哲人爲王:商業領袖會從研讀經典作品中獲益

IT IS hard to rise to the top in business without doing an outward-bound course. You spend a precious weekend in sweaty activity—kayaking, climbing, abseiling and the like. You endure lectures on testing character and building trust. And then you scarper home as fast as you can. These strange rituals may produce a few war stories to be told over a drink. But in general they do nothing more than enrich the companies that arrange them.

沒有參加過戶外課程很難成爲公司高層。你搭上寶貴的週末時間揮汗如雨——參加劃獨木舟、爬山、繩降之類的活動。你忍受那些考驗意志和增進互信的講座。然後你溜回家，要多快有多快。這些奇怪的儀式可以成爲戰鬥故事作爲喝酒時的談資，但總的來說除了讓安排這些互動的公司更充實一些，它們別無它用。

It is time to replace this rite of managerial passage with something much more powerful: inward-bound courses. Rather than grappling with nature, business leaders would grapple with big ideas. Rather than proving their leadership abilities by leading people across a ravine, they would do so by leading them across an intellectual chasm. The format would be simple. A handful of future leaders would gather in an isolated hotel and devote themselves to studying great books. They would be deprived of electronic distractions. During the day a tutor would ensure their noses stay in their tomes; in the evening the inward-bounders would be encouraged to relate what they had read to their lives.

是時候把這些管理進階禮換成更強大的內省課程了。商業領袖們不是和自然對抗，而是要和大問題們交鋒。要展現領導能力，他們不是要帶領團隊跨過真正的深溝，而是帶領他們跨越智識上的鴻溝。形式可以很簡單。幾個未來領袖們找個單獨的酒店，聚在一起研究經典書籍。不讓他們用電子產品避免其干擾。白天老師確保大家靜心讀書寸步不離；晚上鼓勵內省學習者們講述如何把讀到的東西與生活聯繫起來。

It is easy to poke fun at the idea of forcing high-flying executives to read the classics. One could play amusing games thinking up titles that might pique their interest: “Thus Spake McKinsey”, or “Accenture Shrugged”, perhaps. Or pairing books with personality types: “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” for a budding Donald Trump and “Crime and Punishment” for a budding Conrad Black. Or imagining what Nietzschean corporate social responsibility would look like. Or Kierkegaardian supply-chain management.

強迫這些明日之星閱讀經典，這很容易遭到取笑。會有人起些搞笑的書名：比如《麥肯錫如是說》或者《埃森哲聳聳肩》。或者把書和性格類型配對：比如《生命之歌》給正在嶄露頭角的唐納德·特朗普，《罪與罰》給剛出道的康拉德·布萊克。或者想象一下尼采公司的社會責任會是什麼樣，或者是克爾凱郭爾式的供應鏈管理。

Then there are practical questions. Surely high-flyers are decision-makers rather than cogitators? And surely they do not have time to spend on idle thought? However, a surprising number of American CEOs studied philosophy at university. Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, was a philosophy postgraduate at Oxford University and briefly contemplated becoming an academic before choosing the life of a billionaire instead. Anyway, executives clearly have enough time on their hands to attend gabfests such as Davos, where they do little more than recycle corporate clichés about “stakeholders” and “sustainability”. Surely they have enough time for real thinkers.

接下來就是些實際問題了。這些成功人士一定是決策制定者而非深思熟慮者嗎？他們真的沒時間在空閒時間思考嗎？不過，美國的首席執行官裏在大學修過哲學的人數會讓你吃驚。領英創始人之一里德·霍夫曼是牛津大學哲學研究生，他成爲億萬富翁之前有一小段時間想着成爲學者。不管怎樣，主管們顯然有足夠時間去參加達沃斯這樣冗長的會議，除了回收利用下“利益相關者”和“可持續發展”這樣的陳詞濫調也幹不了什麼。他們當然有足夠的時間留給真正的思想家們。

Inward-bound courses would do wonders for “thought leadership”. There are good reasons why the business world is so preoccupied by that notion at the moment: the only way to prevent your products from being commoditised or your markets from being disrupted is to think further ahead than your competitors. But companies that pose as thought leaders are often “thought laggards”: risk analysts who recycle yesterday’s newspapers, and management consultants who champion yesterday’s successes just as they are about to go out of business.

內省課程會對“思想領導力”有奇效。商業世界現在太關注這樣的觀念：想要你的產品不被別人商品化，你的市場不被顛覆，唯一辦法是你比競爭對手之前想得更遠，這麼想是有理由的。但擺出思想領袖模樣的公司經常是“思想後進生”：要不是是炒昨天新聞冷飯的風險分析師，或者是停留在昨日輝煌馬上要歇菜的管理顧問。

The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all this noise and listen to a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides’s hymn to Pericles than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China from reading Confucius than by listening to “culture consultants”. Peter Drucker remained top dog among management gurus for 50 years not because he attended more conferences but because he marinated his mind in great books: for example, he wrote about business alliances with reference to marriage alliances in Jane Austen.

成爲真正的思想領袖的唯一方法是無視這些噪音，只聽幾個偉大思想家是怎麼說的。要了解領導力，讀一讀修昔底德對伯里克利的讚美詩要比你從一千個領導力專家那裏學到的多得多。要在中國做生意，讀一讀孔子遠比你從“文化顧問”那兒瞭解得多。彼得·德魯克50年來一直是管理大師中的泰斗不是因爲他參加了更多會議，而是因爲他把自己的思想浸淫在偉大著作中：舉例來說，他寫商業盟約的時候就提到了簡·奧斯汀的婚姻盟約。

Inward-bound courses would do something even more important than this: they would provide high-flyers with both an anchor and a refuge. High-flyers risk becoming so obsessed with material success that they ignore their families or break the law. Philosophy-based courses would help executives overcome their obsession with status symbols. It is difficult to measure your worth in terms of how many toys you accumulate when you have immersed yourself in Plato. Distracted bosses would also benefit from leaving aside all those e-mails, tweets and LinkedIn updates to focus on a few things that truly matter.

內省課程要做的比這更重要：它們爲明日精英們提供精神支柱和避難所。明日精英們會冒險過於沉迷於物質上的成功，以至於忽視家庭或者違法犯罪。以哲學爲基礎的課程會幫助主管們客服對社會地位標誌的沉迷。當你沉浸在柏拉圖的思想中就很難用你積累了多少玩具來衡量你的價值了。注意力分散的老闆們可以把所有電子郵件、推特和領英的更新扔在一邊，聚精會神研究一些真正重要的事情，這對他們有好處。

Looking for answers

尋找答案

The business world has been groping towards inward-bound courses for years. Many successful CEOs have made a point of preserving time for reflection: Bill Gates, when running Microsoft, used to retreat to an isolated cottage for a week and meditate on a big subject; and Jack Welch set aside an hour a day for undistracted thinking at GE. Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School was so shocked at how many of his contemporaries ended up divorced or in prison that he devised a course called “How will you measure your life?”. It became one of HBS’s most popular courses and provided the basis of a successful book.

商業世界對內省課程的摸索已經有些年頭了。許多成功的首席執行官們都努力爲內省留出時間：比爾•蓋茨在管理微軟的時候，曾經花一週時間退居偏僻村舍思考大問題；傑克•韋爾奇在GE每天拿出一個小時不被幹擾地思考。哈佛商學院的克萊頓•克里斯坦森震驚於他同齡人最終離婚或者入獄的數量，從而開設了一門課程叫做“你要如何衡量你的人生？”這成爲哈佛商學院最受歡迎的課程之一，也成爲他同名暢銷書的基礎。

“Mindfulness” is all the rage in some big corporations, which have hired coaches to teach the mix of relaxation and meditation techniques. Big ideas are becoming as much of a status marker in high-tech hubs as cars and houses are in the oil belt. Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley investor, holds conferences of leading thinkers to try to improve the world. David Brendel, a philosopher and psychiatrist, offers personal counselling to bosses and recently penned a blog for the Harvard Business Review on how philosophy makes you a better leader. Damon Horowitz, who interrupted a career in technology to get a PhD in philosophy, has two jobs at Google: director of engineering and in-house philosopher. “The thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder,” he says, they are “the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.”

“正念”在一些大公司裏非常流行，它們僱來教練教授結合了放鬆和冥想的技巧。宏大思想正成爲高科技中心的標識，就像油氣帶上的汽車和房子。硅谷投資家皮特·泰爾召集思想領袖們開會討論怎樣讓世界變得更好。哲學家兼精神病專家大衛•布倫德爾爲老闆們提供個人諮詢，他最近在《哈佛商業評論》上開設了博客討論哲學如何幫你成爲更好的領導。達蒙·霍洛維茨中斷了他在科技產業的工作，轉而去考哲學博士，他在Google有兩份工作：工程總監和內部哲學家。“我們這個產業的思想領袖不是那些呆呆地埋頭苦幹，一步一個腳印走上職業階梯的那種人，”他說，他們是“會發掘機會並建立獨特視角的那些人。”

Inward-bound courses would offer significant improvements on all this. Mindfulness helps people to relax but empties their minds. “Ideas retreats” feature the regular circus of intellectual celebrities. Sessions on the couch with corporate philosophers isolate managers from their colleagues. Inward-bound courses offer the prospect of filling the mind while forming bonds with fellow-strivers. They are an idea whose time has come.

內省課程會極大地改善所有這些。正念幫助人們放鬆並排空思想。“思想靜修”在知識名人圈裏佔據重要位置。公司哲學家們的心理治療課程把經理們和員工隔開。內省課程提供這樣的前景，給思想充電的同時與增強和共同奮鬥的同事之間的紐帶。這種想法的時代已經來臨了。