領導爲何難以驅散企業幽靈

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.

每個組織都有幽靈。並不是那種尖叫着的鬼，而是在變革本應席捲整個公司以後依然陰魂不散的那種行爲。過往成功的幽靈會困擾董事會，嚇倒投資者，而追求新目標的員工必須艱難地趟過詭異的稠密粘液才能抵達目的地。

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.

幽靈架構和習慣在老牌公司尤爲頑固。不管由誰來接手意大利裕信銀行(UniCredit)，都會找到一些“骷髏”：這家剛剛開始物色一位新首席執行官的意大利銀行集團歷史悠久，可以追溯到近6個世紀以前，因此，該集團的一些工作方式很可能也那麼源遠流長。但是較新的企業也需要“捉鬼特攻隊”。不斷對其層級結構和失靈模式修修補補的Twitter就是一個很好的例子，最初讓這家社交媒體煥發活力的魂靈依然徘徊不去。在初創企業，“驅鬼師”應該隨時待命，一些在發展的第一階段顯得新鮮的舉動，到第二、三輪融資的時候往往會帶有魯莽的感覺。

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.

有兩個大難題會阻礙“搜鬼總長”。身爲組織的領袖，他們往往也是正在拖累企業的那種行爲的捍衛者。”我們在要求他們改變當初讓他們走到今天這個位置的事情，“牛津大學(University of Oxford)賽德商學院(Saïd Business School)的喬納森•特雷弗(Jonathan Trevor)說。

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.

第二個關聯問題是，過時的習慣往往也就是讓舊的組織形成凝聚力的習慣。這些非正式的框架有時被稱爲“休戰協定”——相互爭鬥的派別建立在深植的慣例之上的不穩定同盟。終結休戰協定，你就終結了脆弱的和平。

“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.”

“習慣變得制度化，形成一套定義我們，賦予我們身份認同的慣例、程序和規則，”安東尼•薩爾斯爵士(Sir Anthony Salz)在其2013年撰寫的有關巴克萊(Barclays)商業實踐是如何變壞的的報告中表示，“每個人都會捍衛自己的身份。”

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.

你不用看得很遠就能察覺幽靈的存在。在報業，儘管我們的標題讚美數字化，但我們依然固守舊的術語（欄目、版面），遵從舊的稱號，對舊的印刷日表現出一種近乎宗教的忠誠。作爲一個專欄作家，我並沒有什麼真正的理由應該在第一版付印截止時間臨近的時候坐在我的桌子旁，但我幾乎總是這樣做。

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.

緊迫的技術變革讓瞭解如何終結企業“鬧鬼”變得更爲緊急。花旗集團(Citigroup)發生在互聯網時代之前的一幕告訴了我們如何去做。當時擔任這家銀行集團首席執行官的約翰•裏德(John Reed)尋求應對讓該行瀕臨崩潰的商業房地產危機，他做出了幾番嘗試才實現了拯救花旗的變革。

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.

問題根深蒂固，只靠規勸並不起作用。他必須打破架構，解僱3名負責不在他控制之下的小天地的高管，並且打破根深蒂固的壞習慣。

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，爲了削減成本，他取消了獎金，但他同時也禁止員工在傳真的時候使用封面頁（記住，這可是上世紀90年代早期），要求員工打普通出租車而不是加長型豪車，並且開始收取食堂就餐費用。信號很明確。就如他在一篇私人備忘錄中所說的：“這樣的浪費有很大一部分是習慣。一個“我們如何發展到掌管這個地方”的風格問題……我們需要有勇氣改變我們的方式，並擁抱新的方式。”

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.

裏德向多倫多羅特曼管理學院(Rotman School of Management)的薩拉•卡普蘭(Sarah Kaplan)公開了自己的私人通信，用於近期的一項研究。卡普蘭教授表示，另一種消滅殭屍習慣的重要方式是調整內部激勵措施。

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.

向人們支付的金額傳達了一個信號。薩爾斯的報告發現，在巴克萊，“薪酬對少數幾名投資銀行家形成一種觀念起到了很大作用，那就是他們似乎不受一般規則的影響”。然而，更重要的是改變那些影響行爲的刺激因素。卡普蘭教授寫道，在花旗，首席執行官、直線經理和他們的團隊舉行月度會議的新制度，創建了增加銷售和削減成本的“強大激勵”。

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.

就如牛津大學的特雷弗教授所寫的，企業的戰略、目的和架構是否協調一致，往往會產生好機構或是糟糕機構的巨大差別。清除企業的幽靈至關重要，但這還不夠。領導者還需要制定新的休戰協議，以免過去行爲的死亡之手扼殺新的工作方式。