2023年经济学人 减法思维: 最好的老板知道怎样减少工作

（单词翻译）

Business

商业版块

Bartleby

巴托比专栏

The minus mindset

减法思维

The best bosses don't just load more and more work on; they subtract things.

最好的老板不只是拼命增加工作，他们会减去一些东西。

Companies are used to celebrating addition.

公司习惯于赞颂增长。

Profits, customers and share prices should go up rather than fall.

利润、客户和股价应该上升，而不是下降。

Innovation is the adding of new products.

创新就是添加新产品。

Larger numbers are a measure of career success: managers climb the corporate¹ ladder by taking on more reports, running heftier budgets and trousering bigger salaries.

更大的数字是衡量职业成功的标准：经理们通过做更多的报告、负责预算更高的项目和赚得更多工资来一步步晋升。

Genuine superstars don’t just add. They multiply.

真正的超级巨星不只是做加法，而是会成倍增长。

The best software programmers are tagged as “10x developers”, for supposedly being ten times more productive than their peers.

最优秀的软件程序员会被贴上“10倍开发者”的标签，据说他们的工作效率是同事的10倍。

Firms are not always opposed to subtraction².

公司并不总是反对减法。

There are good kinds of cuts: carbon emissions³, most obviously.

有一些减法是可取的：最明显的就是碳排放。

Reducing costs is a necessary part of management, though not a welcome one.

降低成本是管理的一个必要部分，尽管不受欢迎。

But the value of doing less is underestimated.

但少做事的价值还是被低估了。

The best bosses are those who take things away as well as add them on.

最好的老板是那些既能把东西加上去，又能把东西拿掉的人。

That means clearing time for employees to get work done.

这意味着为员工腾出时间来完成工作。

Meetings are almost always called by bosses.

会议几乎总是由老板召集进行。

Some are useful; many of them have all the pizzazz and impact of a speed-awareness course.

有些会议是有用的，但许多会议的活跃程度和影响力与超速教育课差不多。

Shopify, an e-commerce firm, began the year by deleting 12,000 recurring⁴ meetings from corporate calendars, and asking everyone to think carefully before reinstating them.

今年年初，电商公司Shopify从公司日程表中删除了1.2万个定期会议，并要求所有人在恢复这些会议之前仔细考虑清楚。

The company reports a rise in productivity as a result of the cull⁵.

该公司报告称，由于削减会议，工作效率有所提高。

The only thing worse than having too many meetings is not being invited to them at all.

比开太多会更糟糕的只有根本没被邀请去参加会议。

So whenever meetings do take place, surprisingly large numbers of people can turn up.

因此，无论何时举行会议，到场的人总会出人意料地多。

Minus-minded managers will give employees permission not to attend if they are not needed.

有减法思维的经理会允许员工不参加不必要的会议。

By the same token, good bosses will send messages when necessary, not every time a bright idea pops into their head.

出于同样的原因，好的老板会在必要的时候向员工传达信息，而不是脑子里一冒出好点子就开会。

They will reduce the tempo⁶ of work, by leaving employees time to concentrate.

这样的老板会让员工有时间集中精力，从而让工作节奏变缓。

They will be clear if something is urgent or not.

他们会清楚地知道事情是否紧急。

A recent study by Laura Giurge of London Business School and Vanessa Bohns of Cornell University found that receivers of an email routinely overestimate⁷ how quickly its sender expects a reply.

伦敦商学院的劳拉·吉奇和康奈尔大学的瓦妮莎·博恩斯最近的一项研究发现，收到电子邮件的人通常会高估发件人期待的回复速度。

Subtraction is not just about removing day-to-day distractions⁸.

减法不仅仅是减去日常生活中的干扰。

It’s also about taking decisions to kill off projects and products that are going nowhere, and to focus efforts on the most important bits of the business.

还涉及做出决定，终结那些不会有结果的项目和产品，并将精力集中在业务中最重要的部分。

Peter Drucker, the doyen of management theorists, was an advocate of “planned abandonment”, so that resources that are tied up in marginal activities are freed for more profitable use.

管理学泰斗彼得·德鲁克倡导“有计划的放弃”，从而将被束缚在边际活动中的资源释放出来，用在更有利可图的地方。

Executives should, he advised, routinely ask the same question of every aspect of the business: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?”

他建议，高管们应该常常对企业的各个方面提出同样的问题：“如果我们还没有做这件事，在我们知道了现在知道的情况后，还会再去做这件事吗？”

In “The Case for Good Jobs”, a new book, Zeynep Ton of MIT Sloan School of Management argues that doing less can often make commercial sense.

麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院的泽内普·唐在其新书《好工作案例》中指出，少做些事情往往是符合商业逻辑的。

Costco, a well-regarded American retailer⁹ that believes in the “intelligent loss of sales”, has a deliberately¹⁰ limited product range.

好市多是一家声誉良好的美国零售商，它信奉“聪明的销售损失”原则，并刻意限制了产品种类。

That means it can focus its buying power more effectively, forecast demand more accurately¹¹ and use its employees’ time more productively.

这意味着它可以更有效地集中购买力，更准确地预测需求，更高效地利用员工的时间。

Less may not sound like a great outcome for customers, but at some point choice is deeply wearying.

对于客户来说，更少的选择听起来可能不是一个好结果，但在某种程度上，做出选择也是很累人的。

When you have spent more time trying to decide what to watch on a streaming service than it takes to go to the cinema and watch “Oppenheimer” twice, scarcity¹² seems pretty attractive.

当你迟迟不能决定在流媒体上看什么，而做决定的时间已经超过了去电影院把《奥本海默》看上两遍的时间时，稀缺性会变得相当有吸引力。

Doing and offering less goes against the grain in many ways.

少做事，少产出，这在很多方面都有违常理。

One is how humans are wired.

其中一个方面是人类的天性。

Professor Ton cites a study, published in Nature in 2021 by Gabrielle Adams of the University of Virginia and her co-authors, in which people were asked to think of ways to improve something (like the design of a miniature-golf hole) or solve a problem (such as making the pattern on a grid¹³ symmetrical).

唐教授引用了一项研究发现，这个研究由弗吉尼亚大学的加布里埃尔·亚当斯和她的合著者在2021年发表在《自然》杂志上，研究中，人们被要求想办法改进一些东西(比如微型高尔夫球洞的设计)或解决问题(比如让网格上的图案对称)。

The researchers found that, without an explicit¹⁴ prompt to think about subtraction, participants systematically¹⁵ defaulted to adding features rather than taking them away.

研究人员发现，在没有明确提示他们考虑减法的情况下，参与者系统性地默认要增加而不是减去东西。

There are plenty of other hurdles¹⁶ to embracing the minus mindset.

要接受减法思维，还有很多其他障碍。

The “sunk-cost fallacy” means that managers find it hard to abandon projects that have already soaked up money.

“沉没成本谬论”意味着经理很难放弃已经用掉了很多资金的项目。

Firms are often scared to give up optionality: what if this tiddly new venture turns into the next big thing?

公司往往不敢放弃期权性风险：如果这家小小的新公司变成下一个大公司怎么办？

Sending emails and filling the calendar is a way to feel busy even if not much of value is getting done.

发送电子邮件和填满日历是一种让人感觉忙碌的方式，即使人们没有完成多少有价值的事情。

Recruitment processes and performance reviews reinforce the importance of additive¹⁷ activity; it is unusual for a job candidate to brag¹⁸ about the things they didn’t achieve.

招聘过程和绩效评估强化了附加活动的重要性，求职者吹嘘自己没有完成的事情才是不正常的。

But getting rid of work ought to be a vital part of the managers’ toolkit.

但摆脱工作应该是经理的工具箱中至关重要的一部分。

Add value. Do less.

要增加价值，也要少做事。