外刊听读| 经济学人 马斯克的管理之道
Bartleby
巴特尔比
The bird and the boss
推特和老板
A billionaire’s challenge to management thinking
亿万富翁挑战传统管理思想
1 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? It raises issues of law: is his decision to get rid of so many workers within days of completing the acquisition above board? And it raises questions of strategy: can Twitter make money by moving from a business model based on advertising to one based on subscription? But it is also an extremely public test of a particular style of management. In the way he thinks about work, decision-making and the role of the CEO, Mr Musk is swimming against the tide.
埃隆-马斯克对Twitter的收购提出了政策问题：世界首富拥有如此重要的公共讨论论坛是否正确？它还提出了法律问题：他在完成收购后几天内就解雇了这么多员工是否符合规定？它还提出了战略问题：Twitter能否从基于广告的商业模式转向基于订阅来赚钱？但这也是对一种特殊管理风格的公开测试。马斯克先生对工作、决策和首席执行官角色的思考方式是逆潮流的。
2 His attitude to employees is an obvious example of his counter-cultural approach. For a futurist, Mr Musk is a very old-fashioned boss. He doesn’t like remote work. 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. Anyone who thought this was antiquated could “pretend to work somewhere else”, he tweeted.
他对员工的态度是他反主流文化的一个明显例子。对于一个未来主义者来说，马斯克先生是一个非常守旧的老板。他不喜欢远程工作。今年早些时候，他给特斯拉的员工发了一封电子邮件，要求他们每周至少到办公室工作40小时。他在推特上说，任何认为这很过时的人都可以 "假装在其他地方工作"。
3 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. It is as if Thanos had decided to try his hand at business. 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”. The template for the modern manager tends to be a low-ego, compassionate boss who gives people autonomy. Someone didn’t get the memo.
无论他解雇这么多推特员工的决定是否合法，他的方法都很残忍：人们被锁在公司IT账户之外，职业生涯被一封不近人情的电子邮件所终结，一半的劳动力一下子就消失了。这就像灭霸决定在商业上试试手一样。对于那些留下来的人来说，他们被要求努力工作；推特内部人士说，马斯克先生来到公司的第一个行动就是取消了每月一次的全公司 "休息日"。现代经理人的模板往往是一个有着低自我价值且富有同情心的老板，愿意给予人们自主权。然而有人没有收到这种备忘录。
4 His critics have to accept that the my-way-or-the-highway approach has worked before. 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. Whether this can work for him at Twitter is less clear. His vision for the product as a “digital town square” where free speech flourishes is a typically grand one. This time, however, he is not taking on lumbering incumbents, but fixing an existing business where judgment and politics matter as much as engineering.
批评他的人必须接受这样的事实，即 "要么听我的，要么走人"的做法在以前就很有效。在他的其他公司，如特斯拉和SpaceX，马斯克先生可能没有提供同理心，但他提供了一个星球大小的重要意义，从普及电动汽车到殖民火星。但这是否能在推特上发挥作用并不清楚。他对产品的设想是一个言论自由 "数字城市广场"，这是一个典型的宏伟愿景。然而，这一次，他不是在挑战笨重的现有企业，而是在修复一个企业，在这个企业中，看法和政治与项目工程一样重要。
5 The way that Mr Musk takes decisions also cuts across consensus. 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.
马斯克先生做决定的方式也符合共识。关于CEO如何做出选择的研究相对较少，但哈佛商学院在2020年发表的一篇论文中，通过询问该校262名校友，以了解他们如何制定战略。
6 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. 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). They also tend to make decisions more slowly. Mr Musk and his acolytes are in a different camp: fast, informal and aggressive. Reports are already surfacing of fired Twitter workers being asked to come back.
该论文的作者确实发现了各种各样的方法，一些经理人凭直觉行事，而另一些则使用非常正式的程序。但研究人员发现，使用更多结构化程序的老板往往领导着更大和更快增长的公司（因果关系尚不明确），他们做决定也更加缓慢。马斯克先生和他的追随者属于另一个阵营：快速、随性和积极进取。有报道称，遭解雇的Twitter员工被要求返岗。
7 He is unorthodox in another way, too. 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. No one else in the firm is in a position to combine these perspectives, Mr Drucker wrote.
他在另一个方面也是非正统的。管理学家彼得-德鲁克(Peter Drucker)认为，首席执行官是组织中连接外部世界和公司内部运作机制的人。德鲁克先生写道，公司中没有其他人能够结合这些方面。
8 Mr Musk is not so much bridging this gap as making the distinction between the inside and outside of the company irrelevant. His personal brand and wealth is inextricably linked with the other firms he runs. At Twitter he is going even further, tossing out product ideas on his own Twitter feed, polling the audience for their views and offering realtime commentary on how things are going. And Twitter itself is a platform on which everyone—users, ex-employees, the people who founded the firm, policymakers and pundits—weighs in publicly to say how things are going. There is not much of an inside to talk of.
马斯克先生与其说是在弥合这一差距，不如说是让公司内部和外部的区别变得不重要。他的个人品牌和财富与他经营的其他公司有着密不可分的联系。在推特，他走得更远，在自己的推特上抛出产品创意，调查观众的意见，并对事情的进展进行实时报道。推特本身就是一个平台，每个人--用户、前雇员、创立公司的人、政策制定者和专家学者--都会在这个平台上公开发表意见，谈论事情的进展。没有什么内部会议。
9 You might object that Mr Musk is a one-off, and so is this deal. When he first made his offer to buy Twitter, he explicitly said that it was not because of an economic rationale. He later tried to wriggle out of the transaction entirely. 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. 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.
你可能会反对，马斯克先生是绝无仅有的，这笔交易也是如此。当他第一次提出收购Twitter时，他明确表示，这不是出于经济上的原因。后来，他试图完全从这笔交易中挣脱出来。一个拥有社交媒体平台的亿万富翁，与大多数上市公司的受薪高管所面临的挑战没有什么共同之处。但如果马斯克先生在粗暴对待员工、跳过PPT会议、通过爆红的网络话题进行公司管理的情况下，还能使他最新的企业再次获得成功，那么MBA仍然需要更新一下。
