每天一篇经济学人 | The bird and the boss 推特及其老板（

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·马斯克收购Twitter引发了政策问题: 世界首富拥有一个如此重要的公开辩论论坛合适吗? 这引发了法律问题: 他在完成收购后几天内解雇这么多员工的决定是合法的吗? 这引发了战略问题: Twitter能否靠通过从基于广告的商业模式转向基于订阅的商业模式来赚钱? 但它也是对一种特定管理风格的极为公开的考验。在思考工作、决策和CEO角色的方式上，马斯克是在逆流而上。

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.

他对待员工的态度是他反文化做法的一个明显例子。对于一个未来主义者来说，马斯克是一个非常老式的老板。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。他在推特上写道，任何认为这种做法过时的人都可以“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. 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.

不管他解雇这么多Twitter员工的决定是否合法，但是他的方法都是残忍的: 人们无法使用公司的IT账户，职业生涯以一封非个人的电子邮件结束，一半的员工一下子就走了。这就好像灭霸决定在生意上试一试。那些留下来的人预期要付出巨大的努力；内部人士表示，马斯克上任后的第一个举措就是取消公司每月的“休息日”。现代管理者的模板往往是一个低自尊、富有同情心、给员工自主权的老板。有人没收到“备忘录”。

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.

批评他的人不得不承认，“要么听我的，要么滚蛋”的做法以前也奏效过。在他的其他公司，如特斯拉和SpaceX，马斯克可能没有提供同理心，但他提供了一种星球大小的使命感，从普及电动汽车到征服火星。这是否适用于推特尚不清楚。他对该产品的愿景是将其作为言论自由繁荣的“数字城市广场”，这是一个典型的宏伟愿景。然而，这一次，他不是在与笨拙的现任在职者较量，而是在修复一个现存的业务，在这个业务中，判断和政治与工程同样重要。

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.

马斯克的决策方式也有违共识。相对而言，关于CEO们如何做出选择的研究很少，但哈佛商学院2020年发表的一篇工作论文进行了一番尝试，论文中询问了262名该校校友，他们是如何制定战略的。

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.

这篇论文的作者确实发现了各种各样的方法，一些管理者依靠直觉，而另一些则使用非常形式化的过程。但研究人员发现，使用更结构化流程的老板往往领导规模更大、增长更快的公司(因果关系尚不清楚)。他们做决定的速度也更慢。马斯克和他的助手们属于另一个阵营:快速、随便、态度强硬。已经有报道称，被解雇的推特员工被要求复职。

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.

他在另一方面也不正统。管理思想家中的老前辈彼得•德鲁克将CEO描述为组织中连接外部世界和公司内部运作的人。德鲁克写道，公司里没有其他人能够将这些能力结合起来。

Mr Musk is not so much bridging this gap as making the distinction between the inside and outside of the company irrelevant. 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 real-time 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.

马斯克与其说是在弥合这一鸿沟，不如说是在让公司内部和外部之间的区别变得无关紧要。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。在Twitter，他走得更远，在自己的Twitter账号上抛出产品创意，调查观众的观点，并就事态发展提供实时评论。Twitter本身是一个平台，每个人（包括用户、前雇员、公司的创始人、政策制定者和专家）都可以在上面公开谈论事情的发展。里面没什么可谈的。

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.

你可能会反对说，马斯克是特例，这笔交易也是如此。当他第一次提出收购Twitter时，他明确表示，这不是出于经济原因。后来，他试图完全退出这笔交易。社交媒体平台亿万富翁老板的故事，与大多数上市公司领薪高管所面临的挑战几乎没有共同之处。也许是这样，但如果马斯克通过残酷对待员工、跳过PPT会议、通过表情包管理，使他的最新企业再次获得成功，那么MBA课程仍需要些许更新。