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·馬斯克收購Twitter引發(fā)了政策問題: 世界首富擁有一個(gè)如此重要的公開辯論論壇合適嗎? 這引發(fā)了法律問題: 他在完成收購后幾天內(nèi)解雇這么多員工的決定是合法的嗎? 這引發(fā)了戰(zhàn)略問題: Twitter能否靠通過從基于廣告的商業(yè)模式轉(zhuǎn)向基于訂閱的商業(yè)模式來賺錢? 但它也是對(duì)一種特定管理風(fēng)格的極為公開的考驗(yàn)。在思考工作、決策和CEO角色的方式上，馬斯克是在逆流而上。

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)待員工的態(tài)度是他反文化做法的一個(gè)明顯例子。對(duì)于一個(gè)未來主義者來說，馬斯克是一個(gè)非常老式的老板。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)。他在推特上寫道，任何認(rèn)為這種做法過時(shí)的人都可以“假裝在其他地方工作”。

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.

不管他解雇這么多Twitter員工的決定是否合法，但是他的方法都是殘忍的: 人們無法使用公司的IT賬戶，職業(yè)生涯以一封非個(gè)人的電子郵件結(jié)束，一半的員工一下子就走了。這就好像滅霸決定在生意上試一試。那些留下來的人預(yù)期要付出巨大的努力；內(nèi)部人士表示，馬斯克上任后的第一個(gè)舉措就是取消公司每月的“休息日”?，F(xiàn)代管理者的模板往往是一個(gè)低自尊、富有同情心、給員工自主權(quán)的老板。有人沒收到“備忘錄”。

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)他的人不得不承認(rèn)，“要么聽我的，要么滾蛋”的做法以前也奏效過。在他的其他公司，如特斯拉和SpaceX，馬斯克可能沒有提供同理心，但他提供了一種星球大小的使命感，從普及電動(dòng)汽車到征服火星。這是否適用于推特尚不清楚。他對(duì)該產(chǎn)品的愿景是將其作為言論自由繁榮的“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，他不是在與笨拙的現(xiàn)任在職者較量，而是在修復(fù)一個(gè)現(xiàn)存的業(yè)務(wù)，在這個(gè)業(yè)務(wù)中，判斷和政治與工程同樣重要。

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.

馬斯克的決策方式也有違共識(shí)。相對(duì)而言，關(guān)于CEO們?nèi)绾巫龀鲞x擇的研究很少，但哈佛商學(xué)院2020年發(fā)表的一篇工作論文進(jìn)行了一番嘗試，論文中詢問了262名該校校友，他們是如何制定戰(zhàn)略的。

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.

這篇論文的作者確實(shí)發(fā)現(xiàn)了各種各樣的方法，一些管理者依靠直覺，而另一些則使用非常形式化的過程。但研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)，使用更結(jié)構(gòu)化流程的老板往往領(lǐng)導(dǎo)規(guī)模更大、增長(zhǎng)更快的公司(因果關(guān)系尚不清楚)。他們做決定的速度也更慢。馬斯克和他的助手們屬于另一個(gè)陣營:快速、隨便、態(tài)度強(qiáng)硬。已經(jīng)有報(bào)道稱，被解雇的推特員工被要求復(fù)職。

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.

他在另一方面也不正統(tǒng)。管理思想家中的老前輩彼得?德魯克將CEO描述為組織中連接外部世界和公司內(nèi)部運(yùn)作的人。德魯克寫道，公司里沒有其他人能夠?qū)⑦@些能力結(jié)合起來。

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 real-time 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.

馬斯克與其說是在彌合這一鴻溝，不如說是在讓公司內(nèi)部和外部之間的區(qū)別變得無關(guān)緊要。他的個(gè)人品牌和財(cái)富與他經(jīng)營的其他公司有著千絲萬縷的聯(lián)系。在Twitter，他走得更遠(yuǎn)，在自己的Twitter賬號(hào)上拋出產(chǎn)品創(chuàng)意，調(diào)查觀眾的觀點(diǎn)，并就事態(tài)發(fā)展提供實(shí)時(shí)評(píng)論。Twitter本身是一個(gè)平臺(tái)，每個(gè)人（包括用戶、前雇員、公司的創(chuàng)始人、政策制定者和專家）都可以在上面公開談?wù)撌虑榈陌l(fā)展。里面沒什么可談的。

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.

你可能會(huì)反對(duì)說，馬斯克是特例，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)原因。后來，他試圖完全退出這筆交易。社交媒體平臺(tái)億萬富翁老板的故事，與大多數(shù)上市公司領(lǐng)薪高管所面臨的挑戰(zhàn)幾乎沒有共同之處。也許是這樣，但如果馬斯克通過殘酷對(duì)待員工、跳過PPT會(huì)議、通過表情包管理，使他的最新企業(yè)再次獲得成功，那么MBA課程仍需要些許更新。