Bartleby

巴特爾比

The bird and the boss

推特和老板

A billionaire’s challenge to management thinking

億萬富翁挑戰(zhàn)傳統(tǒng)管理思想

1 ELON MUSK’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, decision-making and the role of the CEO, Mr Musk is swimming against the tide.

埃隆-馬斯克對(duì)Twitter的收購提出了政策問題：世界首富擁有如此重要的公共討論論壇是否正確？它還提出了法律問題：他在完成收購后幾天內(nèi)就解雇了這么多員工是否符合規(guī)定？它還提出了戰(zhàn)略問題：Twitter能否從基于廣告的商業(yè)模式轉(zhuǎn)向基于訂閱來賺錢？但這也是對(duì)一種特殊管理風(fēng)格的公開測(cè)試。馬斯克先生對(duì)工作、決策和首席執(zhí)行官角色的思考方式是逆潮流的。

2 His attitude to employees is an obvious example of his counter-cultural approach. For a futurist, Mr Musk is a very old-fashioned 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.

他對(duì)員工的態(tài)度是他反主流文化的一個(gè)明顯例子。對(duì)于一個(gè)未來主義者來說，馬斯克先生是一個(gè)非常守舊的老板。他不喜歡遠(yuǎn)程工作。今年早些時(shí)候，他給特斯拉的員工發(fā)了一封電子郵件，要求他們每周至少到辦公室工作40小時(shí)。他在推特上說，任何認(rèn)為這很過時(shí)的人都可以 "假裝在其他地方工作"。

3 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 firm-wide “days of rest”. The template for the modern manager tends to be a low-ego, compassionate boss who gives people autonomy. Someone didn’t get the memo.

無論他解雇這么多推特員工的決定是否合法，他的方法都很殘忍：人們被鎖在公司IT賬戶之外，職業(yè)生涯被一封不近人情的電子郵件所終結(jié)，一半的勞動(dòng)力一下子就消失了。這就像滅霸決定在商業(yè)上試試手一樣。對(duì)于那些留下來的人來說，他們被要求努力工作；推特內(nèi)部人士說，馬斯克先生來到公司的第一個(gè)行動(dòng)就是取消了每月一次的全公司 "休息日"?，F(xiàn)代經(jīng)理人的模板往往是一個(gè)有著低自我價(jià)值且富有同情心的老板，愿意給予人們自主權(quán)。然而有人沒有收到這種備忘錄。

4 His critics have to accept that the my-way-or-the-highway approach has worked before. At his other firms, like Tesla and SpaceX, Mr Musk may not have offered empathy but he has provided a planet-sized sense of purpose, from popularising electric vehicles to colonising 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.

批評(píng)他的人必須接受這樣的事實(shí)，即 "要么聽我的，要么走人"的做法在以前就很有效。在他的其他公司，如特斯拉和SpaceX，馬斯克先生可能沒有提供同理心，但他提供了一個(gè)星球大小的重要意義，從普及電動(dòng)汽車到殖民火星。但這是否能在推特上發(fā)揮作用并不清楚。他對(duì)產(chǎn)品的設(shè)想是一個(gè)言論自由 "數(shù)字城市廣場(chǎng)"，這是一個(gè)典型的宏偉愿景。然而，這一次，他不是在挑戰(zhàn)笨重的現(xiàn)有企業(yè)，而是在修復(fù)一個(gè)企業(yè)，在這個(gè)企業(yè)中，看法和政治與項(xiàng)目工程一樣重要。

5 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.

馬斯克先生做決定的方式也符合共識(shí)。關(guān)于CEO如何做出選擇的研究相對(duì)較少，但哈佛商學(xué)院在2020年發(fā)表的一篇論文中，通過詢問該校262名校友，以了解他們?nèi)绾沃贫☉?zhàn)略。

6 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 faster-growing 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.

該論文的作者確實(shí)發(fā)現(xiàn)了各種各樣的方法，一些經(jīng)理人憑直覺行事，而另一些則使用非常正式的程序。但研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)，使用更多結(jié)構(gòu)化程序的老板往往領(lǐng)導(dǎo)著更大和更快增長(zhǎng)的公司（因果關(guān)系尚不明確），他們做決定也更加緩慢。馬斯克先生和他的追隨者屬于另一個(gè)陣營：快速、隨性和積極進(jìn)取。有報(bào)道稱，遭解雇的Twitter員工被要求返崗。

7 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.

他在另一個(gè)方面也是非正統(tǒng)的。管理學(xué)家彼得-德魯克(Peter Drucker)認(rèn)為，首席執(zhí)行官是組織中連接外部世界和公司內(nèi)部運(yùn)作機(jī)制的人。德魯克先生寫道，公司中沒有其他人能夠結(jié)合這些方面。

8 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, ex-employees, 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.

馬斯克先生與其說是在彌合這一差距，不如說是讓公司內(nèi)部和外部的區(qū)別變得不重要。他的個(gè)人品牌和財(cái)富與他經(jīng)營的其他公司有著密不可分的聯(lián)系。在推特，他走得更遠(yuǎn)，在自己的推特上拋出產(chǎn)品創(chuàng)意，調(diào)查觀眾的意見，并對(duì)事情的進(jìn)展進(jìn)行實(shí)時(shí)報(bào)道。推特本身就是一個(gè)平臺(tái)，每個(gè)人--用戶、前雇員、創(chuàng)立公司的人、政策制定者和專家學(xué)者--都會(huì)在這個(gè)平臺(tái)上公開發(fā)表意見，談?wù)撌虑榈倪M(jìn)展。沒有什么內(nèi)部會(huì)議。

9 You might object that Mr Musk is a one-off, 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 social-media 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.

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你可能會(huì)反對(duì)，馬斯克先生是絕無僅有的，這筆交易也是如此。當(dāng)他第一次提出收購Twitter時(shí)，他明確表示，這不是出于經(jīng)濟(jì)上的原因。后來，他試圖完全從這筆交易中掙脫出來。一個(gè)擁有社交媒體平臺(tái)的億萬富翁，與大多數(shù)上市公司的受薪高管所面臨的挑戰(zhàn)沒有什么共同之處。但如果馬斯克先生在粗暴對(duì)待員工、跳過PPT會(huì)議、通過爆紅的網(wǎng)絡(luò)話題進(jìn)行公司管理的情況下，還能使他最新的企業(yè)再次獲得成功，那么MBA仍然需要更新一下。