可口可乐、奈飞、亚马逊为什么都鼓励员工多犯错误？ | 双语哈评
2019/9/7 8:00:00HBR-China 哈佛商业评论

    

     为什么突然之间，很多成功的商业领袖们允许自己公司的员工和同事多犯错误和接受更多的失败呢?

     可口可乐公司CEO的詹姆斯?昆西刚上任的时候，在会议上专门提及要求管理人员们忘记多年前“新可口可乐”的失败事件。那次失败事件带来的恐惧一直萦绕在可口可乐人的心头。“如果我们不犯错，”詹姆斯?昆西着重强调说，“那就表明我们工作上都不够努力。”

     奈飞公司因其拥有众多的用户而享受着前所未有的成功。面对如此大的成功，首席执行官里德?哈斯廷斯(Reed Hastings)仍然担心其顾客最满意的流媒体服务拥有太多热门剧，而正打算删除少量新节目。“我们现在命中率太高了，”在一次技术会议上他说：“我们必须要冒更多的风险……去尝试更疯狂的事情……整体上，我们应该有更高的取消率。”

     可以这么说，作为世界首富，亚马逊公司的首席执行官杰夫?贝佐斯(Jeff Bezos)是世界上最成功的企业家。他曾经很直接地说：亚马逊公司的增长和创新都是建立在失败之上的。“如果你敢大胆押注，那么这些注数将会成为你的实验品。”这话是他在收购全食超市(Whole Foods)后不久说的。“既然它们是一次实验，那么你肯定就不能提前知道它们会产生怎样的作用。毕竟实验究其本身来讲就是一件容易失败的事儿。但只要有几个巨大的成功就能弥补你所经历的无数次的失败。”

     这些成功的CEO们所传达的信息对我们大多数人来说虽然容易理解，但却很难以付诸实践。我无法告诉你我曾遇到了多少商业领袖和拜访了多少个公司，他们都相信创新和创造带来的价值。然而，也有这样一些领导和组织，因为曾经的错误、失误和失望而心生恐惧，从而导致后来的他们几乎没有任何的创新能力和创造能力。当今时代，每个人、每个组织都要跟上这不断变化的世界，不断地学习，否则你将永远不能成长和发展。

     那么该怎么做才好呢？是否有某些方法或者技巧能够让组织或者个人在小小的失败和大大的成功之间建立起必要的联系呢？位于马萨诸塞州西部的一所女子学校——史密斯学院就创建了一个名为“失败”的项目。它教导学生们要忍受并学会关于“失败”的一切东西。《纽约时报》刊登的一篇文章，详细报道了该项目的负责人雷切尔·西蒙斯(Rachel Simmons)。她说:“我们想要告诉大家的是，失败并不是学习过程中犯的错误，而是学习过程中的特征。”报名参加“失败”课程的学生们会收到一张“失败证书”。证书上会有“特此授权为搞砸、惨败或失败”等评语。这些评语是他们经过了一段关系、一个项目、一个测试或者其他一些重要的计划而得来的。虽然是“失败”的评语，但并不代表他们是失败者，他们“仍然是非常有价值、十分优秀的人。” 准备好应对各种失败的学生比那些总是期待完美呈现而不敢犯错的学生要更坚强、更勇敢。

     这样的课程同样适用于商业领域。达美乐比萨的CEO帕特里克·多伊尔自2010年以来不管在哪个行业处于哪个位置一直都非常成功。他一直这样认为，公司取得的所有成就都是建立在敢于面对错误和失误可能性的基础上的。在向其他首席执行官的一份陈述报告中，多伊尔讲到了阻碍企业和个人诚实面对失败的两大挑战。第一个挑战他称之为“忽略偏见”。现实职场中，很多有新想法的人选择不去实现这个想法。因为他们知道如果尝试去做那些事情，一旦不成功的话，所带来的失败很可能会损害他们的职业生涯。第二个挑战则是“损失规避”。对大多数人来说，玩的目的都是为了赢，不是为了输。因为对大多数人来说，“输了以后带来的痛苦会是赢了带来的快乐的两倍。”

     多伊尔进一步说，允许失败是一种激励制度的创建，也是成功的必要条件。他曾经把他的一次演讲命名为“失败是一种选择”，还向电影《阿波罗13号》致歉。允许失败是所有课程中最重要的一课。所以，如果你还有疑问，只要问问里德?哈斯廷斯、杰夫?贝佐斯和詹姆斯?昆西就知道答案了：吃一堑才能长一智，没有失败就没有成功。

     英文原文

     Why, all of a sudden, are so many successful business leaders urging their companies and colleagues to make more mistakes and embrace more failures?

     right after he became CEO of Coca-Cola Co., James Quincey called upon rank-and-file managers to get beyond the fear of failure that had dogged the company since the “New Coke” fiasco of so many years ago. “If we’re not making mistakes,” he insisted, “we’re not trying hard enough.”

     even as his company was enjoying unparalleled success with its subscribers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings worried that his fabulously valuable streaming service had too many hit shows and was canceling too few new shows. “Our hit ratio is too high right now,” he told a technology conference. “We have to take more risk…to try more crazy things…we should have a higher cancel rate overall.”

     Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, arguably the most successful entrepreneur in the world, makes the case as directly as he can that his company’s growth and innovation is built on its failures. “If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments,” he explained shortly after Amazon bought Whole Foods. “And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”

     The message from these CEOs is as easy to understand as it is hard for most of us to put into practice. I can’t tell you how many business leaders I meet, how many organizations I visit, that espouse the virtues of innovation and creativity. Yet so many of these same leaders and organizations live in fear of mistakes, missteps, and disappointments — which is why they have so little innovation and creativity. If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn. And unless people and organizations manage to keep learning as fast as the world is changing, they’ll never keep growing and evolving.

     So what’s the right way to be wrong? Are there techniques that allow organizations and individuals to embrace the necessary connection between small failures and big successes? Smith College, the all-women’s school in western Massachusetts, has created a program called “Failing Well” to teach its students what all of us could stand to learn. “What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning it’s the feature,” explained Rachel Simmons, who runs the initiative, in a recent New York Times article. Indeed, when students enroll in her program, they receive a Certificate of Failure that declares they are “hereby authorized to screw up, bomb, or fail” at a relationship, a project, a test, or any other initiative that seems hugely important and “still be a totally worthy, utterly excellent human being.” Students who are prepared to handle failure are less fragile and more daring than those who expect perfection and flawless performance.

     That’s a lesson worth applying to business as well. Patrick Doyle, CEO of Domino’s Pizza since 2010, has had one of the most successful seven-year runs of any business leader in any field. But all of his company’s triumphs, he insists, are based on its willingness to face up to the likelihood of mistakes and missteps. In a presentation to other CEOs, Doyle described two great challenges that stand in the way of companies and individuals being more honest about failure. The first challenge, he says, is what he calls “omission bias” — the reality that most people with a new idea choose not to pursue the idea because if they try something and it doesn’t work, the setback might damage their career. The second challenge is to overcome what he calls “loss aversion” — the tendency for people to play not to lose rather than play to win, because for most of us, “The pain of loss is double the pleasure of winning.”

     Creating “the permission to fail is energizing,” Doyle explains, and a necessary condition for success — which is why he titled his presentation, with apologies to the movie Apollo 13, “Failure Is an Option.” And that may be the most important lesson of all. Just ask Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, or the new CEO of Coca-Cola: There is no learning without failing, there are no successes without setbacks.

     比尔·泰勒(Bill Taylor)|文

     比尔·泰勒是快公司(Fast Company是美国最具影响力的商业杂志之一)的联合创始人。最近，他出版了名为《Simply Brilliant: How GreatOrganizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways》一书。

     阿丫丫 | 译 周强 |校

     《哈佛商业评论》

     newmedia@hbrchina.org

    

    公众号ID：hbrchinese

     长按二维码，订阅属于你的“卓越密码”。

    http://weixin.100md.com
返回 哈佛商业评论 返回首页 返回百拇医药