2022年经济学人 人无完人（1）

（单词翻译）

Business

商业版块

Bartleby: The grip of vice¹

巴托比：把握罪恶

Nobody’s perfect. Managers should not forget that

管理者应牢记：人无完人

The arc of current management thinking bends towards virtue².

如今的管理思维往往与美德挂钩。

Co-operation is what makes teams purr.

想让团队安稳工作，就要合作。

Low-ego empathy is the hallmark of a thoroughly³ modern boss.

真正现代化的老板要有低自我同理心。

Purpose matters to employees as much as pay; society looms⁴ as large as shareholders⁵.

员工要认为，目标和薪酬一样重要；同事和股东一样重要。

But appealing to people’s better nature, and ignoring their vices⁶, is an incomplete approach.

但是，激发人们的善良本性，而忽视他们的罪恶这种方法，并不完善。

Nor is being good necessarily great for your own career.

做好人也不一定对你的职业生涯有好处。

Take a look at the seven capital virtues⁷ and the seven deadly sins laid out in Christian⁸ tradition.

看看基督教传统中列出的七大美德和七宗罪。

The virtues are chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience and humility⁹; the vices are lust¹⁰, gluttony, greed, sloth¹¹, envy, wrath¹² and pride.

七大美德是贞洁、节制、慷慨、勤勉、宽容、耐心和谦虚；七宗罪是色欲、暴食、贪婪、懒惰、嫉妒、暴怒和傲慢。

In aggregate¹³ the first set of qualities is the one for managers to emulate¹⁴.

总的来说，七大美德是管理者要努力具备的。

Neither chaste¹⁵ charity nor lustful¹⁶ gluttony have much to recommend them as a management ethos; but only one is a lawsuit¹⁷ waiting to happen.

无论是慷慨至极还是贪婪无度，都不是太可取的管理理念；但只有一种一定会遭到反对。

Diligence clearly beats sloth.

勤勉显然会胜过懒惰。

Greed is out of fashion.

贪婪已经过时了。

Aiyesha Dey of Harvard Business School and her co-authors have found that excessive materialism¹⁸ on the part of a chief executive can be a warning sign of fraudulent activity and out-of-control risk-taking.

哈佛商学院的艾耶莎·戴伊和她的合著者发现，如果首席执行官表现出过度物质主义，就要警惕可能会发生欺诈以及风险承担失控事件了。

Pride is also increasingly seen as problematic: in a paper from 2018 academics identified narcissistic¹⁹ bosses by the size of their signatures and found a correlation²⁰ with poor financial outcomes at the firms they ran.

人们也愈发认为傲慢会引发问题：在2018年的一篇论文中，学者们根据签名大小辨认出了自恋的老板，并发现他们的公司财务状况不佳与自恋有关。

Yet saintliness is rare and sinfulness can be underrated.

但是，没有几个人能做到至善，而罪恶的力量可能会被低估。

Take envy, for example.

以嫉妒为例。

By design organisations rely on competition as well as co-operation.

在特定情况下，组织对竞争的依赖性与合作一样强。

A kind person might well be content to applaud other people for their success.

善良的人很可能会满足于为他人的成功鼓掌喝彩。

An envious²¹ one will see someone to catch up with.

而嫉妒的人看到的，是自己要追赶的目标。

Psychologists distinguish between malign²² and benign²³ versions of envy.

心理学家将嫉妒分为恶性嫉妒和良性嫉妒。

In one, people try to close gaps in status by bringing others down.

恶性嫉妒的人会试图通过拉低他人来缩小地位差距。

In the other, they are motivated to improve their own performance.

而良性嫉妒的人会以此为动力提升自己。

The recent paper by Danielle Tussing of the University at Buffalo²⁴ and colleagues discovered a third type of behaviour: people who skipped work or even quit their jobs in order to avoid feelings of envy.

纽约州立大学布法罗分校的丹妮尔·图辛和同事所著的一篇新论文发现了第三种做法：为了避免嫉妒他人而选择旷工甚至辞职。

Understanding such emotions is a step towards harnessing them.

要想控制这些情绪，就要理解它们。