|
|
Bartleby The bird and the boss
巴托比 小鸟和老板
A billionaire’s challenge to management thinking
亿万富翁面临管理思维上的挑战
Elon Musk’s s takeover of Twitter raises questions of policy: is it right for the world’s richest man to own such an important forum for public debate? It raises issues of law: is his decision to get rid of so many workers within days of completing the acquisition above board? And it raises questions of strategy: can Twitter make money by moving from a business model based on advertising to one based on subscription? But it is also an extremely public test of a particular style of management. In the way he thinks about work, decisionmaking and the role of the CEO, Mr Musk is swimming against the tide.
埃隆·马斯克接管推特，这引起了人们对政策的质疑：让世界上最有钱的人掌管一个这么重要的公共社交论坛是否正确？也引发了一些法律问题：在收购完成后的短短几天就解雇了这么多员工是否合法？战略问题：推特的商业模式从基于广告营销转变成订阅能够赢利吗？不过这是对一种特别管理方式进行的一场极为公开的测试。在对工作的理解、决策和CEO角色上，马斯克都在逆势而为。
Above board
[əˌbʌv ˈbɔːrd]
adj./adv. 合法而坦诚(的); 开诚布公(的); 公开(的)
His conduct has been entirely above board.
他的行为一切都是公开的。
Don't worry; the deal was completely above board.
别担心，交易是完全合法的。
His attitude to employees is an obvious example of his countercultural approach. For a futurist, Mr Musk is a very oldfashioned boss. He doesn’t like remote work. Earlier this year he sent an email to employees at Tesla demanding that they come to the office for at least 40 hours a week. Anyone who thought this was antiquated could “pretend to work somewhere else”, he tweeted.
很显然，他对员工的态度是他反文化方式的一种体现。对于一个未来主义者来说，马斯克是一个非常传统的老板。他不喜欢远程办公。今年初，他向特斯拉的员工发送了一封邮件，要求他们每周至少到办公室办公40小时。他还发推称：任何人认为这种做法太过时就可以“假装在其他地方工作”。
antiquate
v. 废弃，使变旧（过时，复古）
adj. 过时的；旧式的;
Whatever the legality of his decision to fire so many Twitter workers, his methods are brutal: people locked out of corporate IT accounts, careers ended with an impersonal email, half the workforce gone at a stroke. It is as if Thanos had decided to try his hand at business. For those who remain, hard graft is the expectation; insiders say that one of Mr Musk’s first acts at the firm was to cancel monthly firmwide “days of rest”. The template for the modern manager tends to be a lowego, compassionate boss who gives people autonomy. Someone didn’t get the memo.
不管他辞退这么多推特员工的决定是否违法，他的手段都是残忍的：员工的公司IT账户被关闭，以一封非正式的邮件终结职业生涯，员工一下被裁了一半。就像灭霸想在商业领域试试手似的。那些留下来的人也能预感前途艰辛，公司内部人士透露，马斯克在公司的第一个举措就是取消了每月的全公司“休息日”。现代管理者的模式趋向于一个低自我，富有同情心，给员工自主权的老板，但有些人没能拿到这个“备忘录”。
at a stroke
[æt ə stroʊk]
一下子;一举
This could solve all my problems at a stroke.
这一下子解决了我所有的问题。
They threatened to cancel the whole project at a stroke.
他们威胁要一下子砍掉整个项目。
Template
[ˈtemplət]
n. 样板; 模板; 型板; 模框; 标准
Trace around your template and transfer the design onto a sheet of card.
沿着你的样板边画一圈，把图案描在一张硬纸板上。
His critics have to accept that the mywayorthehighway approach has worked before. At his other firms, like Tesla and SpaceX, Mr Musk may not have offered empathy but he has provided a planetsized sense of purpose, from popularising electric vehicles to colonizing Mars. Whether this can work for him at Twitter is less clear. His vision for the product as a “digital town square” where free speech flourishes is a typically grand one. This time, however, he is not taking on lumbering incumbents, but fixing an existing business where judgment and politics matter as much as engineering.
批判他的人，不得不承认“要么听我的，要么滚蛋”的做法以前也奏效过。在他的其他公司，如特斯拉和SpaceX，马斯克可能没有体恤员工，但他向员工提供了一个星球大小的使命感，从普及电动车到殖民火星。这在推特是否能行得通尚不清楚。他对产品作为一个言论百花齐放的“数字城市广场”的愿景，就是一个宏大的目标。然而，这一次，他不是在和反映迟钝的在职官员较量，而是在修复一个现存的业务，在这里判断和策略同工程同样重要。
Lumbering
adj. 缓慢吃力的; 步态笨拙的;
v. 缓慢吃力地移动; 笨拙地行进; 迫使担负(职责等);
n. 伐木业;
lumber的现在分词;
incumbents
[ɪnˈkʌmbənts]
n.在职者;现任者
The way that Mr Musk takes decisions also cuts across consensus. Comparatively little research has been done on how CEOs make their choices, but a Harvard Business School working paper published in 2020 had a bash by asking 262 of the school’s own alumni how they went about making strategy.
马斯克做出决策的方式也有违共识。相比之下，虽然很少有人研究CEO是如何决策的，但是哈弗商学院2020年发布的研究报告做了一番尝试，调查了本校262名校友他们是如何做出战略决策的。
Have a bash
[hæv ə bæʃ]
试一试;
I'm not sure I'll be any good but I'll have a bash.
我不敢保证我能有什么用，但我会试试。
The authors of the paper did discover a wide range of approaches, with some managers going on gut instinct and others using very formalised processes. But the researchers found that bosses who use more structured processes tend to lead bigger and fastergrowing firms (which way causality runs is not clear). They also tend to make decisions more slowly. Mr Musk and his acolytes are in a different camp: fast, informal and aggressive. Reports are already surfacing of fired Twitter workers being asked to come back.
这篇报告的作者确实发现了很多方式，一些管理者根据直觉，一些使用非常形式化的程序。但是研究员发现使用更加结构化程序的老板带领的公司通常更大，成长更快（因果原因尚不清楚）。他们做决策也更慢。马斯克和他的助手们在另一个不同的阵营：快速，不正式，激进。已经有报道称，被辞退的推特员工被要求回去上班。
acolytes
[ˈækəˌlaɪts]
n. 侍从; 随员; 助手; 襄礼员;
He is unorthodox in another way, too. Peter Drucker, a doyen among management thinkers, described the CEO as being the person in the organisation who bridges the outside world and the inner workings of the company. No one else in the firm is in a position to combine these perspectives, Mr Drucker wrote.
他在另一个方面也不是正统派。彼得·德鲁克是管理思想家元老，他对CEO的描述是，组织中连接外部世界与内部工作运作的人。他写道，公司中没有其他岗位能够将这些方面整合起来。
Unorthodox
[ʌnˈɔːrθədɑːks]
adj. 非正统的; 非传统的; 不正规的
彼得·德鲁克（Peter F.Drucker，1909.11.19~2005.11.11），现代管理学之父，其著作影响了数代追求创新以及最佳管理实践的学者和企业家们，各类商业管理课程也都深受彼得·德鲁克思想的影响。
彼得·德鲁克1909年生于奥地利首都维也纳，祖籍为荷兰，后移居美国。德鲁克从小生长在富裕的文化环境之中，其1979年所著的自传体小说《旁观者》对其成长历程作了详细而生动的描述。
doyen
[ˈdɔɪən]
n. (某团体或职业中的)老前辈，资格最老者，元老;
Mr Musk is not so much bridging this gap as making the distinction between the inside and outside of the company irrelevant. His personal brand and wealth is inextricably linked with the other firms he runs. At Twitter he is going even further, tossing out product ideas on his own Twitter feed, polling the audience for their views and offering realtime commentary on how things are going. And Twitter itself is a platform on which everyone—users, exemployees, the people who founded the firm, policymakers and pundits—weighs in publicly to say how things are going. There is not much of an inside to talk of.
马斯克并不是一个能够消除这种隔阂的人，他把公司内外的区别变得无关紧要。他的个人声誉和财富同他手下的其他公司密不可分。在推特，他走得更远，他在自己的推特账号上发布新产品的想法，调查群众观点，并就事态发展提供实时评论。推特自身就是一个集用户、前员工、公司创始人、决策者和专家的平台，所有人都可以公开讨论事情发展，没有什么内部消息可言。
inextricably
[ˌɪnɪkˈstrɪkəbli]
adv. 不可分开地; 密不可分地
pundit
[ˈpʌndɪt]
n. 行家; 权威; 专家
You might object that Mr Musk is a oneoff, and so is this deal. When he first made his offer to buy Twitter, he explicitly said that it was not because of an economic rationale. He later tried to wriggle out of the transaction entirely. The story of a billionaire owner of a socialmedia platform has little in common with the challenges that preoccupy the salaried executives of most public firms. Maybe so, but if Mr Musk makes another success of his latest venture by being brutal to his workforce, skipping the PowerPoint sessions and managing through memes, the MBA will still need a bit of an update.
你可能反对，马斯克是个特例，这就是他的一场交易而已。当他第一次提出收购推特的时候，他明确说明这不是因为经济原因。后来，他试图完全退出这场交易。一个社交平台公司亿万富翁老板的故事和大部分上市公司领着薪水的高管忧心忡忡的挑战很少有相似之处。或许，如果马斯克残酷对待员工，跳过PPT会议，用表情包管理公司也能成功的话，MBA课程都需要更新了。
rationale
[ˌræʃəˈnæl]
n. 根本原因; 基本原理;
preoccupy
[priˈɑːkjupaɪ]
vt. 使日夜思考; 使忧心忡忡
每日持续更新英语学习笔记，关注一下共同成长进步！ |
|
发表于 2023-1-16 08:29:35
