Corporate jets: emblem of greed or a boon to business?

公司專機(jī)：是貪婪的象征還是商業(yè)的福利?

The original Rorschach test involves showing a series of ten inkblots to someone, and asking them what images they see. Although the test’s psychological validity is debatable, no one can dispute its wild success as a metaphor: a single object can mean very different things to different people. In business a prime example of Rorschachiness is the corporate jet. Depending on your perspective, it can signal untrammelled greed, rational decision-making, post-pandemic work habits or the fight against climate change.

【1】untrammelled 不受限制的；自由自在的

最初的羅夏測(cè)試包括向某人展示一系列的10個(gè)墨跡，并詢問他們看到了什么圖像。盡管這項(xiàng)測(cè)試的有效性存在爭(zhēng)議，但沒有人能否認(rèn)它作為一個(gè)隱喻的巨大成功：一個(gè)單一的物體對(duì)不同的人來說可能意味著完全不同的東西。在商業(yè)中，公務(wù)機(jī)就是羅夏測(cè)試的一個(gè)典型例子。根據(jù)你的觀點(diǎn)，它可能標(biāo)志著不受約束的貪婪、理性的決策、疫情后的工作習(xí)慣或?qū)箽夂蜃兓?/p>

Those who see excess regard the company jet as the worst in a pile of gold-plated perks for overpaid executives. While minions reacquaint themselves with airport queues and the curse of six hours next to the chatty stranger in 24A, bosses skip the lines and travel in luxury. It is difficult to remain grounded in these circumstances. ey, a global accounting firm, reportedly calls its plane “ey One”; on touchdown, auditors doubtless fantasise about radioing that “the eygle has landed”. If jets were used only for work trips, that would be bad enough. But more than half of the ceos of a 500-strong group of companies monitored by Equilar, an analytics outfit, made use of their firm’s jet for personal purposes in 2020.

那些認(rèn)為(專機(jī))是無節(jié)制的人認(rèn)為，公司的專機(jī)是為薪酬過高的高管提供的一堆鍍金福利中最糟糕的一個(gè)。當(dāng)下屬們?cè)俅卧跈C(jī)場(chǎng)排隊(duì)等候，在24A(座位)上忍受與健談的陌生人在一起的6個(gè)小時(shí)，而老板們則不需要排隊(duì)，享受奢華的旅行。在這種情況下很難保持腳踏實(shí)地。據(jù)報(bào)道，全球會(huì)計(jì)公司安永將其飛機(jī)命名為“ey One”；著陸時(shí)，審計(jì)師無疑會(huì)幻想通過無線電說“EY飛機(jī)著陸了”。如果飛機(jī)只用于工作旅行，這已經(jīng)夠糟了。但在分析機(jī)構(gòu)Equilar監(jiān)測(cè)的500強(qiáng)企業(yè)中，超過半數(shù)的首席執(zhí)行官在2020年將公司的專機(jī)用于個(gè)人目的。

This view equates the company plane with entitlement and waste. The bosses of America’s big carmakers were excoriated for using their jets to travel to Washington, dc, to ask for a bail-out during the financial crisis in 2008. Disquiet about his use of Credit Suisse’s private jet was one reason why António Horta-Osório resigned as chairman of the Swiss bank earlier in the year. When Jeff Immelt, a former chief executive of ge, travelled on the firm’s private plane, a second one would sometimes follow him around the world as backup. Mr Immelt’s successor, John Flannery, made a point of putting ge’s jets up for sale when he took over in 2017. A research study from 2012 found that cost-conscious private-equity firms reduced corporate-jet fleets at firms they had acquired.

這種觀點(diǎn)把公司的專機(jī)等同于權(quán)利和浪費(fèi)。2008年金融危機(jī)期間，美國(guó)大型汽車制造商的老板們因?yàn)槌俗w機(jī)前往華盛頓特區(qū)尋求救助而受到嚴(yán)厲批評(píng)。今年早些時(shí)候，安東尼奧·奧爾塔-奧索里奧辭去瑞信董事長(zhǎng)職務(wù)，原因之一是對(duì)他使用瑞信專機(jī)感到擔(dān)憂。當(dāng)通用電氣前首席執(zhí)行官杰夫?伊梅爾特乘坐公司的私人飛機(jī)旅行時(shí)，另一架飛機(jī)有時(shí)會(huì)作為備用機(jī)跟著他周游世界。伊梅爾特的繼任者約翰?弗蘭納里在2017年接手通用電氣時(shí)，曾強(qiáng)調(diào)要出售通用飛機(jī)。2012年的一項(xiàng)研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，注重成本的私募股權(quán)公司減少了收購(gòu)公司的專機(jī)數(shù)量。

If the corporate-jet inkblot spells excess to some, to others it represents hard-headed pragmatism. The personal safety of top executives is one consideration: private aircraft are a big part of Meta’s outsized spending ($27m in 2021) on the security of Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive. So is privacy: it is really hard to finalise a secret takeover when there is a stranger spilling pretzels on you. (Both of these arguments are slightly weakened by the scraping of air-traffic data that lets people track specific aircraft; a paper published last year described a machine-learning algorithm designed to predict where a corporate jet is going to land while it is still in the air.)

如果說專機(jī)的墨跡對(duì)一些人來說意味著無節(jié)制，那么對(duì)另一些人來說，它代表著務(wù)實(shí)的實(shí)用主義。高管的人身安全是一個(gè)考慮因素：私人飛機(jī)是Meta在首席執(zhí)行官馬克?扎克伯格人身安全上的巨額支出(2021年為2700萬美元)的很大一部分。隱私也是一個(gè)考慮因素：當(dāng)一個(gè)陌生人把椒鹽卷餅灑在你身上時(shí)，你真的很難敲定一樁秘密收購(gòu)案。(這兩個(gè)觀點(diǎn)都因人們可以跟蹤特定飛機(jī)的空中交通數(shù)據(jù)而略有減弱；去年發(fā)表的一篇論文描述了一種機(jī)器學(xué)習(xí)算法，該算法設(shè)計(jì)用于預(yù)測(cè)在空中的公司專機(jī)將要降落的位置。)

Above all, chief executives are busy people. If boards would rather they spent more time working and less time watching someone repack their suitcase at the security gates, that’s their call. And because private jets can land on more airfields than commercial airliners can, they are often the only way for executives to travel directly from headquarters to factories and subsidiaries in less accessible locations. A paper published in 2018 by academics at Boston College and Drexel University found that business-related flights of this kind improved firms’ operational performance.

最重要的是，首席執(zhí)行官們都是大忙人。如果董事會(huì)希望他們花更多的時(shí)間工作，而不是看著有人在安檢口重新打包行李，私人飛機(jī)就派上用場(chǎng)了。因?yàn)樗饺孙w機(jī)可以降落在比商用飛機(jī)更多的機(jī)場(chǎng)上，它們往往是高管們從總部直接前往交通不便地區(qū)的工廠和子公司的唯一途徑。波士頓學(xué)院和德雷克塞爾大學(xué)學(xué)者2018年發(fā)表的一篇論文發(fā)現(xiàn)，這類與商業(yè)相關(guān)的航班改善了公司的運(yùn)營(yíng)業(yè)績(jī)。

Some look at corporate jets and primarily see an enemy in the fight against climate change. Because of the small number of passengers on board, private planes emit much more carbon per passenger mile than commercial flights do. Elon Musk, a clean-tech tycoon who is fast becoming a Rorschach test in his own right, was pilloried recently when his jet took a nine-minute flight from San Jose to San Francisco. Mr Musk is also an outspoken critic of remote work, which is another thing that private jets bring to mind. The argument for using them rests heavily on the importance of in-person communication, something that has become a lot more contentious in the post-pandemic workplace.

一些人將商務(wù)機(jī)視為對(duì)抗氣候變化的敵人。由于乘坐私人飛機(jī)的乘客數(shù)量較少，每名乘客每英里的碳排放量遠(yuǎn)高于商業(yè)航班?！扒鍧嵓夹g(shù)”大亨埃隆·馬斯克正憑借自己的能力迅速成為羅夏墨跡測(cè)試的代表。近日，他的飛機(jī)從圣何塞飛往舊金山，總共飛行了9分鐘，這讓他備受抨擊。馬斯克還直言不諱地批評(píng)遠(yuǎn)程工作，這是私人飛機(jī)(墨跡)讓人想起的另一件事。使用它們的理由在很大程度上取決于面對(duì)面交流的重要性，在疫情后的工作場(chǎng)所，面對(duì)面交流變得更具爭(zhēng)議性。

The point of the Rorschach test is that it has no single right answer. Corporate jets look unjustifiable to some and sensible to others. They can improve productivity or be a sign of an out-of-control ceo; the paper from 2018 found that planes made more flights to resorts when a firm’s boss had been in place for longer and when it had dual-class shares. They raise questions of fairness among critics and spell efficiency to defenders. They have become a useful shortcut for testing someone’s gut instincts on management, as well as for beating the queues.

羅夏測(cè)試的關(guān)鍵在于它沒有唯一的正確答案。公司專機(jī)在一些人看來是不合理的，在另一些人看來是明智的。它們可以提高生產(chǎn)力，或者是失控的CEO的標(biāo)志；2018年的一篇論文發(fā)現(xiàn)，當(dāng)一家公司的老板在位時(shí)間更長(zhǎng)，并且公司擁有雙重股權(quán)時(shí)，飛機(jī)會(huì)更多地飛往度假勝地。它們?cè)谂u(píng)者之間引發(fā)了公平性的問題，而在辯護(hù)者看來則意味著效率。它們已經(jīng)成為一種有用的捷徑，既可以測(cè)試某人在管理方面的直覺，也可以用來解決排隊(duì)問題。