Business

商业版块

Bartleby: The grip of vice

巴托比：把握罪恶

Nobody’s perfect. Managers should not forget that

管理者应牢记：人无完人

The arc of current management thinking bends towards virtue.

如今的管理思维往往与美德挂钩。

Co-operation is what makes teams purr.

想让团队安稳工作，就要合作。

Low-ego empathy is the hallmark of a thoroughly modern boss.

真正现代化的老板要有低自我同理心。

Purpose matters to employees as much as pay; society looms as large as shareholders.

员工要认为，目标和薪酬一样重要；同事和股东一样重要。

But appealing to people’s better nature, and ignoring their vices, is an incomplete approach.

但是，激发人们的善良本性，而忽视他们的罪恶这种方法，并不完善。

Nor is being good necessarily great for your own career.

做好人也不一定对你的职业生涯有好处。

Take a look at the seven capital virtues and the seven deadly sins laid out in Christian tradition.

看看基督教传统中列出的七大美德和七宗罪。

The virtues are chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience and humility; the vices are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath and pride.

七大美德是贞洁、节制、慷慨、勤勉、宽容、耐心和谦虚；七宗罪是色欲、暴食、贪婪、懒惰、嫉妒、暴怒和傲慢。

In aggregate the first set of qualities is the one for managers to emulate.

总的来说，七大美德是管理者要努力具备的。

Neither chaste charity nor lustful gluttony have much to recommend them as a management ethos; but only one is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

无论是慷慨至极还是贪婪无度，都不是太可取的管理理念；但只有一种一定会遭到反对。

Diligence clearly beats sloth.

勤勉显然会胜过懒惰。

Greed is out of fashion.

贪婪已经过时了。

Aiyesha Dey of Harvard Business School and her co-authors have found that excessive materialism on the part of a chief executive can be a warning sign of fraudulent activity and out-of-control risk-taking.

哈佛商学院的艾耶莎·戴伊和她的合著者发现，如果首席执行官表现出过度物质主义，就要警惕可能会发生欺诈以及风险承担失控事件了。

Pride is also increasingly seen as problematic: in a paper from 2018 academics identified narcissistic bosses by the size of their signatures and found a correlation with poor financial outcomes at the firms they ran.

人们也愈发认为傲慢会引发问题：在2018年的一篇论文中，学者们根据签名大小辨认出了自恋的老板，并发现他们的公司财务状况不佳与自恋有关。

Yet saintliness is rare and sinfulness can be underrated.

但是，没有几个人能做到至善，而罪恶的力量可能会被低估。

Take envy, for example.

以嫉妒为例。

By design organisations rely on competition as well as co-operation.

在特定情况下，组织对竞争的依赖性与合作一样强。

A kind person might well be content to applaud other people for their success.

善良的人很可能会满足于为他人的成功鼓掌喝彩。

An envious one will see someone to catch up with.

而嫉妒的人看到的，是自己要追赶的目标。

Psychologists distinguish between malign and benign versions of envy.

心理学家将嫉妒分为恶性嫉妒和良性嫉妒。

In one, people try to close gaps in status by bringing others down.

恶性嫉妒的人会试图通过拉低他人来缩小地位差距。

In the other, they are motivated to improve their own performance.

而良性嫉妒的人会以此为动力提升自己。

The recent paper by Danielle Tussing of the University at Buffalo and colleagues discovered a third type of behaviour: people who skipped work or even quit their jobs in order to avoid feelings of envy.

纽约州立大学布法罗分校的丹妮尔·图辛和同事所著的一篇新论文发现了第三种做法：为了避免嫉妒他人而选择旷工甚至辞职。

Understanding such emotions is a step towards harnessing them.

要想控制这些情绪，就要理解它们。

Pride can also lead to greater effort (as well as to gigantic signatures).

傲慢也会让人付出更多努力(还会让签名变大)。

In an elegant paper looking into the performance of German fighter pilots in the second world war, Philipp Ager of the University of Mannheim and other researchers found that personal rivalry fuelled risk-taking behaviour.

曼海姆大学的菲利普·阿格尔和其他研究人员在一篇研究二战期间德国战斗机飞行员表现的出色论文中发现，个人竞争助长了冒险行为。

When pilots received public recognition for their exploits in a daily bulletin to the German armed forces, peers with whom they had flown in the past redoubled their own efforts.

当飞行员的功绩在德国武装部队的每日公报中得到公众认可时，曾与他们一起飞行的同行们会加倍努力。

Something propelled them to fly more missions, even though that meant a greater chance of being killed, and it wasn’t humility.

某种因素会促使他们执行更多的任务，尽管这样会导致他们的死亡几率变大，而这种因素绝不是谦虚。

Patience may be a virtue, but it is not always the best quality in a leader.

耐心可能是一种美德，但它并不总是领导的最佳品质。

Research on the impact of managers’ moods on performance is pretty thin: one deeply unpersuasive paper from 2017 used facial-recognition software to analyse CEOs’ TV appearances and concluded that expressions of anger and fear were associated with improved profitability in the following quarter.

关于管理者的情绪对业绩影响的研究非常站不住脚：2017年的一篇非常缺乏说服力的论文使用面部识别软件分析了首席执行官在电视上的表现，得出的结论是，愤怒和恐惧与下个季度盈利能力的提高有关。

Yet forbearance can plainly go too far.

然而，忍耐显然可能会过火。

Anyone who has worked in an office knows that the boss’s wrath can sometimes be the only thing that gets things moving.

任何在办公室工作过的人都知道，老板的暴怒有时可能是推动工作取得进展的唯一方法。

Greed is not something to admit to in polite society but acquisitiveness still motivates an awful lot of people.

在上流社会，贪婪是不能承认的，但贪婪仍然是很多人的动力。

In their research into CEO behaviour Ms Dey and her co-authors defined excessive materialism as owning a private home worth twice as much as the median house in the area; owning a car worth more than $75,000; or owning a boat that was longer than 25 feet.

在对首席执行官行为的研究中，戴伊和她的合著者将过度物质主义定义为：拥有一套价值是当地房价中值两倍的私人住宅；一辆价值超7.5万美元的汽车；或是一艘超过25英尺长的船。

Of her sample of CEOs, fully 58% ticked one or more of these boxes; only 42% counted as frugal.

在她的首席执行官样本中，足足有58%的人符合其中一个或多个条件；只有42%的人算作节俭。

Gluttony may not fuel ambition but it could well be a side-effect of the hierarchies that characterise companies.

暴食可能不会助长雄心，但它很可能是企业特有等级制度的副作用。

Research experiments in which strangers are assigned a high-status role and a low-status role and put in a room together have found that those placed in positions of authority help themselves to more biscuits than the others.

一些研究实验会给陌生人分配地位高和地位低的角色，并把他们放在一个房间里，这些实验发现，那些分到权威地位的人会自行比其他人吃更多饼干。

Even people who mean well may end up behaving badly if they acquire power.

即使是心怀善意的人，一旦获得权力，最终也可能行为不端。

If management is about getting the best out of people, it helps to understand base behaviours as well as noble ones.

如果管理是为了让人们发挥出最大的作用，那它就不仅有助于理解高尚的行为，也有助于理解低级的行为。

Employees are humans and humans are complex.

员工也是人，而人都是复杂的。

They seek to improve the world and would quite like their own swimming pool.

他们既追求改善世界，但也很喜欢自己的游泳池，无论好坏。

They want to mentor the disadvantaged and see their rivals fail miserably.

他们既想要指导弱势群体，却也会眼睁睁看着对手惨败。

They grab the biscuits.

他们会抢夺饼干。

来源：经济学人