Business
商业版块
Bartleby: The bird and the boss
巴托比：小蓝鸟与大老板
A billionaire’s challenge to management thinking
亿万富翁的管理思维挑战
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?
埃隆·马斯克接管推特后，人们从多个角度提出了质疑，首先是政策角度：这么重要的公共论坛成为全球首富的所属物，这合适吗？
It raises issues of law: is his decision to get rid of so many workers within days of completing the acquisition above board?
其次是法律角度：他刚完成收购就在短短几天内决定解雇这么多员工，这合法吗？
And it raises questions of strategy: can Twitter make money by moving from a business model based on advertising to one based on subscription?
最后是战略角度：推特从依靠广告盈利改为通过订阅创收，这样还能赚到钱吗？
But it is also an extremely public test of a particular style of management.
但这也是对特定管理风格的一次极其公开的考验。
In the way he thinks about work, decision-making and the role of the CEO, Mr Musk is swimming against the tide.
在工作、决策和首席执行官的职责这些方面，马斯克的思维方式与当下的趋势背道而驰。
His attitude to employees is an obvious example of his counter-cultural approach.
他对待员工的态度就明显体现出了他的反主流文化行事风格。
For a futurist, Mr Musk is a very old-fashioned boss.
马斯克是一名未来主义者，但他当起老板来却非常老派。
He doesn’t like remote work.
他不喜欢远程办公。
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.
今年早些时候，他给特斯拉的员工发了一封电子邮件，要求他们每周至少坐班40个小时。
Anyone who thought this was antiquated could “pretend to work somewhere else”, he tweeted.
他在推特上写道，任何认为坐班已经过时的人都可以“假装在其他地方工作”。
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.
无论他解雇这么多推特员工的决定是否合法，他的方法都很残酷，比如封禁企业IT账户，用一封没有人情味的电子邮件掐断职业生涯，一口气裁掉半数员工等等。
It is as if Thanos had decided to try his hand at business.
这就好像灭霸决定用他的手在商业领域打响指一样。
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”.
至于那些留下来的人，就只剩“努力工作”这一条路可走了；内部人士透露，马斯克接管后一上来就取消了公司每月的“休息日”。
The template for the modern manager tends to be a low-ego, compassionate boss who gives people autonomy.
如今，无私、富有同情心以及给员工自主权是老板的标配。
Someone didn’t get the memo.
某人看来是不知道这事儿。
His critics have to accept that the my-way-or-the-highway approach has worked before.
但批评他的人不得不承认，“顺我者昌，逆我者亡”这种做法以前奏效过。
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.
在他的其他公司，如特斯拉和SpaceX，尽管马斯克可能没有表现出同理心，但他提供了如星球般宏大的使命感，既普及了电动汽车，又开拓了火星。
Whether this can work for him at Twitter is less clear.
至于这招在推特能否奏效就不好说了。
His vision for the product as a “digital town square” where free speech flourishes is a typically grand one.
他希望将推特打造成一个言论高度自由的“数字城市广场”，这想法本身就是个典型的宏大愿景。
This time, however, he is not taking on lumbering incumbents, but fixing an existing business where judgment and politics matter as much as engineering.
然而，这一次，他不是在与笨拙的现任老板较量，而是在修复一家现有的企业，而且在这家企业中，判断与权术的重要程度丝毫不亚于管理。
The way that Mr Musk takes decisions also cuts across consensus.
马斯克做决策的方式也有悖常理。
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.
关于首席执行官如何做决策的研究一直相对较少，但哈佛商学院的研究人员进行了一番尝试，他们在2020年发表的一篇工作论文中，对262名校友制定战略的方式进行了调查。
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.
调查发现，他们的决策方式确实各不相同，一些管理者凭直觉行事，另一些则循规蹈矩。
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).
但研究人员发现，老板采用的流程越有条理，其带领的公司往往规模更大、发展更快(其中的逻辑关系尚不清楚)。
They also tend to make decisions more slowly.
他们做决定的速度也往往更慢。
Mr Musk and his acolytes are in a different camp: fast, informal and aggressive.
马斯克和其追随者的方式则与众不同：快速、不拘小节又十分激进。
Reports are already surfacing of fired Twitter workers being asked to come back.
已经有报道称推特正在召回部分被炒员工了。
He is unorthodox in another way, too.
马斯克在另一方面也没有遵循正统。
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.
管理思维界的元老彼得·德鲁克称，首席执行官的职责是将外部世界与公司内部的运作连接在一起。
No one else in the firm is in a position to combine these perspectives, Mr Drucker wrote.
德鲁克写道，公司里的其他人都无法把这些点结合起来。
Mr Musk is not so much bridging this gap as making the distinction between the inside and outside of the company irrelevant.
至于马斯克，与其说他是在弥合鸿沟，不如说他是在让公司内外之间的区别变得无关紧要。
His personal brand and wealth is inextricably linked with the other firms he runs.
他的个人品牌和财富与他经营的其他公司有着千丝万缕的联系。
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.
而推特更甚，他会在自己的推特推送上抛出产品想法，调查受众的看法，并对事情进展进行实时评论。
And Twitter itself is a platform on which everyone else—users, ex-employees, the people who founded the firm, policymakers and pundits—weighs in publicly to say how things are going.
推特这个平台本身就允许所有人公开发表意见，谈论事情的进展，包括用户、前员工、公司创始人、政策制定者和权威人士。
There is not much of an inside to talk of.
没有太多内部消息可谈。
You might object that Mr Musk is a one-off, and so is this deal.
你可能会反对说，马斯克是前无古人，后无来者，这笔交易也是如此。
When he first made his offer to buy Twitter, he explicitly said that it was not because of an economic rationale.
他第一次提出收购推特时曾明确表示，这么做不是为了赚钱。
He later tried to wriggle out of the transaction entirely.
后来，他试图完全退出这笔交易。
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.
亿万富翁拥有社交媒体平台的故事，与大多数上市公司的领薪高管所面临的挑战几乎没有共同之处。
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.
也许是这样的吧，但如果马斯克通过残酷对待员工、跳过PPT会议并用表情包管理员工，让他的最新事业再次取得成功，那工商管理硕士课程就仍需要进行更新。
来源：经济学人
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