目录

1. I: Managing the human resource 人力资源管理
2. II: The Office Environment 办公环境
3. III: The Right People 合适的人选
4. IV: Growing Productive Teams 培养富有成效的团队
5. V: Fertile Soil 肥沃的土壤
6. VI: It’s Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here 在这里工作应该很好玩儿

第一部分 管理人力资源 Managing the human resource

• 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing 今日某处，一个项目正在失败

• 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger 做一个干酪汉堡，卖一个干酪汉堡

  错误在所难免 管理：傻瓜定义 人力商店 稳定的项目濒临死亡 我们只是做事，没时间考虑工作自身

• 3: Vienna Waits for You 维也纳在等你

  西班牙理论 来自家里的一句话 不存在加班的谎言 工作狂 工作效率：赢得战斗，输掉战争 反思

• 4: Quality—If Time Permits 品质——如果时间允许

  飞离卓越的航班 质量是免费的，但是…… 否决的力量

• 5: Parkinson’s Law Revisited 再谈帕金森定律

  帕金森定律和牛顿定律 如果经历了我们的见闻，你就不会这样说了 来自新南威尔士大学的数据 帕金森主题的变异

• 6: Laetrile 苦杏素

  在睡梦中减肥 七宗罪 这就是管理

Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components. It’s obvious enough where this tendency comes from. Consider the preparation we had for the task of management: We were judged to be good management material because we performed well as doers, as technicians and developers. That often involved organizing our resources into modular pieces, such as software routines, circuits, or other units of work. The modules we constructed were made to exhibit a black-box characteristic, so that their internal idiosyncrasies could be safely ignored. They were designed to be used with a standard interface. After years of reliance on these modular methods, small wonder that as newly promoted managers, we try to manage our human resources the same way. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well. In Part I, we begin to investigate a very different way of thinking about and managing people. That way involves specific accommodation to the very nonmodular character of the human resource.

1 Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing 某个地方的项目失败了

Since the days when computers first came into common use, there must have been tens of thousands of accounts receivable programs written. There are probably a dozen or more accounts receivable projects underway as you read these words. And somewhere today, one of them is failing.

Imagine that! A project requiring no real technical innovation is going down the tubes. Accounts receivable is a wheel that’s been reinvented so often that many veteran developers could stumble through such projects with their eyes closed. Yet these efforts sometimes still manage to fail.

Suppose that at the end of one of these debacles, you were called upon to perform an autopsy. (It would never happen, of course; there is an inviolable industry standard that prohibits examining our failures.) Suppose, before all the participants had scurried off for cover, you got a chance to figure out what had gone wrong. One thing you would not find is that the technology had sunk the project. Safe to say, the state of the art has advanced sufficiently so that accounts receivable systems are technically possible. Something else must be the explanation.

During the first decade of our Peopleware project, we conducted annual surveys of development projects and their results. We’ve measured project size, cost, defects, acceleration factors, and success or failure in meeting schedules. Eventually, we accumulated more than five hundred project histories, all of them from real-world development efforts.

We observe that about 15 percent of all projects studied came to naught: They were canceled or aborted or “postponed” or they delivered products that were never used. For bigger projects, the odds are even worse. Fully 25 percent of projects that lasted 25 work-years or more failed to complete. In the early surveys, we discarded these failed data points and analyzed the others. Since 1979, though, we’ve been contacting whoever is left of the project staff to find out what went wrong. For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.

The Name of the Game 这场游戏的名称

The cause of failure most frequently cited by our survey participants was “politics.” But now observe that people tend to use this word rather sloppily. Included under “politics” are such unrelated or loosely related things as communication problems, staffing problems, disenchantment with the boss or with the client, lack of motivation, and high turnover. People often use the word politics to describe any aspect of the work that is people-related, but the English language provides a much more precise term for these effects: They constitute the project’s sociology.

The truly political problems are a tiny and pathological subset. If you think of a problem as political in nature, you tend to be fatalistic about it. You know you can stand up to technical challenges, but honestly, who among us can feel confident in the realm of politics? By noting the true nature of a problem as sociological rather than political, you make it more tractable.

Project and team sociology may be a bit outside your field of expertise, but not beyond your capabilities. Whatever you name these people-related problems, they’re more likely to cause you trouble on your next assignment than all the design, implementation, and methodology issues you’ll have to deal with. In fact, that idea is the underlying thesis of this whole book: The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they’ve got more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage that way.

They manage as though technology were their principal concern. They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted and most interesting puzzles that their people will have to solve, almost as though they themselves were going to do the work rather than manage it. They are forever on the lookout for a technical whizbang that promises to automate away part of the work (see Chapter 6, “Laetrile,” for more on this effect).

The most strongly peopleoriented aspects of their responsibility are often given the lowest priority. Part of this phenomenon is due to the upbringing of the average manager. He or she was schooled in how the job is done, not how the job is managed. It’s a rare firm in which new managers have done anything that specifically indicates an ability or an aptitude for management. They’ve got little management experience and no meaningful practice. So how do new managers succeed in convincing themselves that they can safely spend most of their time thinking technology and little or no time thinking about the people side of the problem?

The High-Tech Illusion 高科技的幻觉

Perhaps the answer is what we’ve come to think of as the High-Tech Illusion: the widely held conviction among people who deal with any aspect of new technology (as who of us does not?) that they are in an intrinsically high-tech business. They are indulging in the illusion whenever they find themselves explaining at a cocktail party, say, that they are “in computers,” or “in telecommunications,” or “in electronic funds transfer.” The implication is that they are part of the high-tech world. Just between us, they usually aren’t. The researchers who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are in a high-tech business. The rest of us are appliers of their work. We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs. Because we go about this work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, we are mostly in the human communication business. Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions. The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do. Getting the new disk drive installed is positively trivial compared to figuring out why Horace is in a blue funk or why Susan is dissatisfied with the company after only a few months. Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.

高科技的幻觉：广为人知的理论认为， 凡是接触新技术的人(我们谁不是呢？)就被想当然地看做属于高科技领域。

只有从事基础研究、获得根本性突破的科研人员才是高科技工作者， 其他人只是在运用他们的研究成果。 由于我们以团队、项目或者其他紧密协作工作小组的形式来完成工作， 我们大多数人是在从事人类交流的职业。 我们的成功源自于所有参与者良好的人与人之间的互动， 我们的失败则归因于这种互动的缺失。

我们习惯性地专注于工作中的技术问题，主因并非它们重要，而是因为它们更简单。 安装一块新的硬盘，比寻思为何Horace显得忧郁而恐慌，Suan入职几个月就对公司不满意要容易得多。

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, “The light is better there.”

倘若你发现自己更加关注技术问题而非社会问题，那你就像是一名杂耍演员， 在一条昏暗的街道丢失了钥匙，却逡巡至邻近的街道去寻找，并美其名曰：“那里的灯光更明亮。”

2 Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger

Development is inherently different from production. But managers of development and allied efforts often allow their thinking to be shaped by a management philosophy derived entirely from a production environment. Imagine for the moment that you’re the manager of the local fast food franchise. It makes perfect sense for you to take any or all of the following efficient production measures: • Squeeze out error. Make the machine (the human machine) run as smoothly as possible. • Take a hard line about people goofing off on the job. • Treat workers as interchangeable pieces of the machine. • Optimize the steady state. (Don’t even think about how the operation got up to speed, or what it would take to close it down.) • Standardize procedure. Do everything by the book. • Eliminate experimentation — that’s what the folks at headquarters are paid for. These would be reasonable approaches if you were in the fast food business (or any production environment), but you’re not. The “make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger” mentality can be fatal in your development area. It can only serve to damp your people’s spirits and focus their attention away from the real problems at hand. This style of management will be directly at odds with the work. To manage thinking workers effectively, you need to take measures nearly opposite those listed above. Our proposed opposite approaches are described in the following sections.

A Quota for Errors

For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural and healthy part of their work. But there can be an almost Biblical association between error on the job and sin. This is an attitude we need to take specific pains to change.

Speaking to a group of software managers, we introduced a strategy for what we think of as iterative design. The idea is that some designs are intrinsically defect-prone; they ought to be rejected, not repaired. Such dead ends should be expected in the design activity. The lost effort of the dead end is a small price to pay for a clean, fresh start. To our surprise, many managers felt this would pose an impossible political problem for their own bosses: “How can we throw away a product that our company has paid to produce?” They seemed to believe that they’d be better off salvaging the defective version even though it might cost more in the long run.

Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive. They don’t try things that may turn out badly. You encourage this defensiveness when you try to systematize the process, when you impose rigid methodologies so that staff members are not allowed to make any of the key strategic decisions lest they make them incorrectly. The average level of technology may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit error. The team sociology, however, can suffer grievously.

The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they’ve been down, and by making sure they understand that “none” is not the best answer. When people blow it, they should be congratulated—that’s part of what they’re being paid for.

Management: The Bozo Definition

Management is a complex enough thing to defy simple definition, but that nuance was lost on one senior manager we encountered at a professional society meeting in London. He summed up his entire view of the subject with this statement: “Management is kicking ass.” This equates to the view that managers provide all the thinking and the people underneath them just carry out their bidding. Again, that might be workable for cheeseburger production, but not for any effort for which people do the work with their heads rather than their hands. Everyone in such an environment has got to have the brain in gear. You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.

Even if kicking people in the backside did boost their short-term productivity, it might not be useful in the long run: There is nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his own motivation is inadequate and has to be “supplemented” by that of the boss. The saddest thing about this management approach is that it’s almost always superfluous. You seldom need to take Draconian measures to keep your people working; most of them love their work. You may even have to take steps sometimes to make them work less, and thus get more meaningful work done (more about this idea in Chapter 3, “Vienna Waits for You”).

The People Store

In a production environment, it’s convenient to think of people as parts of the machine. When a part wears out, you get another. The replacement part is interchangeable with the original. You order a new one, more or less, by number. Many development managers adopt the same attitude. They go to great lengths to convince themselves that no one is irreplaceable. Because they fear that a key person will leave, they force themselves to believe that there is no such thing as a key person. Isn’t that the essence of management, after all, to make sure that the work goes on whether the individuals stay or not? They act as though there were a magical People Store they could call up and say, “Send me a new George Gardenhyer, but make him a little less uppity.”

One of my clients brought a splendid employee into a salary review and was just amazed that the fellow wanted something other than money. He said that he often had good ideas at home but that his slow Internet connection was a real bother to use. Couldn’t the company install a new line into his house and buy him a high-performance workstation? The company could. In subsequent years, it even built and furnished a small home office for the fellow. But my client is an unusual case. I wonder what a less-perceptive manager would have done. Too many managers are threatened by anything their workers do to assert their individuality. —TRL

One example of just such a less-perceptive manager was a boss who showed extreme signs of being threatened by his people’s individuality: He had one very talented worker on the road for much of the year visiting client sites and, as a result, living on an expense account. An analysis of the man’s expense reports showed that his expenditures on food were way out of line with those of other travelers. He spent 50 percent more on food than the others did. In an indignant public memo, the boss branded the worker a “food criminal.” Now, the worker’s total expenditures weren’t out of line; whatever extra he spent on food, he saved on something else. The man was not more expensive, he was just different.

The uniqueness of every worker is a continued annoyance to the manager who has blindly adopted a management style from the production world. The natural people manager, on the other hand, realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It’s something to be cultivated.

A Project in Steady State Is Dead

Steady-state production thinking is particularly ill-suited to project work. We tend to forget that a project’s entire purpose in life is to put itself out of business. The only steady state in the life of a project is rigor mortis. Unless you’re riding herd on a canceled or about-to-be-canceled project, the entire focus of project management ought to be the dynamics of the development effort. Yet the way we assess people’s value to a new project is often based on their steady-state characteristics: how much code they can write or how much documentation they can produce. We pay far too little attention to how well each of them fits into the effort as a whole.

I was teaching an in-house design course some years ago, when one of the upper managers buttonholed me to request that I assess some of the people in the course (his project staff). He was particularly curious about one woman. It was obvious he had his doubts about her: “I don’t quite see what she adds to a project; she’s not a great developer or tester or much of anything.” With a little investigation, I turned up this intriguing fact: During her 12 years at the company, the woman in question had never worked on a project that had been anything other than a huge success. It wasn’t obvious what she was adding, but projects always succeeded when she was around. After watching her in class for a week and talking to some of her co-workers, I came to the conclusion that she was a superb catalyst. Teams naturally jelled better when she was there. She helped people communicate with each other and get along. Projects were more fun when she was part of them. When I tried to explain this idea to the manager, I struck out. He just didn’t recognize the role of catalyst as essential to a project. —TDM

The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work.

We Haven’t Got Time to Think about This Job, Only to Do It

If you are charged with getting a task done, what proportion of your time ought to be dedicated to actually doing the task? Not 100 percent. There ought to be some provision for brainstorming, investigating new methods, figuring out how to avoid doing some of the subtasks, reading, training, and just goofing off. Looking back over our own years as managers, we’ve both concluded that we were off-track on this subject. We spent far too much of our time trying to get things done and not nearly enough time asking the key question, “Ought this thing to be done at all?” The steady-state cheeseburger mentality barely even pays lip service to the idea of thinking on the job. Its every inclination is to push the effort into 100-percent do-mode. If an excuse is needed for the lack of think-time, the excuse is always time pressure — as though there were ever work to be done without time pressure.

The importance of a more considered approach goes up sharply as the stakes increase. It’s when the truly Herculean effort is called for that we have to learn to do work less of the time and think about the work more. The more heroic the effort required, the more important it is that the team members learn to interact well and enjoy it. The project that has to be done by an impossible fixed date is the very one that can’t afford not to have frequent brainstorms and even a project dinner or some such affair to help the individual participants knit into an effective whole. But all that is motherhood. Everybody knows that and acts accordingly, right? Wrong.

We are so single-mindedly oriented toward Doing Something, Anything that we spend a scant 5 percent of our time on the combined activities of planning, investigating new methods, training, reading books, estimating, budgeting, scheduling, and allocating personnel. (The 5-percent figure comes from an analysis of system development projects, but it seems to apply more broadly than that, perhaps to the entire category of salaried workers.) The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one. That fact is horrifying for anyone concerned about the quality of work in the field; for folks like us who write books, it is positively tragic.

3 Vienna Waits for You

Some years ago, I was swapping war stories with the manager of a large project in Southern California. He began to relate the effect that his project and its crazy hours had had on his staff. There were two divorces that he could trace directly to the overtime his people were putting in, and one of his worker’s kids had gotten into some kind of trouble with drugs, probably because his father had been too busy for parenting during the past year. Finally, there had been the nervous breakdown of the test-team leader. As he continued through these horrors, I began to realize that in his own strange way, the man was bragging. You might suspect that with another divorce or two and a suicide, the project would have been a complete success, at least in his eyes. —TDM

For all the talk about “working smarter,” there is a widespread sense that what real-world management is all about is getting people to work harder and longer, largely at the expense of their personal lives. Managers are forever tooting their horns about the quantity of overtime their people put in, and the tricks one can use to get even more out of them.

Spanish Theory Management

Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods).

The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in. That’s not exactly productivity—it’s more like fraud —but it’s the state of the art for many American managers. They bully and cajole their people into long hours. They impress upon them how important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; the world isn’t going to stop just because a project completes a month late). They trick them into accepting hopelessly tight schedules, shame them into sacrificing any and all to meet the deadline, and do anything to get them to work longer and harder.

And Now a Word from the Home Front

Although your staff may be exposed to the message “work longer and harder” while they’re at the office, they’re getting a very different message at home. The message at home is, “Life is passing you by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the brass ring. And if you use your life up on... .”

But you know when the truth is told, That you can get what you want or you can just get old. You’re going to kick off before you even get halfway through. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you? —Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

The Vienna that waits for you, in Billy Joel’s phrase, is the last stop on your personal itinerary. When you get there, it’s all over. If you think your project members never worry about such weighty matters, think again. Your people are very aware of the one short life that each person is allotted. And they know too well that there has got to be something more important than the silly job they’re working on.

There Ain’t No Such Thing as Overtime

Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naïve manager’s imagination. Oh, there might be some benefit in a few extra hours worked on Saturday to meet a Monday deadline, but that’s almost always followed by an equal period of compensatory “undertime” while the workers catch up with their lives. Throughout the effort, there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime. The trade-off might work to your advantage for the short term, but for the long term it will cancel out.

Slow down you crazy child, And take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while. It’s all right. You can afford to lose a day or two. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you?

Just as the unpaid overtime was largely invisible to the Spanish Theory manager (who always counts the week as forty hours regardless of how much time the people put in), so too is the undertime invisible. You never see it on anybody’s time sheet. It’s time spent on the phone or in bull sessions or just resting. Nobody can really work much more than forty hours, at least not continually and with the level of intensity required for creative intellectual work. Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you’re just wasting time. Trying to get people to sprint too much can only result in loss of respect for the manager. The best workers have been through it all before; they know enough to keep silent and roll their eyes while the manager raves on that the job has got to get done by April. Then they take their compensatory undertime when they can, and end up putting in forty hours of real work each week. The best workers react that way; the others are workaholics.

Workaholics

Workaholics will put in uncompensated overtime. They’ll work extravagant hours, though perhaps with declining effectiveness. Put them under enough pressure and they will go a long way toward spoiling their personal lives. But only for a while. Sooner or later, the message comes through to even the most dedicated workaholic:

Slow down, you’re doing fine, You can’t be everything you want to be before your time. Although it’s so romantic on the borderline tonight. But when will you realize... Vienna waits for you?

Once that idea is digested, the worker is lost forever after to the project. The realization that one has sacrificed a more important value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work) is devastating. It makes the person who has unwittingly sacrificed seek revenge. He doesn’t go to the boss and explain calmly and thoughtfully that things have to change in the future — he just quits, another case of burnout. One way or the other, he’s gone.

Workaholism is an illness, but not an illness like alcoholism that affects only the unlucky few. Workaholism is more like the common cold: Everyone has a bout of it now and then. Our purpose in writing about it here is not so much to discuss its causes and cures, but to address the simpler problem of how you, the manager, ought to deal with your workaholics. If you exploit them to the hilt in typical Spanish Theory fashion, you’ll eventually lose them. No matter how desperately you need them to put in all those hours, you can’t let them do so at the expense of their personal lives. The loss of a good person isn’t worth it. This point goes beyond the narrow area of workaholism, into the much more complex subject of meaningful productivity.

Productivity: Winning Battles and Losing Wars

Next time you hear someone talking about productivity, listen carefully to hear if the speaker ever uses the term “employee turnover.” Chances are that he or she will not. In years of hearing productivity discussed and in hundreds of articles about it, we have never encountered a single expert that had anything to say about the related subject of turnover. But what sense can it possibly make to discuss one without the other? Consider some of the things that organizations typically do to improve productivity: • Pressure people to put in more hours. • Mechanize the process of product development. • Compromise the quality of the product (more about this in the next chapter). • Standardize procedures.

Any of these measures can potentially make the work less enjoyable and less interesting. Hence, the process of improving productivity risks motivating employees to look for more satisfying work elsewhere. That doesn’t say you can’t improve productivity without paying a turnover price. It only says you need to take turnover into account whenever you set out to attain higher productivity. Otherwise, you may achieve an “improvement” that is more than offset by the loss of your key people.

Most organizations don’t even keep statistics on turnover. Virtually none can tell you what replacement of an experienced worker costs. And whenever productivity is considered, it is done as though turnover were nonexistent or cost-free. The Eagle project at Data General was a case in point. The project was a Spanish Theory triumph: Workaholic project members put in endless unpaid overtime hours to push productivity to unheard of levels. At the end of the project, virtually the entire development staff quit. What was the cost of that? No one even figured it into the equation. Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.

Reprise

One of my early consults was a project that was proceeding so smoothly that the project manager knew she would deliver the product on schedule. She was summoned in front of the management committee and was asked for a progress report. She said she could guarantee that her product would be ready by the deadline of March 1, exactly on time according to the original estimate. The upper managers chewed over that piece of unexpected good news and then called her in again the next day. Since she was on time for March 1, they explained, the deadline had been moved up to January 15. —TRL

A schedule that the project could actually meet was of no value to those Spanish Theory managers, because it didn’t put the people under pressure. Better to have a hopelessly impossible schedule to extract more labor from the workers. Chances are, you’ve known one or more Spanish Theory managers during your career. It’s all very well to smile at their short-sightedness, but don’t let yourself off the hook too easily. Each of us has succumbed at one time or another to the short-term tactic of putting people under pressure to get them to work harder. In order to do this, we have to ignore their decreased effectiveness and the resultant turnover, but ignoring bad side effects is easy. What’s not so easy is keeping in mind an inconvenient truth like this one: People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and of their own work experience.

4 Quality—If Time Permits

Twentieth-century psychological theory holds that man’s character is dominated by a small number of basic instincts: survival, self-esteem, reproduction, territory, and so forth. These are built directly into the brain’s firmware. You can consider these instincts intellectually without great passion (that’s what you’re doing now), but when you feel them, there is always passion involved. Even the slightest challenge to one of these built-in values can be upsetting.

Whenever strong emotions are aroused, it’s an indication that one of the brain’s instinctive values has been threatened. A novice manager may believe that work can be completed without people’s emotions ever getting involved, but if you have any experience at all as a manager, you have learned the opposite. Our work gives us plenty of opportunity to exercise the emotions. Chances are, you can think of at least one incident when a person’s emotions did flare up as a direct result of something purely work-related. Consider that incident now and ask yourself (probably for the nth time), Where did all the emotion come from? Without knowing anything about your specific incident, we’re willing to bet that threatened self-esteem was a factor. There may be many and varied causes of emotional reaction in one’s personal life, but in the workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem. We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce —not the quantity of product, but the quality. (For some reason, there is little satisfaction in turning out huge amounts of mediocre stuff, although that may be just what’s required for a given situation.) Any step you take that may jeopardize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of your staff directly against you.

The Flight from Excellence

Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. They don’t think about their action in such terms; they think rather that what they’re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence. Experienced (jaded) workers know otherwise. They know that under the gun, their efforts will be overconstrained. There will be no freedom to trade off resources to make on-time delivery possible. They won’t have the option of more people or reduced function. The only thing to give on will be quality. Workers kept under extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will push problems under the rug to be dealt with later or foisted off onto the product’s end user. They will deliver products that are unstable and not really complete. They will hate what they’re doing, but what other choice do they have? The hard-nosed, real-world manager part of you has an answer to all this: “Some of my folks would tinker forever with a task, all in the name of ‘Quality.’ But the market doesn’t give a damn about that much quality — it’s screaming for the product to be delivered yesterday and will accept it even in a quick-and-dirty state.”

In many cases, you may be right about the market, but the decision to pressure people into delivering a product that doesn’t measure up to their own quality standards is almost always a mistake. We managers tend to think of quality as just another attribute of the product, something that may be supplied in varying degrees according to the needs of the marketplace. It’s like the chocolate sauce you pour onto a homemade sundae: more for people who want more, and less for people who want less.

The builders’ view of quality, on the other hand, is very different. Since their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own. The minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they have achieved in the past. This is invariably a higher standard than what the market requires and is willing to pay for. “But the market doesn’t give a damn about that much quality.” Read those words and weep, because they are almost always true. People may talk in glowing terms about quality or complain bitterly about its absence, but when it comes time to pay the price for quality, their true values become apparent. On a software project, for instance, you might be able to make the following kind of presentation to your users: “We can extrapolate from empirical evidence that the Mean Time Between Failures for this product is now approximately 1.2 hours. So, if we deliver it to you today, on time, it will have very poor stability. If we put in another three weeks, we can forecast MTBF of approximately two thousand hours, a rather respectable result.” Expect to see some Olympic-class hemming and hawing. The users will explain that they are as quality-conscious as the next fellow, but three weeks is real money. Speaking of software, that industry has accustomed its clients to accept in-house-developed application programs with an average defect density of one to three defects per hundred lines of code! With sublime irony, this disastrous record is often blamed on poor quality consciousness of the builders. That is, those same folks who are chided for being inclined to “tinker forever with a program, all in the name of ‘Quality’” are also getting blamed when quality is low. Let’s put the blame where it belongs. He who pays the piper is calling for a low-quality tune. By regularly putting the development process under extreme time pressure and then accepting poor-quality products, the software user community has shown its true quality standard.

All of this may sound like a diatribe against software users and against the standards of the marketplace in general, but it needn’t be taken that way. We have to assume that the people who pay for our work are of sound enough mind to make a sensible trade-off between quality and cost. The point here is that the client’s perceived needs for quality in the product are often not as great as those of the builder. There is a natural conflict. Reducing the quality of a product is likely to cause some people not to buy, but the reduced market penetration that results from virtually any such quality reduction will often be more than offset by increased profit on each item sold. Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence. A market-derived quality standard seems to make good sense only as long as you ignore the effect on the builder’s attitude and effectiveness. In the long run, market-based quality costs more. The lesson here is, Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

If you doubt that notion, imagine the following gedankenexperiment: Ask a hundred people on the street what organization or culture or nation is famous for high quality. We predict that more than half the people today would answer, “Japan.” Now ask a different hundred people what organization or culture or nation is famous for high productivity. Again, the majority can be expected to mention, “Japan.” The nation that is an acknowledged quality leader is also known for its high productivity.

Wait a minute. How is it possible that higher quality coexists with higher productivity? That flies in the face of the common wisdom that adding quality to a product means you pay more to build it. For a clue, read the words of Tajima and Matsubara, two of the most respected commentators on the Japanese phenomenon: The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.

Quality Is Free, But...

Philip Crosby presented this same concept in his book Quality Is Free, published in 1979. In this work, Crosby gave numerous examples and a sound rationale for the idea that letting the builder set a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality.

We have an awful inkling that Crosby’s book has done more harm than good in industry. The problem is that the great majority of managers haven’t read it, but everybody has heard the title. The title has become the whole message. Managers everywhere are enthusing over quality: “The sky’s the limit for quality, we’ll have as much free quality as we can get!” This hardly boils down to a positive quality consciousness. The attitude is just the opposite of what Crosby advocates.

The real message of the linked quality and productivity effects needs to be presented in slightly different terms: Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.

The organization that is willing to budget only zero dollars and zero cents for quality will always get its money’s worth. A policy of “Quality—If Time Permits” will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product.

Hewlett-Packard has long been an example of an organization that reaps the benefits from increased productivity due to high, builder-set quality standards. From its beginning, the company has made a cult of quality. In such an environment, the argument that more time or money is needed to produce a high-quality product is generally not heard. The result is that developers know they are part of a culture that delivers quality beyond what the marketplace requires. Their sense of quality identification works for increased job satisfaction and some of the lowest turnover figures seen anywhere in the industry.

Power of Veto

In some Japanese companies, notably Hitachi Software and parts of Fujitsu, the project team has an effective power of veto over delivery of what they believe to be a not-yet-ready product. No matter that the client would be willing to accept even a substandard product, the team can insist that delivery wait until its own standards are achieved. Of course, project managers are under the same pressure there that they are here: They’re being pressed to deliver something, anything, right away. But enough of a quality culture has been built up so that these Japanese managers know better than to bully their workers into settling for lower quality.

Could you give your people power of veto over delivery? Of course, it would take nerves of steel, at least the first time. Your principal concern would be that Parkinson’s Law would be working against you. That’s an important enough subject to warrant a chapter of its own.

5 Parkinson’s Law Revisited

Parkinson’s Law and Newton’s Law

Parkinson was not a scientist. He collected no data; he probably didn’t even understand the rules of statistical inference. Parkinson was a humorist. His “law” didn’t catch on because it was so true. It caught on because it was funny.

Of course, Parkinson’s Law wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t a germ of truth in it. Parkinson cites examples of his law as observed in a fictitious government bureaucracy, some believe patterned on the British Post Office. Bureaucracies are prone to such problems, because they give little job-derived satisfaction to their workers. But you probably don’t work in a bureaucracy. Even if you do, you go to great lengths to make sure that your people are spared its effects; otherwise, they’d never get anything done. The result is that your people have the possibility of lots of job-derived satisfaction. That leads to a simple truth worth stating: Parkinson’s Law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people.

Their lives are just too short to allow too much loafing on the job. Since they enjoy their work, they are disinclined to let it drag on forever —that would just delay the satisfaction they all hanker for. They are as eager as you are to get the job done, provided only that they don’t have to compromise their standard of quality.

You Wouldn’t Be Saying This If You’d Ever Met Our Herb

Some Data from the University of New South Wales

Of course, the Parkinson’s Law mentality is not going to go away just because we say it ought to. What would help to convert managers would be some carefully collected data proving that Parkinson’s Law doesn’t apply to most workers. (Forget for a moment that Parkinson supplied no data at all to prove that the law did apply, he just reiterated it for a few hundred pages.) Two respected researchers at the University of New South Wales, Michael Lawrence and Ross Jeffery, ran annual surveys through the eighties and nineties. They measured live projects in industry according to a common data collection standard. Each year they focused on a different aspect of project work. The 1985 survey provided some data that reflects on the inapplicability of Parkinson’s Law. It isn’t exactly the “smoking gun” that completely invalidates the law, but it ought to be sufficient to raise some doubts. Lawrence and Jeffery set out to determine the productivity effect of various estimating methods. They had in mind to prove (or disprove) the folkloric belief that developers (programmers, in this case) work harder if they’re trying to meet their own estimates. For each of 103 projects studied, Lawrence and Jeffery calculated a weighted metric of productivity. They then grouped the sample into subgroups, depending on how the original estimates were made. A partial result is presented in Table 5–1.

Variation on a Theme by Parkinson

A slight variation on Parkinson’s Law produces something that is frighteningly true in many organizations: Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

This effect can start when the company is founded, and become worse every year. If the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1651 and once the largest company in the world) were still around, its employees might well be spending forty hours a week filling in forms. Notice that in this case, it’s the company that exhibits Parkinsonian behavior rather than its employees. We’ll return to this theme in Part II.

6 Laetrile

Laetrile is a colorless liquid pressed from the soft bitter insides of apricot pits. In Sweden, you can buy the stuff in the grocery store for about the price of almond extract, and you use it in baking much as you would any other extract. In Mexico, you can buy it for fifty dollars a drop to “cure” your fatal cancer. Of course, it doesn’t cure anything. All the evidence demonstrates that it is a cruel fraud. But since no one else has anything at all to offer them, some terminal patients accept the claims of the laetrile peddlers, no matter how outrageous. People who are desperate enough don’t look very hard at the evidence. Similarly, lots of managers are “desperate enough,” and their desperation makes them easy victims of a kind of technical laetrile that purports to improve productivity. There is seldom any evidence at all to support the claims of what they buy. They, too, dispense with evidence because their need is so great.

One day, in a moment of high silliness, I started clipping ads for products that claimed to boost productivity by 100 percent or more. Within a very short time, I had quite a pile. The amazing thing was the diversity of the means advertised to yield big productivity gains. There were seminars, packaged programs, methodologies, books, scheduling boards, hardware monitors, computing languages, and newsletters. Going uptown on the subway that night, I spotted one final ad on the back of the New York Post. It read, “Lose Fat While Sleeping.” It seemed to fit right in with the others. —TRL

The Seven Sirens

This Is Management

第二部分 办公环境 the office environment

• The Furniture Police 家具警察

  警察思路 统一的塑料地下室

• “You Never Get Anything Done around Here between 9 and 5.” “朝九晚五在这里啥也完成不了。”

  弃权政策 编码战争游戏：观察生产效率的因素 个体差异 生产效率的非相关因素 你可能不想让你的老板知道 工作环境的影响 我们证明了什么

• Saving Money on Space 在空间上省钱

  席卷大地的瘟疫 让我们暂停抨击，来谈几点事实 工作环境质量和产品质量 诺贝尔奖级别的发现 躲起来 间奏曲：生产效率度量和不明飞行物 Intermezzo: Productivity measurement and unidentified flying objcets 吉尔布定律 但是，不知你可否接受 闭上你的眼睛去度量

• Brain Time versus Body Time 大脑时间与身体时间

  流 没有流的无休止状态 根据流来计算时间 E参数 一座丝巾花园 对工作的思考

• The Telephone 电话

  进入另一个世界 魔界奇谭 修改过的电话道德 不兼容的多任务处理

• Bring Back the Door 门的回归

  表演还未结束，直到胖妈开始演唱 闪亮的问题 创意空间 活力空间 打破企业常规

• Taking Umbrella Steps 采取保护步骤

  亚历山大的有机控制理论 模式 第一个模式：从工具箱里定制工作空间 第二个模式：窗户 第三个模式：室内和室外空间 第四个模式：公共空间 模式之模式 回归现实

试想一下： 一个员工在办公场所，却无法进入工作状态，那样一来，老板就白白浪费了给他的一切工资。 为了节省办公费用，却白费了工资，那可真是亏大了。 哪些因素在阻碍脑力劳动者的工作？ 1 噪音会使人无法集中精力，迫使大脑处于浅薄的、轻浮、急躁的状态。 2 狭小阴暗的办公环境使人处于压抑的状态，限制并缩小大脑思考的广度。 3 没有一点个人隐私的办公环境使人处于防御状态，难以安心工作。 4 需要相互配合的工作者异地分居，造成无法及时密切地沟通。

In order to make it possible for people to work, you have to come to grips with those factors that sometimes make it impossible. The causes of lost hours and days are numerous but not so different from one another. They are often—maybe even most often—failures, in one form or another, of the environment that the organization has provided to help you work. The phone rings off the hook, the printer service man stops by to chat, the copier breaks down, the chap from the blood drive calls to revise donation times, Personnel continues to scream for the updated skills survey forms, time sheets are due at 3 P.M., lots more phone calls come in,... and the day is gone. Some days you never spend a productive minute on anything having to do with getting actual work done.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all these diversions affected the manager alone, while the rest of the staff worked on peacefully. But as you know, it doesn’t happen that way. Everybody’s workday is plagued with frustration and interruption. Entire days are lost, and nobody can put a finger on just where they went. If you wonder why almost everything is behind schedule, consider this: There are a million ways to lose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.

In Part II, we’ll look into some of the causes of lost time and propose measures that you can take to create a healthy, work-conducive environment.

7 The Furniture Police

The Police Mentality

The Uniform Plastic Basement

8 “You Never Get Anything Done around Here between 9 and 5.”

A Policy of default

Coding War Games: Observed Productivity Factors

Individual Differences

You May Want to Hide This from Your Boss

Effects of the Workplace

What Did We Prove?

9 Saving Money on Space

A Plague upon the Land

We Interrupt This Diatribe to Bring You a Few Facts

A Discovery of Nobel Prize Significance

Hiding Out

Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects

Gilb’s Law

But You Can’t Afford Not to Know

Measuring with Your Eyes Closed

10 Brain Time versus Body Time

Flow

During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement. In this state, there is a gentle sense of euphoria, and one is largely unaware of the passage of time: “I began to work. I looked up, and three hours had passed.” There is no consciousness of effort; the work just seems to, well, flow. You’ve been in this state often, so we don’t have to describe it to you.

An Endless State of No-Flow

Time Accounting Based on Flow

The E-Factor

A Garden of Bandannas

Thinking on the Job

11 The Telephone

Visit to an Alternate Reality

Tales from the Crypt

A Modified Telephone Ethic

Incompatible Multitasking

12 Bring Back the Door

The Show Isn’t Over Till the Fat Lady Sings

The Issue of Glitz

Creative Space

Vital Space

Breaking the Corporate Mold

13 Taking Umbrella Steps

Alexander’s Concept of Organic Order

Patterns

CHAPTER 13 TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS

The First Pattern: Tailored Work Space from a Kit

The Second Pattern: Windows

The Third Pattern: Indoor and Outdoor Space

The Fourth Pattern: Public Space

The Pattern of the Patterns

Return to Reality

Part III: The Right People 正确的人

• The Hornblower Factor 霍恩布洛尔因素

  天生与后天练就 整齐的塑料人 着装标准 词汇代号：专业 企业熵

• Let’s Talk about Leadership 谈谈领导力

  作为工作压榨机制的领导力 作为服务的领导力 领导力和创新 领导力：言与行

• Hiring a Juggler 雇一名杂耍演员

  作品集 技能测试 组织一场试演

• Playing Well with Others 与他人良好合作

  首先，机遇 食物魔法 是的，但是……

• Chapter 18 Childhood’s End 童年的终结

  科技——和它的反面 持续不断的局部注意力 明确合同 昔日的杀手级应用

• Happy to Be Here 很开心在这儿

  离职率：明显的花费 离职的隐性成本 人们为何要离开 一种特殊的病理学：公司搬迁 永恒之地的观念

• Human Capital 人力资本

  对人来说呢？ 谁在意这些？ 衡量人力资本投资 新人上手需要多长时间？ 玩华尔街的游戏

The final outcome of any effort is more a function of who does the work than of how the work is done. Yet modern management science pays almost no attention to hiring and keeping the right people. Any management course you’re likely to take barely gives lip service to these aspects. Management science is much more concerned with the boss’s role as principal strategist and tactician of the work. You are taught to think of management as playing out one of those battle simulation board games. There are no personalities or individual talents to be reckoned with in such a game; you succeed or fail based on your decisions of when and where to deploy your faceless resources. In the next four chapters, we will attempt to undo the damage of the manager-as-strategist view, and replace it with an approach that encourages you to court success with this formula: • Get the right people. • Make them happy so they don’t want to leave. • Turn them loose. Of course, you have to coordinate the efforts of even the best team so that all the individual contributions add up to an integrated whole. But that’s the relatively mechanical part of management. For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment the team is formed and the initial directions set out. With talented people, the manager can almost coast from that point on.

14 The Hornblower Factor

Born versus Made

The Uniform Plastic Person

Standard Dress

Code Word: Professional

Corporate Entropy

15 Let’s Talk about Leadership

Leadership as a Work-Extraction Mechanism

Leadership as a Service

Leadership and Innovation

Leadership: The Talk and the Do

16 Hiring a Juggler

The Portfolio

Aptitude Tests (Erghhhh)

Holding an Audition

17 Playing Well with Others

First, the Benefits

Food Magic

Yes, But...

18 Childhood’s End

Technology—and Its Opposite

Continuous Partial Attention

Articulate the Contract

Yesterday’s Killer App

19 Happy to Be Here

Turnover: The Obvious Costs

The Hidden Costs of Turnover

Why People Leave

A Special Pathology: The Company Move

The Mentality of Permanence

20 Human Capital

How About People?

So Who Cares?

Assessing the Investment in Human Capital

What Is the Ramp-Up Time for an Experienced Worker?

Playing Up to Wall Street

Part IV: Growing Productive Teams 高效团队养成

• The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts 整体大于部分之和

  有凝聚力团队的概念 歇斯底里式的乐观管理 纳瓦隆大炮 有凝聚力团队的标志 团队和团伙

• The Black Team 黑衣团队

  传奇团队的人员组成 可怜的地球生物，谁能拯救你们呢？ 小结

• Teamicide 团队自毁

  防御式管理 官僚主义 物理分隔 时间碎片 牺牲产品质量 伪造截止日期 团伙控制 重游伤心地

• Teamicide Revisited 再谈团队自毁

  可恶的标语和纪念牌 加班：一种意外的副作用

• Competition 竞争

  考虑一个类比 这有关系吗？辅导的重要性 再谈团队自毁 混合的隐喻

• A Spaghetti Dinner 一顿意面晚餐

  团队效应开始起作用 这里发生了什么？

• Open Kimono 敞开和服

  感觉好，请“病”假 走出去 存在规则，但我们要打破规则 带嘴唇的鸡 这里谁说了算？

• Chemistry for Team Formation 团队形成的化学反应

  对质量的执著追求 结婚时，我告诉她我爱她 精英团队 不要拆散洋基队 团队行为的网络模型 中餐菜谱的选择 做个总结

Think back over a particularly enjoyable work experience from your career. What was it that made the experience such a pleasure? The simplistic answer is, “Challenge.” Good work experiences have always got a fair measure of challenge about them. Now think of a specific enjoyable memory from that period. Play it over in your mind like a video. Maybe it was a meeting or a bull session or an all-nighter or the breakfast that followed one. If you’re like most of us, such memories are vivid and surprisingly complete. You can hear the sounds and individual voices, you can see expressions on faces, you’re aware of the setting. Freeze your mental video now and examine a single frame in detail. Where is the challenge? We’re willing to bet that it doesn’t figure into your memory at all, or if it does, it’s a remote part of the background. What’s in the foreground of most of our prized work memories is team interaction. When a group of people fuse into a meaningful whole, the entire character of the work changes. The challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is important because it gives us something to focus on together. The challenge is the instrument for our coming together. In the best work groups, the ones in which people have the most fun and perform at their upper limits, team interactions are everything. They are the reason that people stick it out, put their all into the work, overcome enormous obstacles. People work better and have more fun when the team comes together. Part IV looks into the concept of the successfully bonded team and things you can do to help such teams happen.

21 The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

Concept of the Jelled Team

Management by Hysterical Optimism

The Guns of Navarone

Signs of a Jelled Team

Teams and Cliques

22 The Black Team

The Stuff of Which Legends Are Made

Pitiful Earthlings, What Can Save You Now?

Footnote

23 Teamicide

Defensive Management

Bureaucracy

Physical Separation

Fragmentation of Time

The Quality-Reduced Product

Phony Deadlines

Clique Control

Once More Over the Same Depressing Ground

24 Teamicide Revisited

Those Damn Posters and Plaques

Overtime: An Unanticipated Side Effect

25 Competition

Consider an Analogy

Does It Matter? The Importance of Coaching

Teamicide Re-revisited

Mixing Metaphors

26 A Spaghetti Dinner

Team Effects Beginning to Happen

What’s Been Going On Here?

27 Open Kimono

Calling In Well

The Getaway Ploy

There Are Rules and We Do Break Them

Chickens with Lips

Who’s in Charge Here?

28 Chemistry for Team Formation

The Cult of Quality

I Told Her I Loved Her When I Married Her

The Elite Team

On Not Breaking Up the Yankees

A Network Model of Team Behavior

Selections from a Chinese Menu

Putting It All Together

Part V: Fertile Soil 沃土

• The Self-Healing System 自我愈复系统

  确定性与非确定性系统 方法学的隐蔽含义 疯狂的方法学 恶意合规问题 鸡和鸡蛋 再论高科技假象

• Dancing with Risk 与风险共舞

  不要逃避风险 我们几乎从不管理的一种风险 为什么不达标的风险总是没有得到管理

• Meetings, Monologues, and Conversations 会议、独白和交流

  神经硬化 “科技手段增强”的会议 站立会议 基本的健康会议 仪式 太多参与者 开放空间社交 治愈会议上瘾组织的处方

• The Ultimate Management Sin Is 终极管理罪恶得主是……

  举例说明 项目状态会议只关于状态 早期超编 再说碎片化 尊重你自己的投资

• E(vil) Mail “邪恶”电邮

  忆往昔 公司内垃圾邮件 “FYI”到底啥意思？ 是开放型组织，还是公社？ 撤销被动的同意 建立一个少垃圾邮件、自我协调的组织

• Making Change Possible 让改变成为可能

  现在，聆听另一位著名顾问的几句话 老板，这想法很妙。我马上着手进行 一个更好的变化模型 安全第一

• Organizational Learning 组织型学习

  经验与学习 一个重新设计的例子 组织型学习的关键问题 管理团队 空白地带的危险

• The Making of Community 社区的创建

  偏离公司政治 为什么需要社区 没有魔法

Projects and teams exist within a context provided by the larger organization. We call this context the corporate culture. Some cultures support healthy work, while others may make it almost impossible. While factors at the organizational level might be beyond your ability to control, they’re still worth considering. At worst, you need to be aware of what’s being imposed upon you from above; at best, you may someday be in a position to revamp it to best facilitate the work going on in projects underneath you.

29 The Self-Healing System

Deterministic and Nondeterministic Systems

The Covert Meaning of Methodology

Methodology Madness

The Issue of Malicious Compliance

The Baby and the Bathwater

The High-Tech Illusion Revisited

30 Dancing with Risk

Not Running Away from Risk

The One Risk We Almost Never Manage

Why Nonperformance Risks Often Don’t Get Managed

31 Meetings, Monologues, and Conversations

Neuro-sclerosis

The “Technologically Enhanced” Meeting

Stand-Up Meetings

Basic Meeting Hygiene

Ceremonies

Too Many People

Open-Space Networking

Prescription for Curing a Meeting-Addicted Organization

32 The Ultimate Management Sin Is...

For Instance

Status Meetings Are About Status

Early Overstaffing

Fragmentation Again

Respecting Your Investment

33 E(vil) Mail

In Days of Yore

Corporate Spam

What Does “FYI” Even Mean?

Is This an Open Organization or a Commune?

Repeal Passive Consent

Building a Spam-less Self-Coordinating Organization

34 Making Change Possible

And Now, a Few Words from Another Famous Consultant

That’s a Swell Idea, Boss. I’ll Get Right on It.

A Better Model of Change

Safety First

35 Organizational Learning

Experience and Learning

A Redesign Example

The Key Question About Organizational Learning

The Management Team

Danger in the White Space

36 The Making of Community

Digression on Corporate Politics

Why It Matters

Pulling Off the Magic

Part VI: It’s Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here 快乐地在这儿工作

• Chaos and Order 混乱与秩序

  进步是我们最大的问题 试点项目 战争游戏 头脑风暴 培训、旅行、会议、庆祝和撤退

• Free Electrons 自由电子

  小作坊现象 同事、大师、内部创业者 没有前车之鉴

• Holgar Dansk 霍尔加 丹斯克

  然而，为什么是我？ 沉睡巨人 醒来吧，霍尔加

Somewhere deep in our ancestral memory is buried the notion that work is supposed to be onerous. If you enjoy doing something, it isn’t really work. If you enjoy it enough, it’s probably sinful. You ought not to do it too much or even at all. You certainly shouldn’t be paid for it. What you really ought to do is find something else to work at, something that feels like work. Then you can be bored, tired, and generally miserable like everybody else. If you’re a manager, this vestigial memory requires you to make sure that your people never have any fun on the job. Any evidence of pleasure or joy in the workplace is a sure sign that some manager is not doing the job properly. Work is not being extracted with maximum efficiency from the workers; otherwise, they wouldn’t be having such a good time. Of course, nobody ever says outright that work ought not to be fun, but the idea is there, burned into our cultural subconsciousness. It turns up in the guilty sheepishness we feel if we’re ever caught giggling in delight at the task at hand. It surfaces in our reluctant acceptance of the dress code, the anti-popcorn code, and the general furrowed-brow attitude that distinguishes so-called professionals from people who are enjoying themselves. In Part VI, we’ll address the opposite premise, that work should be fun.

37 Chaos and Order

Progress Is Our Most Important Problem

Pilot Projects

War Games

Brainstorming

Training, Trips, Conferences, Celebrations, and Retreats

CHAPTER 37 CHAOS AND ORDER

38 Free Electrons

The Cottage-Industry Phenomenon

Fellows, Gurus, and Intrapreneurs

No Parental Guidance

39 Holgar Dansk

But Why Me?

The Sleeping Giant

Waking Up Holgar

Part I: Managing the human resource

1. Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing

The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.

我们工作的主要问题与其说是技术问题，不如说是社会学问题。

The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do. (…) If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, “The light is better there.”

我们倾向于关注工作的技术方面而不是人性方面的主要原因不是因为它更关键，而是因为它更容易做到。如果你发现自己专注于技术而不是社会学，你就像一个杂耍角色，他在黑暗的街道上丢失了钥匙，并在相邻的街道上寻找钥匙，因为正如他所解释的那样，“那里的光线更好。

Projects fail because of “social” reasons.

由于“社会”原因，项目失败。

2. Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger 芝士汉堡

Speaking to a group of software managers, we introduced a strategy for what we think of as iterative design. The idea is that some designs are intrinsically defect-prone; they ought to be rejected, not repaired. Such dead ends should be expected in the design activity. The lost effort of the dead end is a small price to pay for a clean, fresh start. (…) Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive.

在与一群软件经理的交谈中，我们介绍了一种我们认为是迭代设计的策略。这个想法是，有些设计本质上是容易缺陷的;它们应该被拒绝，而不是修复。在设计活动中应该预料到这样的死胡同。死胡同的付出的努力是为一个干净的、新的开始付出的小代价。(...)营造一种不允许犯错的氛围只会使人们产生防御性。

We spent far too much of our time trying to get things done and not nearly enough time asking the key question, “Ought this thing to be done at all?”

我们花了太多时间试图把事情做好，而没有足够的时间问一个关键问题，“这件事到底应该做吗？

Producing software is not like most productions system at all.

生产软件完全不像大多数生产系统。

3. Vienna Waits for You

Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference.

生产力应该意味着在一小时内取得更多成就，但很多时候，它意味着为了一小时的工资而获得更多。有很大的区别。

Trying to get people to sprint too much can only result in loss of respect for the manager.

试图让人们过度冲刺只会导致对经理失去尊重。

Workaholic project members put in endless unpaid overtime hours to push productivity to unheard of levels. At the end of the project, virtually the entire development staff quit. What was the cost of that? No one even figured it into the equation.

工作狂项目成员投入了无休止的无偿加班时间，将生产力提高到闻所未闻的水平。在项目结束时，几乎所有的开发人员都辞职了。这样做的代价是多少？甚至没有人把它纳入等式。

People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster.

在时间压力下，人们不会工作得更好，他们只是工作得更快。

If you want a healthy project, pursue a healthy work-life balance.

如果您想要一个健康的项目，请追求健康的工作与生活的平衡。

4. Quality — If Time Permits

There may be many and varied causes of emotional reaction in one’s personal life, but in the workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem.

在个人生活中，情绪反应的原因可能有很多，但在工作场所，情绪的主要唤起因素是自尊受到威胁。

We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce—not the quantity of product, but the quality.

我们都倾向于将自尊心与我们生产的产品的质量紧密联系在一起——不是产品的数量，而是质量。

The builders’ view of quality (…) tend to impose quality standards of their own. The minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they have achieved in the past. This is invariably a higher standard than what the market requires and is willing to pay for.

建筑商对质量的看法（...）倾向于强加自己的质量标准。满足他们的最低要求或多或少是他们过去取得的最佳质量。这总是比市场要求和愿意支付的标准更高。

[Software] industry has accustomed its clients to accept in-house-developed application programs with an average defect density of one to three defects per hundred lines of code!

[软件]行业已经习惯于接受内部开发的应用程序，平均缺陷密度为每百行代码一到三个缺陷！

Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence.

允许质量标准由买方而不是建筑商设定，这就是我们所说的“远离卓越”。

In the long run, market-based quality costs more. The lesson here is: Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

从长远来看，基于市场的质量成本更高。这里的教训是：质量远远超出最终用户的要求，是提高生产力的一种手段。

“The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.”

“在日本，价格和质量之间的权衡是不存在的。相反，高质量带来成本降低的想法被广泛接受。

Strive for quality!

精益求精！

5. Parkinson’s Law Revisited 重新审视帕金森定律

Work expands to fill the time allocated for it - Parkinson’s Law

工作扩大以填补分配给它的时间 - 帕金森定律

Parkinson was not a scientist. He collected no data; he probably didn’t even understand the rules of statistical inference. Parkinson was a humorist. His “law” didn’t catch on because it was so true. It caught on because it was funny.

帕金森不是科学家。他没有收集任何数据;他可能甚至不了解统计推断的规则。帕金森是个幽默家。他的“律法”没有流行起来，因为它是如此真实。它之所以流行，是因为它很有趣。

Parkinson’s Law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people.

帕金森定律几乎肯定不适用于您的员工。

Bad estimates, hopelessly tight estimates, sap the builders’ energy.

糟糕的估计，无可救药的严格估计，消耗了建筑商的精力。

These projects [which no estimates were prepared at all] far outperformed all the others.”

这些项目（根本没有进行任何估算）的表现远远优于所有其他项目。

Estimations (because of the time pressure that they impose) are most of the times harmful for productivity.

大多数时候，估算（因为它们施加的时间压力）对生产力有害。

6. Laetrile 扁桃腈

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

经理的职能不是让人们工作，而是让人们有可能工作。

There’s no silver bullet. Focus on effective ways of handling people, modifying the workplace and corporate culture…

没有灵丹妙药。注重有效的人事方式，改变工作场所和企业文化......

Part II: The Office Environment

7. The Furniture Police

Intellectual work is not taken into consideration when offices are set up.

在设立办事处时，不考虑智力工作。

8. “You Never Get Anything Done around Here between 9 and 5.”

Many companies provide developers with a workplace that is so crowded, noisy, and interruptive as to fill their days with frustration.

许多公司为开发人员提供的工作场所非常拥挤、嘈杂和干扰，以至于他们每天都充满挫败感。

The data presented above does not exactly prove that a better workplace will help people to perform better. It may only indicate that people who perform better tend to gravitate toward organizations that provide a better workplace.

上面提供的数据并不能完全证明更好的工作场所会帮助人们表现得更好。这可能只表明表现更好的人倾向于提供更好工作场所的组织。

Think about your workplace beyond defaults.

想想你的工作场所，超越默认。

9. Saving Money on Space 节省空间费用

When a worker complains about noise, he’s telling you he doesn’t fit into either of those fortunate subsets. He’s telling you that he is likely to be defect-prone.

当一个工人抱怨噪音时，他告诉你他不适合这些幸运的子集。他告诉你，他很可能有缺陷。

A quiet environment is likely to be more cost-effective than any other measure that you tackle for productivity gains.

安静的环境可能比您为提高生产力而采取的任何其他措施更具成本效益。

Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects

间奏曲：生产力测量和不明飞行物

Having some metrics is always better that not having any measurement at all.

有一些指标总是比没有任何衡量标准要好。

Keep individual metrics private.

将单个指标保持私密。

10. Brain Time versus Body Time

Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in order to be productive, but for anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must.

并非所有工作角色都要求你达到心流状态才能提高工作效率，但对于任何参与工程、设计、开发、写作或类似任务的人来说，心流是必须的。

What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at full potential.

重要的不是你在场的时间，而是你充分发挥潜力的时间。

By regularly noting uninterrupted hours, you are giving official sanction to the notion that people ought to have at least some interrupt-free time. That makes it permissible to hide out, to ignore the phone, or to close the door (if, sigh, there is a door).

通过定期记录不间断的时间，您正式认可了人们应该至少有一些不受干扰的时间的观念。这使得躲在外面，无视电话或关上门（如果，叹气，有一扇门）是允许的。

11. The Telephone

Managers ought to be alert to the effect that interruption can have on their own people who are trying to get something done.

管理者应该警惕中断可能对试图完成某事的自己员工产生的影响。

People who are charged with getting work done must have some peace and quiet to do it in. That means periods of total freedom from interruptions. When they want to work in flow, they have to have some efficient, acceptable way of ignoring incoming calls. “Acceptable” means the corporate culture realizes that people may sometimes choose to be unavailable for interruption by phone. “Efficient” means that they don’t have to wait out the bell in order to get back to work.

负责完成工作的人必须有一些平静和安静来完成工作。这意味着完全不受干扰的时期。当他们想在流程中工作时，他们必须有一些有效、可接受的方式来忽略来电。“可接受”意味着企业文化意识到，人们有时可能会选择不被电话打断。“高效”意味着他们不必等待铃声响起才能重新开始工作。

The big difference between a phone call and an electronic mail message is that the phone call interrupts and the e-mail does not; (…) Priority “at the receiver’s convenience” is acceptable for the great majority of business communications.

电话呼叫和电子邮件之间的最大区别在于，电话呼叫会中断，而电子邮件不会;(...)对于绝大多数商业通信来说，“在接收方方便时”的优先权是可以接受的。

To the extent that knowledge workers are required to multitask, their managers need to take account of the flow requirements of the different tasks. Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration.

在某种程度上，知识工作者需要同时处理多项任务，他们的管理者需要考虑不同任务的流程要求。混合流动和高度中断的活动只会带来挫败感。

s/phone/Slack

Keep in mind that this involves changes in habits and attitudes.

请记住，这涉及习惯和态度的改变。

12. Bring Back the Door 带回门

The most obvious symbol of success is the door. When there are sufficient doors, workers can control noise and interruptibility to suit their changing needs. The most obvious symbol of failure is the paging system. Organizations that regularly interrupt everyone to locate one person are showing themselves to be totally insensitive to the imperatives of a work-conducive environment.

成功的最明显标志是门。当有足够的门时，工人可以控制噪音和可中断性，以满足他们不断变化的需求。最明显的失败标志是寻呼系统。那些经常打断每个人以找到一个人的组织表明，他们对有利于工作的环境的要求完全不敏感。

We should be proactive seeking a better workplace.

我们应该积极主动地寻求更好的工作场所。

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or inhibits you.

在工作场所设计中，外观被强调得太多了。更重要的，是职场是让你工作还是抑制你。

Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say “Ahah!” and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work. The creative leap involves right-brain function. If the right brain is busy listening to “1,001 Strings” on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost.

许多由专业工人执行的日常任务都是在左脑的串行处理中心完成的。音乐不会特别干扰这项工作，因为消化音乐的是大脑的整体右侧。但并非所有的工作都集中在左脑。偶尔会有突破，让你说“啊哈！”，并引导你走向一个巧妙的旁路，可以节省数月或数年的工作。创造性的飞跃涉及右脑功能。如果右脑忙于听穆扎克的“1,001 Strings”，那么创造性飞跃的机会就失去了。

You don’t need to go for 1-person offices. Instead of open spaces you can arrange small 2-3 people offices, enabling natural, easy interactions.

你不需要去1人办公室。您可以安排 2-3 人的小型办公室，而不是开放空间，从而实现自然、轻松的互动。

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible work space. Uniformity has no place in this view.

在最好的情况下，管理层应该确保有足够的空间、足够的安静和足够的方法来确保隐私，以便人们可以创造自己的合理工作空间。在这种观点中，统一性没有立足之地。

13. Taking Umbrella Steps 采取伞形步骤

Most monolithic corporate space can only be understood in terms of its symbolic value to the executives who caused it to be built. (…) The master plan is an attempt to impose totalitarian order. A single and therefore uniform vision governs the whole.

大多数整体式企业空间只能从其对促成它的高管的象征价值来理解。(...)总体规划是试图强加极权主义秩序。一个单一的、因此统一的愿景支配着整体。

In place of the master plan, Alexander proposes a meta-plan. It is a philosophy by which a facility can grow in an evolutionary fashion to achieve the needs of its occupants. The meta-plan has three parts:

亚历山大提出了一个元计划，而不是总体规划。这是一种理念，通过这种理念，设施可以以渐进的方式发展，以满足其居住者的需求。元计划由三个部分组成：

• A philosophy of piecemeal growth
• A set of patterns or shared design principles governing growth
• Local control of design by those who will occupy the space

• 零碎增长的哲学
• 一组控制增长的模式或共享设计原则
• 由将占用空间的人对设计进行本地控制

The First Pattern: Tailored Work Space from a Kit. (…) Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated.

第一种模式：从套件中定制工作空间。(...)今天的模块化隔间是妥协的杰作：它没有给你任何有意义的隐私，但仍然设法让你感到孤立。

Groups of people who have been assigned or have elected to work together need to have a meaningful role in the design of their own space.

被指派或选择一起工作的人群需要在他们自己的空间设计中发挥有意义的作用。

The Second Pattern: Windows. (…) If buildings are constructed in a fairly narrow shape, there need be no shortage of windows.

第二种模式：Windows。(...)如果建筑物的形状相当狭窄，则不必缺少窗户。

The Third Pattern: Indoor and Outdoor Space. (…) If you’ve ever had the opportunity to work in space that had an outdoor component, it’s hard to imagine ever again limiting yourself to working entirely indoors.

第三种模式：室内外空间。(...)如果您曾经有机会在具有户外组件的空间中工作，那么很难想象再次将自己限制在完全室内工作。

The Fourth Pattern: Public Space. (…) a smooth “intimacy gradient” as you move toward the interior (…) should be true as well of a healthy workplace.

第四种模式：公共空间。(...)当你走向内部时，一个平滑的“亲密梯度”也应该是一个健康的工作场所。

The patterns that crop up again and again in successful space are there because they are in fundamental accord with characteristics of the human creature. They allow him to function as a human. They emphasize his essence—he is at once an individual and a member of a group. They deny neither his individuality nor his inclination to bond into teams. They let him be what he is. A common element that runs through all the patterns (both ours and Alexander’s) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas. No two people have to have exactly the same work space. No two coffee areas have to be identical, nor any two libraries or sitting areas. The texture and shape and organization of space are fascinating issues to the people who occupy that space. The space needs to be isomorphic to the work that goes on there. And people at all levels need to leave their mark on the workplace.

在成功的太空中一次又一次出现的模式之所以存在，是因为它们从根本上符合人类的特征。他们允许他像人一样运作。他们强调他的本质——他既是个体，又是群体的一员。他们既不否认他的个性，也不否认他融入团队的倾向。他们让他成为他现在的样子。 贯穿所有模式（包括我们的模式和亚历山大模式）的一个共同因素是对不可复制公式的依赖。没有两个人必须拥有完全相同的工作空间。没有两个咖啡区必须完全相同，也没有两个图书馆或休息区必须完全相同。空间的质地、形状和组织对于占据该空间的人们来说是令人着迷的问题。空间需要与那里正在进行的工作同构。各级人员都需要在工作场所留下自己的印记。

There is nonetheless a possible way to put your people into vital, productive space. The possibility arises because master-planned space is almost always full, and it’s a continual hassle to find a place to house any new effort. If you run one of those as-yet-unhoused efforts, turn your sights outward. Petition to move your group out of the corporate monolith. (…) You don’t have to solve the space problem for the whole institution. If you can solve it just for your own people, you’re way ahead.

尽管如此，还是有一种可能的方法可以将您的员工置于重要的、富有成效的空间中。这种可能性之所以出现，是因为总体规划的空间几乎总是满的，而且找到一个容纳任何新工作的地方都是一个持续的麻烦。如果你在做那些尚未找到的工作之一，把你的目光转向外面。请愿将您的团队从公司整体中移出。(...)您不必为整个机构解决空间问题。如果你能只为自己的人解决这个问题，你就遥遥领先。

Part III. The Right People 合适的人选

Replace [the manager-as-strategist view] with an approach that encourages you to court success with this formula: Get the right people. Make them happy so they don’t want to leave. Turn them loose.

用一种鼓励你用这个公式来争取成功的方法取代[经理即战略家的观点]：找到合适的人。让他们开心，这样他们就不想离开了。把它们松开。

14. The Hornblower Factor

So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be.

因此，在任何时期为你工作的人在结束时都会或多或少地与开始时相同。如果他们从一开始就不适合这份工作，他们永远不会。

The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management.

统一的需要是管理层不安全的表现。

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional.

“不专业”一词通常用于描述令人惊讶和威胁的行为。任何让软弱的经理感到不安的事情几乎都是不专业的。

SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT: Entropy is always increasing in the organization. That’s why most elderly institutions are tighter and a lot less fun than sprightly young companies.

管理的第二热力学定律：组织中的熵总是在增加。这就是为什么大多数老年机构比年轻公司更紧凑，乐趣也少得多的原因。

15. Let’s Talk about Leadership

In order to lead without positional authority —without anyone ever appointing you leader— you have to do:

为了在没有职位权威的情况下领导——没有人任命你为领导者——你必须做到：

Step up to the task. Be evidently fit for the task. Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time. Maximize value to everyone. Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill. It also helps to have charisma.

逐步完成任务。 显然适合这项任务。 通过提前完成所需的功课来准备任务。 为每个人创造最大价值。 以幽默和明显的善意来做这一切。 它也有助于拥有魅力。

Innovation is all about leadership, and leadership is all about innovation.

创新是关于领导力的，而领导力就是创新。

The net here is that it takes a bit of a rebel to help even the best innovation achieve its promise: rebel leadership. The innovator himself doesn’t have to be a great leader, but someone has to be. What rebel leadership supplies to this process is the time to innovate—you take a key person away from doing billable work (this may constitute constructive disobedience on your part) in order to pursue a nascent vision—and the hard push for whatever reshaping the organization has to submit to in order to take advantage of the innovation.

这里的网络是，即使是最好的创新也需要一点叛逆者才能实现它的承诺：叛逆者领导。创新者自己不一定是伟大的领导者，但必须有人成为领导者。反叛领导层为这一过程提供的是创新的时间——你让一个关键人物远离做收费的工作（这可能构成你的建设性不服从），以追求一个新生的愿景——以及为了利用创新而必须屈服于组织的任何重塑。

Since nobody ever knows how the next innovation may alter the organization, nobody knows enough to give permission to the key instigators to do what needs to be done. That’s why leadership as a service almost always operates without official permission.

由于没有人知道下一次创新会如何改变组织，所以没有人知道足够的知识来允许关键的煽动者做需要做的事情。这就是为什么领导力即服务几乎总是在未经官方许可的情况下运作的原因。

16. Hiring a Juggler 雇用杂耍者

When you set out to hire an engineer or a designer or a programmer or a group manager, the rules of common sense are often suspended. You don’t ask to see a design or a program or anything. In fact, the interview is just talk.

当你开始雇用工程师、设计师、程序员或团队经理时，常识规则往往被搁置。你不会要求看到一个设计或程序或任何东西。事实上，采访只是说说而已。

Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired. (…) [But] That person might end up doing the tasks that the test measured for two years and then do other things for twenty.

能力倾向测试几乎总是针对该人在被录用后将立即执行的任务。(...)[但是]这个人可能最终会完成测试测量两年的任务，然后做二十年的其他事情。

So the hiring process needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication traits. The best way we’ve discovered to do this is through the use of auditions for job candidates.

因此，招聘过程至少需要关注一些社会学和人类沟通特征。我们发现最好的方法是对求职者进行试镜。

17. Playing Well with Others 与他人相处融洽

Women brought much more to their new industry than just labor hours. They changed the way that teams were organized and how team members interacted. (…) Today, an all-male team seems thin and less than totally energized. Women made a huge difference.

女性为她们的新行业带来的不仅仅是劳动时间。它们改变了团队的组织方式和团队成员的互动方式。(...)今天，一支全男性的团队看起来很单薄，而且没有完全精力充沛。女性发挥了巨大的作用。

That said, the capacity of a team to absorb newness has its limits. Twenty contractors this month, three the next month, and fifteen the third month means you have just had to integrate 38 new people during your project. You need extra planning to avoid renting humans like you rent cars.

也就是说，一个团队吸收新事物的能力有其局限性。这个月有 20 个承包商，下个月有 3 个，第三个月有 15 个，这意味着您只需要在项目期间整合 38 名新人。你需要额外的计划，以避免像租车一样租人。

18. Childhood’s End 童年的终结

One generation’s technology is the next generation’s environment.

一代人的技术就是下一代的环境。

In the most-simplistic terms, the new generational divide in your organization is about attention: Young people divide theirs while their older colleagues tend to focus on one or possibly two tasks at a time. A generation that grew up studying with music blaring on their iPods, text messages flooding in and out, social networking sites open at all hours, and a video game going on sporadically in a window beside the history assignment is an illustration of what former Microsoft Vice President Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention.” Your youngest hires will tell you that they operate most effectively in this environment. The problem is that continuous partial attention is the exact opposite of flow. If you believe, as we do, that a flow state is essential for getting real work done, then you need to set limits on how attention may be divided. You need to make your youngest workers understand the difference between spending 2 percent of their workday on Facebook in a single block of time and spending 2 percent of their attention all day on Facebook. The one may be a reasonable accommodation for human workers’ personal needs (much like the occasional call or text message home during working hours), while the other may be a deterrent to their ever fitting in. Workers who can’t get into flow are not just less effective, they also are unlikely to fit into a jelled team of mixed-generation people.

用最简单的术语来说，组织中新的代际鸿沟是关于注意力的：年轻人将他们的注意力分开，而他们的年长同事倾向于一次专注于一项或两项任务。 这一代人从小就在iPod上播放着音乐，短信如潮水般涌入，社交网站全天开放，历史作业旁边的橱窗里零星地播放着电子游戏，这些都是前Microsoft副总统琳达·斯通（Linda Stone）所说的“持续部分关注”的例证。你最年轻的员工会告诉你，他们在这种环境中运作得最有效。 问题在于，持续的部分注意力与心流完全相反。如果你像我们一样相信心流状态对于完成真正的工作是必不可少的，那么你需要对注意力的分配方式设定限制。你需要让你最年轻的员工明白，在一段时间内将2%的工作日花在Facebook上和整天花在Facebook上2%的注意力之间的区别。一种可能是满足人类工作者个人需求的合理便利（就像在工作时间偶尔打电话或发短信回家一样），而另一种可能是阻碍他们适应的障碍。无法进入流程的工人不仅效率较低，而且也不太可能融入由混血一代组成的团队。

Articulating the contract to young workers is going to be essential to give them a chance to fit in. If work needs to be done in flow, then your people need to be ready to focus. Continuous-partial-attention periods have to be defined as personal time off, acceptable within limits during the workday. The rest of the workday is for, well, work.

向年轻工人阐明合同对于让他们有机会融入至关重要。如果工作需要按流程完成，那么您的员工需要准备好集中精力。连续部分注意力时间必须定义为个人休假，在工作日的范围内是可以接受的。工作日的其余时间都是为了工作。

19. Happy to Be Here 很高兴来到这里

A reasonable assessment of start-up cost is therefore approximately three lost work-months per new hire. (…) The total cost of replacing each person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of employee cost or about 20 percent of the cost of keeping that employee for the full two years on the job.

因此，对启动成本的合理评估是，每个新员工大约损失三个工作月。(...)更换每个人的总成本相当于四个半到五个月的员工成本，或大约是让该员工工作整整两年的成本的 20%。

In an organization with high turnover, nobody is willing to take the long view.

在一个高流动率的组织中，没有人愿意采取长远的眼光。

Over the years, we have been privileged to work and consult for a few companies with extraordinarily low turnover. You won’t be surprised to learn that low turnover is not the only good thing about these companies. Indeed, they seem to excel at many or most of the people-conscious qualities discussed in these pages. They are the best. (…) The best organizations are not of a kind; they are more notable for their dissimilarities than for their likenesses. But one thing that they all share is a preoccupation with being the best.

多年来，我们有幸为一些营业额极低的公司工作和提供咨询。你不会惊讶地发现，低周转率并不是这些公司的唯一好处。事实上，他们似乎在这些页面中讨论的许多或大多数具有人性意识的品质方面表现出色。他们是最好的。(...)最好的组织不是那种;它们更引人注目的是它们的差异性，而不是它们的相似性。但有一个共同点是，他们都专注于成为最好的。

A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining. (…) When they needed new skills to make a change, the company provided those skills. No job is a dead end.

营业额最低的公司的一个共同特征是广泛的再培训。(...)当他们需要新技能来做出改变时，公司提供了这些技能。没有工作是死胡同。

20. Human Capital 人力资本

Companies treat investment in people as an expense, which is contrary to the fact that people is what matters the most for knowledge work.

公司将对人的投资视为一种费用，这与人是知识工作最重要的事实相反。

Part IV: Growing Productive Teams

Good work experiences have always got a fair measure of challenge about them (…) [but] it’s a remote part of the background. What’s in the foreground of most of our prized work memories is team interaction.

良好的工作经验总是会受到相当大的挑战（...[但是]它是背景的远程部分。我们大多数珍贵的工作记忆中最重要的是团队互动。

21. The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (…) Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. (…) Teams by their very nature are formed around goals. (…) As part of the jelling process, they have all bought into the common goal. (…) Even though the goal itself may seem arbitrary to team members, they pursue it with enormous energy.

一个果冻团队是一群紧密团结的人，整体大于部分之和。(...)一旦一个团队开始抽搐，成功的可能性就会急剧上升。(...)团队本质上是围绕目标组建的。(...)作为果冻过程的一部分，他们都接受了共同的目标。(...)尽管目标本身对团队成员来说似乎是任意的，但他们以巨大的精力追求它。

Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naïve managerial optimism. (…) Organizational goals come in for constant scrutiny by the people who work for the organization, and most of those goals are judged to be awfully arbitrary.

相信员工会自动接受组织目标，这是幼稚的管理乐观主义的标志。(...)组织目标受到为组织工作的人的不断审查，其中大多数目标被判定为非常武断。

There is very little true teamwork required in most of our work. But teams are still important, for they serve as a device to get everyone pulling in the same direction. The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

在我们的大多数工作中，几乎不需要真正的团队合作。但团队仍然很重要，因为它们是一种让每个人都朝着同一个方向努力的工具。团队的目的不是实现目标，而是目标一致。

A few very characteristic signs indicate that a jelled team has occurred. The most important of these is low turnover during projects and in the middle of well-defined tasks.

一些非常典型的迹象表明，已经出现了一个果冻团队。其中最重要的是在项目期间和明确定义的任务中流动率低。

Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity.

果冻团队通常以强烈的认同感为标志。

There is a sense of eliteness on a good team.

一个好的团队有一种精英感。

There is invariably a feeling of joint ownership of the product built by the jelled team.

总有一种对果冻团队构建的产品的共同所有权的感觉。

The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work.

果冻团队的最后一个标志是人们在工作中得到的明显乐趣。

People use team when the tight bonding of the jelled working group is pleasing to them. And they use clique when it represents a threat. (…) Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity.

当果冻工作组的紧密联系令他们满意时，人们就会使用团队。当集团代表威胁时，他们会使用集团。(...)对小圈子的恐惧是管理不安全感的标志。

22. The Black Team

Give a goal to a group of motivated, talented people and you have a jelled team.

给一群积极进取、才华横溢的人一个目标，你就拥有了一个充满活力的团队。

23. Teamicide

You can’t make teams jell. You can hope they will jell; you can (…) but you can’t make it happen. The process is much too fragile to be controlled.

你不能让团队果冻。你可以希望它们会果冻;你可以（...），但你不能让它发生。这个过程太脆弱了，无法控制。

We stopped talking about building teams, and talked instead of growing them. The agricultural image seemed right.

我们不再谈论建立团队，而是谈论而不是发展他们。农业形象似乎是正确的。

Measures that make a team fail: Defensive management; Bureaucracy; Physical separation; Fragmentation of people’s time; Quality reduction of the product; Phony deadlines; Clique control.

使团队失败的措施：防守管理;官僚;物理分离;人们时间的碎片化;产品质量降低;虚假的最后期限;集团控制。

You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. (…) But once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. Any defensive measure taken to guarantee success in spite of them will only make things worse.

你无法保护自己免受自己人民的无能。(...)但是，一旦你决定与一个特定的小组一起去，你最好的策略就是信任他们。尽管有这些措施，但为保证成功而采取的任何防御措施只会使事情变得更糟。

Mindless paper pushing is a waste. It ought to be attacked because it keeps people from working. But our point here is a slightly different one. It is that bureaucracy hurts team formation. The team needs to believe in whatever goal it forms around. (…) Just telling your people that the goal matters won’t be enough if you also have to tell them they should spend a third of their time pushing paper.

盲目推纸是一种浪费。它应该受到攻击，因为它使人们无法工作。但我们在这里的观点略有不同。官僚主义损害了团队的形成。团队需要相信它围绕什么目标形成。(...)如果你还必须告诉他们他们应该花三分之一的时间在推动纸张上，那么仅仅告诉你的员工目标很重要是不够的。

Teams need not only work interactions but also casual interactions, and you often need spaces for that.

团队不仅需要工作互动，还需要随意互动，而你往往需要空间。

Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it’s also bad for efficiency. (…) No one can be part of multiple jelled teams.

碎片化不利于团队组建，但也不利于效率。(...)没有人可以成为多个果冻团队的一员。

Nobody really talks about quality-reduced products. What they talk about is cost-reduced products. But it usually boils down to the same thing.

没有人真正谈论质量降低的产品。他们谈论的是降低成本的产品。但它通常归结为同一件事。

Tight deadlines can sometimes be demotivating. (…) A tight but not impossible deadline can constitute an enjoyable challenge to the team. What’s never going to help, however, is a phony deadline.

紧迫的最后期限有时会令人沮丧。(...)紧迫但并非不可能的最后期限对团队来说是一个令人愉快的挑战。然而，永远无济于事的是虚假的最后期限。

The only time our management shows any awareness of teams is when it takes specific steps to break them up. (…) The team phenomenon, as we’ve described it, is something that happens only at the bottom of the hierarchy.

我们的管理层唯一表现出对团队的意识时，就是采取具体步骤来解散他们。(...)正如我们所描述的，团队现象只发生在层次结构的底部。

24. Teamicide Revisited

Motivational accessories, as they are called (including slogan coffee mugs, plaques, pins, key chains, and awards), are a triumph of form over substance. They seem to extol the importance of Quality, Leadership, Creativity, Teamwork, Loyalty, and a host of other organizational virtues. But they do so in such simplistic terms as to send an entirely different message: Management here believes that these virtues can be improved with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent.

励志配件，正如它们所称的那样（包括标语咖啡杯、牌匾、别针、钥匙链和奖项），是形式胜于实质的胜利。他们似乎颂扬了质量、领导力、创造力、团队合作、忠诚度和许多其他组织美德的重要性。但他们这样做的措辞如此简单，以至于发出了一个完全不同的信息：这里的管理层认为，这些美德可以通过海报来改善，而不是通过努力工作和管理才能来改善。

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, anyway. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by the negative side effects. (…) We don’t work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn’t get done on time.

无论如何，延长加班时间是一种降低生产力的技术。额外的时间几乎总是被负面的副作用所抵消。(...)我们不会为了按时完成工作而加班，而是在工作不可避免地无法按时完成时保护自己免受指责。

25. Competition

Competition between siblings is not entirely ok.

兄弟姐妹之间的竞争并不完全可以。

When you observe a well-knit team in action, you’ll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time. Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their roles tend to switch back and forth over time with, perhaps, A coaching B about TCP/IP and then B coaching A about implementation of queues. When it works well, the participants are barely even aware of it. They may not even identify it as coaching; to them, it may just seem like work. (…) Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. (…) The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don’t feel safe.

当你观察一个团结良好的团队在行动时，你会看到一个基本的卫生行为，即一直在进行的同伴辅导。团队成员两人一组坐下来传授知识。当这种情况发生时，总会有一个学习者和一个老师。随着时间的流逝，他们的角色往往会来回切换，也许是 A 指导 B 了解 TCP/IP，然后 B 指导 A 实现队列。当它运作良好时，参与者甚至几乎不知道它。他们甚至可能不认为这是教练;对他们来说，这似乎只是工作。(...)无论是否命名，教练都是成功团队互动的重要因素。(...)如果人们感到不安全，教练的行为根本无法发生。

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible.

内部竞争的直接影响是使教练变得困难或不可能。

Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.

任何对团队成员进行差异奖励的行动都可能促进竞争。管理者需要采取措施减少或抵消这种影响。

26. A Spaghetti Dinner 意大利面晚餐

Good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. (…) The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed.”

优秀的管理者经常为团队提供轻松的机会，让他们共同取得成功。(...)最好的老板是能够一遍又一遍地管理这件事的人，而团队成员却不知道他们已经被“管理”了。

27. Open Kimono 打开和服

You take no steps to defend yourself from the people you’ve put into positions of trust. And all the people under you are in positions of trust. A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.

你没有采取任何措施来保护自己免受你所信任的人的伤害。你手下的所有人都处于信任的位置。一个你不能信任任何自主权的人对你毫无用处。

It’s heady and a little frightening to know that the boss has put part of his or her reputation into the subordinates’ hands. It brings out the best in everyone.

知道老板将他或她的部分声誉交到下属手中，这令人陶醉，也有点可怕。它能激发每个人最好的一面。

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

如果你手下有体面的人，那么你可能没有什么比偶尔让自己摆脱他们的头发更能显着提高他们成功的机会了。

By their fruits, ye shall know them.

凭着他们的果子，你们就认识他们了。

The engineering profession is famous for a kind of development mode that doesn’t exist elsewhere: (…) the project is hidden away someplace where it can be done without upper management’s knowing what’s going on.º

工程专业以一种在其他地方不存在的开发模式而闻名：（...）项目隐藏在某个地方，可以在高层管理人员不知道发生了什么的情况下完成。

People at all levels know whether some sensible insubordination is acceptable or not.

各级人民都知道一些明智的不服从是可以接受的。

28. Chemistry for Team Formation. 团队组建的化学反应。

Admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization:

• Make a cult of quality.
  • The judgment that a still-imperfect product is “good enough” is the death knell for a jelling team. (…) The opposite attitude, of “only perfect is good enough for us,” gives the team a real chance. This cult of quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation.
• Provide lots of satisfying closure.
• Build a sense of eliteness.
• Allow and encourage heterogeneity.
• Preserve and protect successful teams.
• Provide strategic but not tactical direction.
  • By definition, the manager is not a peer and so can’t be part of the peer group. (…) No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down. The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy. For all the deference paid to the concept of leadership (a cult word in our industry), it just doesn’t have much place here.

诚然，一个健康组织的化学建设战略的要素清单非常简单：

• 对质量进行崇拜。
  • 判断一个仍然不完美的产品是否“足够好”，是果冻团队的丧钟。(...)相反的态度，“只有完美对我们来说才足够好”，这给了团队一个真正的机会。这种对质量的崇拜是团队组建的最强催化剂。
• 提供许多令人满意的关闭。
• 建立精英感。
• 允许并鼓励异质性。
• 维护和保护成功的团队。
• 提供战略方向，而不是战术方向。
  • 根据定义，经理不是对等方，因此不能成为对等组的一部分。(...)没有人是永久的领导者，因为这个人将不再是同事，团队互动将开始破裂。团队的结构是一个网络，而不是一个层次结构。尽管对领导力的概念（我们行业中的一个崇拜词）给予了尊重，但它在这里并没有太多的位置。

Part V: Fertile Soil

29. The Self-Healing System 自我修复系统

There is a big difference between Methodology and methodology. Small m methodology is a basic approach one takes to getting a job done. It doesn’t reside in a fat book, but rather inside the heads of the people carrying out the work. Such a methodology consists of two parts: a tailored plan (specific to the work at hand) and a body of skills necessary to effect the plan. One could hardly be opposed to methodology: The work couldn’t even begin without it. But a Methodology is very different

方法论和方法论之间有很大的区别。小 m 方法论是完成工作的基本方法。它不是存在于一本厚厚的书中，而是存在于从事这项工作的人的脑海中。这种方法由两部分组成：量身定制的计划（针对手头的工作）和实施计划所需的一系列技能。人们几乎不能反对方法论：没有它，工作甚至无法开始。但方法论却大不相同

Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking.1 All meaningful decisions are made by the Methodology builders, not by the staff assigned to do the work. Those who espouse a Methodology have a long list of its supposed benefits, including standardization, documentary uniformity, managerial control, and state-of-the-art techniques. These make up the overt case for the Methodology. The covert case is simpler and cruder: the idea that project people aren’t smart enough to do the thinking.

Big M Methodology 是一种集中思考的尝试.1 所有有意义的决策都是由方法论的构建者做出的，而不是由被指派做这项工作的员工做出的。那些拥护方法论的人有一长串所谓的好处，包括标准化、文件统一性、管理控制和最先进的技术。这些构成了方法论的明显案例。隐蔽的情况更简单、更粗糙：项目人员不够聪明，无法进行思考。

Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

大量的文档是问题的一部分，而不是解决方案的一部分。

Methodologies are not the only way to achieve convergence.

方法论不是实现趋同的唯一途径。

Better ways to achieve convergence: training; tools; peer review.

实现融合的更好方法：培训;工具;同行审查。

30. Dancing with Risk

Project risk is a good thing, a likely indicator of value. Projects that have real value but little or no risk were all done ages ago.

It’s perfectly reasonable not to manage a risk for which the probability of occurrence is extremely low. It’s not reasonable to leave unmanaged the risk for which the consequences are “just too awful to think about.”

不管理发生概率极低的风险是完全合理的。对后果“太可怕而无法想象的”风险置之不理是不合理的。

31. Meetings, Monologues, and Conversations 会议、独白和对话

Behavior [open laptops and so on] that we take for granted today would have gotten you fired a generation ago.

我们今天认为理所当然的行为（打开笔记本电脑等）会在一代人之前让你被解雇。

A meeting that is specifically called to get something done might be called a working meeting (…), typically called to reach a decision. Who should be invited? That’s easy, the people who need to agree before the decision can be judged made. Nobody else. To make sure no one is blindsided, it’s essential that the working meeting have an agenda relevant to its purpose and that it stick to that agenda.

专门为完成某事而召开的会议可能称为工作会议 （...），通常是为了做出决定而召开的。应该邀请谁？这很容易，在做出决定之前需要达成一致的人才能做出判断。没有其他人。为了确保没有人被蒙蔽双眼，工作会议必须有一个与其目的相关的议程，并坚持该议程。

Your goal should be to eliminate most ceremonial meetings and spend the time in one-on-one conversation, to limit attendance at working meetings and apply the “What ends this meeting?” test to each one. In place of ceremonies, encourage Open-Space networking to give people a chance to have unstructured interaction. Most important, curtail your own need for the confirmation that is provided by ceremonial meetings.

你的目标应该是取消大多数仪式会议，把时间花在一对一的对话上，限制工作会议的出席率，并对每个会议应用“什么结束了这次会议？”测试。代替仪式，鼓励开放空间网络，让人们有机会进行非结构化的互动。最重要的是，减少你自己对礼仪会议提供的确认的需要。

32. The Ultimate Management Sin Is ... 管理的终极罪是……

… wasting people’s time. ……浪费人们的时间

The need that [a meeting with n people present] was being served was not the boss’s need for information, but for reassurance. The ceremony supplies reassurance.

[有 n 个人在场的会议] 的需要不是老板对信息的需要，而是对保证的需要。仪式让人放心。

Ad-hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. And it’s not the status of the work, but the status of the boss.

临时意味着会议不太可能定期安排。因此，任何定期的聚会都可能具有仪式目的，而不是达成共识的重点目标。每周一次的状态会议就是一个明显的例子。虽然它的目标似乎是状态报告，但其真正意图是状态确认。这不是工作的状态，而是老板的状态。

There is a natural inclination to take the effort lopped off the end and apply it back at the beginning. Voilà, a project with this familiar pattern of early overstaffing.

有一种自然的倾向，就是把从末端掉下来的努力，在开始时把它放回去。瞧，这是一个具有这种熟悉的早期人员过剩模式的项目。

Fragmented time is almost certain to be teamicidal, but it also has another insidious effect: It is guaranteed to waste the individual’s time. A worker with multiple assignments—a little new development, some maintenance of a legacy product, some sales support, and perhaps a bit of end user hand-holding— will spend a significant part of each day switching gears.

碎片化的时间几乎可以肯定是团队杀戮，但它也有另一个阴险的影响：它肯定会浪费个人的时间。一个有多个任务的工人——一些新的开发、一些遗留产品的维护、一些销售支持，也许还有一些最终用户的帮助——每天将花费很大一部分时间来换档。

33. E(vil) Mail

When you over-coordinate the people who work for you, they’re all too likely to under-coordinate their own efforts.

当你过度协调为你工作的人时，他们很可能会不协调自己的努力。

Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you’re not going to get much done.

生命是短暂的。如果你需要知道一切才能做任何事情，你不会做很多事情。

34. Making Change Possible 让改变成为可能

People hate change.

人们讨厌改变。

When we start out to change, it is never certain that we will succeed. And the uncertainty is more compelling than the potential for gain.

当我们开始改变时，我们永远无法确定我们是否会成功。不确定性比潜在的收益更具吸引力。

The Believers But Questioners are the only meaningful potential allies of any change

信徒，但质疑者是任何变革中唯一有意义的潜在盟友

Change involves at least 4 stages: old Status Quo, Chaos, Practice and Integration and New Status Quo. You move from 1 to 2 pushed by a foreign element, and from 2 to 3 with a transforming idea.

变革至少涉及4个阶段：旧现状、混沌、实践和整合以及新现状。你从一个外来元素推动下从 1 移动到 2，从一个转变的想法从 2 移动到 3。

Change won’t even get started unless people feel safe.

除非人们感到安全，否则改变甚至不会开始。

35. Organizational Learning

The first thing to realize about organizational learning is that it is not the same as simple accumulation of experience.

关于组织学习，首先要认识到的是，它与简单的经验积累不同。

Experience gets turned into learning when an organization alters itself to take account of what experience has shown. This alteration takes two forms: The organization instills new skills and approaches in its people. OR The organization redesigns itself to operate in some different manner.

当一个组织改变自己以考虑到经验所显示的内容时，经验就会转化为学习。这种改变有两种形式：组织向员工灌输新的技能和方法。或者：组织重新设计自己，以某种不同的方式运作。

The most natural learning center for most organizations is at the level of that much-maligned institution, middle management. This squares exactly with our own observation that successful learning organizations are always characterized by strong middle management.

对于大多数组织来说，最自然的学习中心是在备受诟病的机构——中层管理人员的层面上。这与我们自己的观察完全吻合，即成功的学习型组织总是以强大的中层管理人员为特征。

36. The Making of Community 社区的形成

An organization that succeeds in building a satisfying community tends to keep its people.

一个成功建立令人满意的社区的组织往往会留住其员工。

Part VI: It’s Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here

Nobody ever says outright that work ought not to be fun, but the idea is there, burned into our cultural subconsciousness.

从来没有人直截了当地说工作不应该很有趣，但这个想法就在那里，深深地烙印在我们的文化潜意识中。

Work should be fun.

37. Chaos and Order 混沌与秩序

Progress toward more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The thoughtful manager doesn’t want to stop the trend, but may nonetheless feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder that has breathed so much energy into the work. This leads to a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder. (…) Ways to implement this policy:

• Pilot projects
• War games
• Brainstorming
• Provocative training experiences
• Training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats

朝着更有序、更可控的方式发展是不可阻挡的趋势。深思熟虑的经理不想阻止这种趋势，但可能仍然觉得有必要取代一些为工作注入大量能量的失落的混乱。这导致了建设性地重新引入少量混乱的政策。(...)实施此策略的方法：

• 试点项目
• 战争游戏
• 头脑 风暴
• 挑衅性的训练经历
• 培训、旅行、会议、庆典和务虚会

38. Free Electrons 自由电子

The trend to create an increasing number of free electron positions is more than just a response to the threat of the cottage industry. The reason there are so many gurus and fellows and intrapreneurs and internal consultants in healthy modern companies is quite simply that companies profit from them. The people in these positions contribute disproportionately to the organizations that employ them. They are motivated to make the positions created for them pay off for their companies.

创造越来越多的自由电子位置的趋势不仅仅是对家庭手工业威胁的回应。在健康的现代公司中，之所以有如此多的大师、研究员、内部企业家和内部顾问，原因很简单，公司从中获利。担任这些职位的人对雇用他们的组织做出了不成比例的贡献。他们有动力让为他们创造的职位为他们的公司带来回报。

The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose.

最佳经理人的标志是能够挑选出少数几个具有适当视角和成熟度的关键精神，然后让他们松懈。

39. Holgar Dansk 霍尔加·丹斯克

It doesn’t take much to wake up the giant. If the silliness is gross enough, people need no more than a gentle catalyst. It may be one small voice saying, “This is unacceptable.” People know it’s true. Once it’s been said out loud, they can’t ignore it any longer.

唤醒巨人并不需要太多。如果愚蠢到足够恶心，人们只需要一个温和的催化剂。可能是一个小声音在说，“这是不可接受的。人们知道这是真的。一旦大声说出来，他们就不能再忽视它了。

If you’ve smiled ruefully at any of the characterizations in this book, it’s time now to stop smiling and start taking corrective action.

如果你对本书中的任何描述都露出了可怜的笑容，那么现在是时候停止微笑并开始采取纠正措施了。

歌曲 Vienna waits for you 维也纳在等你

词曲: Billy Joel 放慢脚步，感受生活之美。

Slow down you crazy child 慢点，你个疯娃儿。 You're so ambitious for a juvenile But then if you're so smart, Tell me why are you still so afraid? 少年啊，你太张狂了； 然而，若你真的聪明，那请告诉我，你为何依然恐惧？ Where's the fire, what's the hurry about? You better cool it off before you burn it out (cool off: 变凉, 平静下来) 哪里冒火了？什么事情使你火烧眉毛？ 在你烧焦之前，你最好冷静下来。 You got so much to do, And only so many hours in a day But you know that when the truth is told That you can get what you want, Or you can just get old You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through 你还有那么多事要做，而一天的时间却只有这么多 你可知道，当水落石出之时 你得到的，也许是你想要的，也许只是你的老去 —— 人生的旅途还未过半，就完蛋了。 When will you realize, Vienna waits for you 你何时醒悟：维也纳在等你？ Slow down you're doing fine You can't be everything you wanna be before your time 慢下来，你做地很好 在死之前，你没法实现你的一切想法 Although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight Tonight Too bad but it's the life you lead 尽管天际的余晖如此浪漫， 今晚却糟糕透顶，然而，这是你自找的。 You're so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need 你想得太多了，以至于忘记了你需要什么。 Though you can see when you're wrong You know, you can't always see when you're right 尽管你能够看到你的错误， 你知道吗，你却不能总是发现你的正确。 You're right！ 你是正确的！ You've got your passion You've got your pride But don't you know that only fools are satisfied Dream on but don't imagine they'll all come true 你有你的激情，你有你的骄傲； 可你知道吗，只有傻瓜才会满意！ 梦想，却别幻想它们全部实现。 When will you realize Vienna waits for you? 你何时才会清醒：维也纳在等你？ Slow down you crazy child 慢点，你个疯娃儿。 Take the phone off the hook And disappeaar for a while It's alright, you can afford to lose a day or two 关掉手机，玩一下消失。 没事儿，你负担得起一两天的放空。 When will you realize, Vienna waits for you 你何时才会清醒：维也纳在等你？

['dʒu:vinail] n. 少年, 少年读物。 kick off: [informal] to begin 踢开; 强使离开。 gonna: /ˈɡɑː.nə/ going to

“流”的状态：“我开始工作。等我抬头一看，三个小时就过去了。” 这里不会有工作量的感知; 工作展开就像流一样自然。 对于从事工程、设计、开发、写作或类似的工作，流是必需的。 这些任务都需要精神高度集中，只有处在流的状态下，你才能够很好地工作。 不幸的是，你无法像开关那样随时启动流。 你需要一个缓慢的过程来进入状态，15分钟或更长时间的集中才能把自己锁定在流里面。 在这个引入过程中，对噪声和干扰是非常敏感的。 在一个毁灭性的环境，可能让你很难、甚至不可能进入流的状态。 办公环境设计往往过分关注外观。 事实上，与设计密切相关的是要看工作环境能否让你安心开展工作。 有益工作的办公室不是地位的象征，而是一种必需品。 你要么为打造这样的环境买单，要么就是牺牲生产效率来偿付。 当大家挂起稀奇古怪的照片，在桌上堆满东西，家具移来移去，或者合并他们的办公室时，你最好一笑置之。 只有当大家把空间按照适合自己的工作组织后，他们才能够抛开空间的影响，完全投入到工作中。 没有一起聚餐的人类不可能形成群体。给每个(工作小组)一个可以共同进餐的地方，并让其成为日常活动。 人既是个体的人，又是群体的人。人的个体属性和集体倾向性都得到了认可，从而让人能够自由发挥。 一个离职率高的组织里，没有人会去长线思考问题。 为什么离开？ 过客心态：同事造成不希望长期投入工作的感觉 可被替代感：管理层认为员工是可被替代的部件，在这种情况下，忠诚是可笑的。 最低离职率的公司的一个共同特点就是广泛的再培训。