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Schumpeter 熊彼得 Fail often, fail well 吃一堑，长一智 Companies have a great deal to learn from failure—provided they manage it successfully 失败是成功之径——如果公司能成功地控制失败 Apr 14th 2011 | from the print edition of The Economist 译者：skittos BUSINESS writers have always worshipped at the altar of success. Tom Peters turned himself into a superstar with “In Search of Excellence”. Stephen Covey has sold more than 15m copies of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Malcolm Gladwell cleverly subtitled his third book, “Outliers”, “The Story of Success”. This success-fetish makes the latest management fashion all the more remarkable. The April issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to failure, featuring among other contributors A.G. Lafley, a successful ex-boss of Procter & Gamble (P&G), proclaiming that “we learn much more from failure than we do from success.” The current British edition of Wired magazine has “Fail! Fast. Then succeed. What European business needs to learn from Silicon Valley” on its cover. IDEO, a consultancy, has coined the slogan “Fail often in order to succeed sooner”. 商业作者向来爱把“成功”捧上神坛。汤姆·彼得斯通过一本《追求卓越》，结果把自己追成了超星。史蒂芬·科尔已经成功销出了1500万册《高效能人士的七个习惯》。马尔科姆·葛拉威尔为他的第三本书《异类：不一样的成功启示录》起了个讨巧的副标题。 这种盲目的崇拜成功成了最新潮的管理指导。与之相逆，四月刊的《哈佛商业评论》将焦点放在 “失败”上 。这期的专题报道人物中包括前宝洁公司的成功掌舵人A.G.雷富礼，他在文中宣称：“我们从失败中学到东西要远远比从成功中学到的多”。本期英国版《连线》杂志在封面上登出的标题为：“栽吧！快点！继而成功。欧洲企业需要向硅谷学习什么”。 艾迪欧咨询公司（IDEO）所设计励志口号是“多栽跟头才能加速成功”。 There are good reasons for the failure fashion. Success and failure are not polar opposites: you often need to endure the second to enjoy the first. Failure can indeed be a better teacher than success. It can also be a sign of creativity. The best way to avoid short-term failure is to keep churning out the same old products, though in the long term this may spell your doom. Businesses cannot invent the future—their own future—without taking risks. 时尚失败有其充分的理由。成功与失败并非两个完全对立的极端。你常常需要忍受后者才能享受前者。而相对于成功，失败其实是个更加有益的良师，也是激发创造力的征兆。为了避免短期的失利，企业通常采用最安全的方法，大量生产同类老产品。从长远来看，它却可能把自己送上了穷途末路。不敢承担风险，就不能闯出新路、创造自己的未来。 Entrepreneurs have always understood this. Thomas Edison performed 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb. Students of entrepreneurship talk about the J-curve of returns: the failures come early and often and the successes take time. America has proved to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of “failing forward” as a common tech-industry phrase puts it: in Germany bankruptcy can end your business career whereas in Silicon Valley it is almost a badge of honour. 上述道理，其实企业家都懂的。爱迪生做了9000次实验才想出了一只成功的灯泡雏形。商科学生所讨论的投入回报J型曲线表明：失败早来常来，成功缓缓而迟。事实证明美国比欧洲更具企业家精神，其很大原因在于美国接受（拥抱）“转败为胜”的文化，用句科技行业中的常用俗语来表达就是：在德国，破产能送掉你的商业前程；在硅谷，它简直就像一枚荣誉勋章。 A more tolerant attitude to failure can also help companies to avoid destruction. When Alan Mulally became boss of an ailing Ford Motor Company in 2006 one of the first things he did was demand that his executives own up to their failures. He asked managers to colour-code their progress reports—ranging from green for good to red for trouble. At one early meeting he expressed astonishment at being confronted by a sea of green, even though the company had lost several billion dollars in the previous year. Ford’s recovery began only when he got his managers to admit that things weren’t entirely green. 对失败采取更容许的心态也能够帮助公司避免被摧毁的命运。在2006年，阿兰·穆拉利掌管了境况不佳福特汽车公司之后，首当其冲的事务之一便是要求他的高管诚对自己的失败。他让高管用颜色来标示进度汇报——颜色范围由绿色（佳况）至红色（劣境）。 在一次早期的会议上，他对眼前一片绿色的汪洋大感惊诧，因为上年的公司损失已达几十亿美元。直到他让这些高管承认公司业务并非全部绿意盈然之后，福特才开始迈出复苏的步伐。 Failure is also becoming more common. John Hagel, of Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge (which advises bosses on technology), calculates that the average time a company spends in the S&P 500 index has declined from 75 years in 1937 to about 15 years today. Up to 90% of new businesses fail shortly after being founded. Venture-capital firms are lucky if 20% of their investments pay off. Pharmaceutical companies research hundreds of molecular groups before coming up with a marketable drug. Less than 2% of films account for 80% of box-office returns. 失败现象如今也越来越普遍。德勤前沿中心 (为老板提供技术建议)的负责人约翰·哈格尔作了一项计算，在标准普尔500指数中，一家公司所能保持的平均年数已经从1937年的75年减少到现在的15年左右。约90%以上的新公司在成立后不久便宣告失败。风险投资公司如果能有20%的投资赚到钱就算运气了。制药公司要经过研究数以百计的分子团之后，才能推出一种适合市场的药品。电影业中80%的票房收入来自不到2%的影片。 But simply “embracing” failure would be as silly as ignoring it. Companies need to learn how to manage it. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School argues that the first thing they must do is distinguish between productive and unproductive failures. There is nothing to be gained from tolerating defects on the production line or mistakes in the operating theatre. 然而，仅仅限于“拥抱”失败的话，就和忽视失败一样是可笑而荒唐的，公司需要研究如何控制失败。哈佛商学院的艾米·艾姆森认为，公司必须首先区分有益和无益失败之间的差别，如容许生产流水线上出废品或手术室中出医疗事故是不会让你有任何收益的。 This might sound like an obvious distinction. But it is one that some of the best minds in business have failed to make. James McNerney, a former boss of 3M, a manufacturer, damaged the company’s innovation engine by trying to apply six-sigma principles (which are intended to reduce errors on production lines) to the entire company, including the research laboratories. It is only a matter of time before a boss, hypnotised by all the current talk of “rampant experimentation”, makes the opposite mistake. 这种“区别”能力虽然貌似基本常识，但商界中一些最优秀的人材都未能做对这件事。3M前老板、制造业的詹姆斯·麦克纳尼把six-sigma原理 (用于减少生产线上的出错率) 应用在整个公司包括研究实验室的运作上，结果损害了公司的创新引擎。 作为一位老板，为当时流行的 “疯狂实验”盲目狂热，那他迟早会制造出与实验结果相反的错误。 Companies must also recognise the virtues of failing small and failing fast. Peter Sims likens this to placing “Little Bets”, in a new book of that title. Chris Rock, one of the world’s most successful comedians, tries out his ideas in small venues, often bombing and always junking more material than he saves. Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, compares his company’s strategy to planting seeds, or “going down blind alleys”. One of those blind alleys, letting small shops sell books on the company’s website, now accounts for a third of its sales. 公司还必须认识到小败与速败的好处。彼得·西姆斯在他的一本同名新书《小赌注》里，把这比作“小赌注”。世界上最成功的喜剧演员之一克里斯·洛克爱在小众场合试行他的搞笑创意并经常遭遇冷场，而且他摈弃的素材总是多过能用的好段子。亚马逊的总裁杰夫贝索斯将公司的策略比喻为播种, 即所谓 “盲区撒种”。其中之一鼓励小商店在公司网站上售书, 结果那部分销售量现已达到了公司的三分之一。 Damage limitation 限制损失程度 Placing small bets is one of several ways that companies can limit the downside of failure. Mr Sims emphasises the importance of testing ideas on consumers using rough-and-ready prototypes: they will be more willing to give honest opinions on something that is clearly an early-stage mock-up than on something that looks like the finished product. Chris Zook, of Bain & Company, a consultancy, urges companies to keep potential failures close to their core business—perhaps by introducing existing products into new markets or new products into familiar markets. Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School suggests that companies should guard against “confirmation bias” by giving one team member the job of looking for flaws. 小赌注是公司能有效限制失败损失的方法之一。西姆斯先生强调了让消费者测试初始原型产品的重要性: 比起完成品，顾客更愿意对初期原型产品提出诚恳的意见。贝恩咨询公司负责人克里斯·祖克敦促公司把潜在的失败限制在自己的核心企业之内——比如将现有产品引入新的市场；或者将新产品引进熟悉的市场。哥伦比亚商学院教授莉塔·冈瑟·麦格兰斯建议说，公司应该防备 “确认偏误”，并通过特定一名团队员找错来减少这类偏误。 But there is no point in failing fast if you fail to learn from your mistakes. Companies are trying hard to get better at this. India’s Tata group awards an annual prize for the best failed idea. Intuit, in software, and Eli Lilly, in pharmaceuticals, have both taken to holding “failure parties”. P&G encourages employees to talk about their failures as well as their successes during performance reviews. But the higher up in the company, the bigger the egos and the greater the reluctance to admit to really big failings rather than minor ones. Bosses should remember how often failure paves the way for success: Henry Ford got nowhere with his first two attempts to start a car company, but that did not stop him. 如果你不能从错误中学习，即使失败得再快也变得毫无意义。各家公司正奋力从中取得更好的成效。印度塔塔集团为“最佳的失败创意”颁发年度奖。直觉会计软件和美国礼来制药两家公司都会定期举行 “失败聚会”。宝洁公司鼓励员工在业绩评估时谈论自己的失败和成功。但员工在公司的地位越高就越容易自负，越不愿承认所犯的大错误, 只愿捡些小芝麻泛泛而论。老板们应该记住，成功之路多少次是由失败铺出来的: 亨利·福特当初两次尝试汽车公司都毫无起色，但这并没有挡住他。 Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter |
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