(Rotman School of Management)的萨拉•卡普兰(Sarah Kaplan)公开了自己的私人通信，用于近期的一项研究。卡普兰教授表示，另一种消灭僵尸习惯的重要方式是调整内部激励措施。

The amount people are paid sends one signal. At Barclays, the Salz review found that “pay contributed significantly to a sense among a few [investment bankers] that they were somehow unaffected by the ordinary rules”. More important, though, is to change the stimuli that affect behaviour. At Citi, Prof Kaplan writes, a new system of monthly meetings of the CEO, the line managers and their teams “created acute incentives” to increase sales and cut costs.

向人们支付的金额传达了一个信号。萨尔斯的报告发现，在巴克莱，“薪酬对少数几名投资银行家形成一种观念起到了很大作用，那就是他们似乎不受一般规则的影响”。然而，更重要的是改变那些影响行为的刺激因素。卡普兰教授写道，在花旗，首席执行官、直线经理和他们的团队举行月度会议的新制度，创建了增加销售和削减成本的“强大激励”。

As Prof Trevor has written, whether the strategy, purpose and structure of companies are aligned often makes the difference between a good organisation and a bad one. Expunging phantasms is essential, but not enough. Leaders also need to make new truces, lest the dead hand of past behaviour strangles new ways of working.

就如牛津大学的特雷弗教授所写的，企业的战略、目的和架构是否协调一致，往往会产生好机构或是糟糕机构的巨大差别。清除企业的幽灵至关重要，但这还不够。领导者还需要制定新的休战协议，以免过去行为的死亡之手扼杀新的工作方式。