“最佳实践”诅咒

If I have learnt one thing in business journalism, it is that flops and failures are rarely available for interview, while successes flock to the limelight.

如果说我从商业记者这一行学到了一样东西，那就是受挫与失败的商界领袖很少愿意接受采访，而成功的老总往往主动要求在聚光灯下亮相。

By the same token, business leaders love biographies, where in the lives of great figures they can trace the similarities to their own careers. Consultants and academics research leading companies while corporate laggards shrink from study.

同理，商界领袖们爱看人物传记，在那些伟大人物的生平中，他们能够追寻那些与自身职业生涯相似的地方。咨询师和学者们研究领先企业，而落后的企业不愿成为研究对象。

So the curse of “best practice” spreads. Chief executives seek simple, repeatable patterns in success stories. Here is the problem, though: often those patterns are neither simple nor repeatable. Worse still, they may propagate Bad behaviour and unproductive methods.

于是“最佳实践”诅咒传播开来。首席执行官们从成功故事中寻找简单、可复制的规律。但有个问题：这些规律往往既不简单又不可复制。更糟的是，它们可能助长糟糕行为和不具成效的方法。

It would be senseless for every generation of leaders to have to start from scratch, ignoring proven ways to be more productive and profitable. But the follow-the-leader approach can backfire.

如果每一代领导者都要从一张白纸开始，无视那些更具成效、也更有利可图的做法，那未免很愚蠢。但对成功的先行者亦步亦趋也可能事与愿违。

Freek Vermeulen of London Business School points out that perception bias, imperfect copying of methods, herd-like benchmarking against top-ranked rivals and an obsession with short-term results can sucker companies into bad habits.

伦敦商学院(London Business School)的弗里克?韦穆伦(Freek Vermeulen)指出，感知偏差、对方法的不完善复制、对排名靠前的竞争对手进行羊群式的基准比对，以及痴迷于短期结果，都可能令企业沾染上陋习。

Like a virus, rather than killing their host quickly, bad practices linger long enough to be transmitted to others.

陋习就像病毒，它们不会迅速杀死它们的宿主，而是会持续很久，以便被传染到其他人。

A bias towards perceived success is inevitable, Prof Vermeulen says. He and Xu Li, now at ESMT in Berlin, showed people a decade’s worth of performance data for 1,000 companies, each of which followed one of three strategies. After a while they noticed that people stopped poring over complex information on each company and fell back on the performance ranking. Using the rank of a few successful companies as a rule of thumb, most wrongly decided that their strategy was best, when most companies following that path underperformed.

韦穆伦称，人们对成功的认识不可避免地会存在偏见。他与柏林欧洲管理技术学院(ESMT Berlin)的Xu Li，向人们展示了1000家企业10年来的业绩数据，每家企业都遵循三种战略之一。不久，他们发现人们不再注意每家公司的复杂信息，而是把目光重新投向业绩排名。多数人把少数几家排名靠前的成功企业当作正确战略的化身，错误地认定它们的战略就是最好的，而实际上遵循这条路线的多数企业表现不佳。

“It’s human [nature], when people have information overload and there’s a lot of companies to look at,” Prof Vermeulen told me. “[But] I don’t think it’s necessarily inevitable that we can’t do something about those biases.”

“这是人的本性，当人们掌握的信息过多，又有大量公司要研究，”韦穆伦告诉我。“但我并不认为我们对这些偏见就真的无能为力。”

Managers sometimes stick with what was once deemed best practice simply because they never question why such methods still apply. In his book, Breaking Bad Habits, Prof Vermeulen cites Britain’s broadsheet newspapers, whose format is a relic of a long-repealed tax on the number of pages printed.

有时，管理者之所以坚持以往公认的最佳实践，只是因为他们从不质疑这些方法为何仍然适用。在其新书《破除陋习》(Breaking Bad Habits)中，韦穆伦提到了英国的大报，历史上英国曾针对报纸的页数征税，后来这个税种被废止，但这种报纸规格保留了下来。

One way to lift the curse of best practice is to be aware of how — and where — a method is being used and whether its success is specific to one sector, company or country.

破解最佳实践诅咒的一个方法，就是弄清一种方法如何——以及在哪里——被应用，以及它的成功是否局限于某一行业、企业或是国家。

Prof Vermeulen points out, for example, that US companies stuttered when they tried to introduce Total Quality Management, the meticulous Japanese method for process and product improvement, in the 1980s and 1990s. US imitators applied it in idiosyncratic ways. They simplified the system, took shortcuts and added features such as performance measurement, although W Edwards Deming, one of TQM’s architects, believed this “builds fear, demolishes teamwork, [and] nourishes rivalry and politics”.

韦穆伦指出，当年美国公司在试图引入全面质量管理(Total Quality Management)时就不顺利，这是20世纪80及90年代一种旨在改进流程与产品的日式精细管理方法。美国的效仿者采用全面质量管理的方式很独特。他们简化了这一体系，大走捷径，还添加了绩效评定等花样，尽管全面质量管理的设计者之一威廉?爱德华兹?德明(W. Edwards Deming)认为这样做会“营造恐惧心理、破坏团队协作、并滋生较劲行为和勾心斗角”。

Similarly, when Michelin, the tyremaker, tried to introduce lean production methods — as pioneered by Toyota — in the 1990s, it succeeded in improving productivity at the expense of agility and at a cost to its carefully nurtured humane corporate culture.

同样，上世纪90年代，轮胎制造商米其林(Michelin)在尝试引进了由丰田(Toyota)首创的精益制造方法后，成功地提高了生产率，但却牺牲了灵活性以及该公司精心培育的人性化的企业文化。

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way, has laid out broad principles for “lean” methods to be used by companies launching products, but he agrees that “there’s always going to be a tension between wanting to seek out universal laws [and] recognising that context matters a great deal.”

《精益创业》(The Lean Startup)及《创业之路》（The Startup Way）的作者埃里克?里斯(Eric Ries，见文首照片)，阐述了推出产品的公司所用的“精益”方法的笼统原则，但他也同意“在寻求普遍规律与认识到具体情况很重要之间总是存在矛盾”。

Another way to avoid bad habits is to put working methods to the test. Start small and revisit practices regularly to assess consequences. In other words, apply a version of the “build-measure-learn” method taught by Ries.

另一个避免陋习的办法是对工作方法进行检验。以小规模起步，定期审议相关实践以评估后果。换句话说，就是采用里斯所倡导的“打造——衡量——学习”方法的某个版本。

Michelin, seeking a way to make itself more agile and responsive to customers five years ago, tried a new management approach first with selected teams, giving more responsibility to frontline workers. It extended the successful experiment to production lines, then pilot factories, before this year rolling it out to the group.

五年前，米其林开始设法变得更灵巧，更快地响应客户需求，该公司先与选定的团队尝试一种新的管理方法，让第一线员工承担更多责任。随后，米其林将成功的实验推广到生产线，接着是试点工厂，最后在今年在整个集团实施。

Of course, the good practices of today, such as Michelin’s initiative or Ries’s lean start-up methods, adopted by companies such as General Electric, may become the bad habits of tomorrow.

当然，今天的最佳实践也许会成为明日的陋习。米其林的举措或里斯的精益创业法都是如此，后者已被通用电气(General Electric)等企业采用。

The key is not to be lulled by short-term success into pursuing practices that jeopardise long-term survival.

关键是不要被短期成功蒙蔽，去追逐那些危及长期生存的实践。

Consider the lemming. Bounding cliffwards in the slipstream of its furry comrades, it must feel as though running with the pack is best practice. It is only just before impact that the hapless creature realises it should have veered away from the dangerously popular path that leads to the precipice.

想想旅鼠。追随着它们毛茸茸的同伴一起跳下悬崖，它们一定认为随大流就是最佳实践。只有在快要落地时，这些可怜的生物才会意识到，自己本应远离危险地扑向悬崖的群体。