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7/25/2006 賴聲川：過了30，要有自己的看法最近，事情有点点多，于是很少跟朋友联络。接到一个很久没有电话联系朋友的电话，问我还好不好，最后要我不要太客气，想发发牢骚的时候，不要顾虑他有多忙，一定给他打电话。30岁以前的我，也许会打电话或者msn上向别人倒苦水，可是既然过了30岁，就不会这样了。大家都不容易，你也不会比别人苦很多，如果有一点点累，那多半因为自己还有想要找寻的。所以，该干嘛，还干嘛。
沒有誇張的手勢，也沒有戲劇化的言詞，在國家音樂廳後台的練習場地，表演工作坊導演賴聲川只是坐在一旁，平靜注視著工作人員反覆賣力地練習，偶爾輕輕地提供一個手勢，一件道具，把工作人員拉出豐沛台詞的情緒中，提醒他們注意觀眾看的角度。
這是表演工作坊6月底推出的舞台劇「費加洛的婚禮」的排演場景，賴聲川不疾不徐地邊看排演、邊做筆記。他說，表演這個行業比較特殊的地方就是，舞台劇的票已經在賣了，而他們還在繼續創作，直到打鐘才交卷。 創造台灣劇場奇蹟 這位留著著名甜甜圈鬍子與半長頭髮的導演，1985年因為創團作品「那一夜，我們說相聲」而轟動整個台灣文化界；1989年的「這一夜，誰來說相聲」繼續把台灣遺忘已久的相聲藝術推到顛峰，相聲錄音帶賣出一百萬套以上，在那個劇場文化荒蕪的年代，表演工作坊是一股活水。 這股活水多年來不斷創造出奇蹟，1985年表坊另一齣大戲「暗戀桃花源」不但再度引起轟動，甚至成為華語戲劇表演中最重要一部戲，至今在中國大陸演出超過一百場以上。此外，成立已經二十二年的表演工作坊，光是它長期倚賴票房收入維生的方式就足以成為世界奇蹟。 賴聲川說，世界上大概沒有像表坊這種做法，其他的表演團體必須靠企業贊助至少百分之六十到七十以上，但是表坊的贊助卻只有百分之十幾，甚至還有餘力去做不是為討好觀眾喜好的創作，1999年的作品「如夢之夢」長達八小時的演出，就是一個最好的證明。 這是賴聲川獨特的自信，他可以輕鬆自如地把精緻表演與大眾文化做完美的結合，無論觀眾欣賞表坊的戲劇表演動機為何，「好看」絕對是讓人掏腰包的關鍵因素，至於賴聲川在劇本上的創意，也絕對是廣大觀眾繼續支持的原因。 能夠兼顧營生與創作，對賴聲川很重要。不過，他卻有些黯然地指出，做自己想做的東西，未來只會愈來愈難維持下去。劇場對他來說或許曾經有娛樂的因子，但絕對不是娛樂，可是現在的觀眾看待劇場表演，卻把它當成娛樂的選項之一。只要娛樂性質不高，觀眾興趣就大減，難怪賴聲川在被問到最近台灣無論在社會或是政壇上話題連連，是否考慮推出新的相聲表演時，他無奈笑說：「政治風暴那麼精彩時，我們就多餘了。」 創意是人人都有的潛能 賴聲川身上最引人好奇之處就是他的創意來源，總是在別人想不到與不可能的地方綻放出新的方向。驚人的是，他源源不絕的創意常在他談笑風生中，一個又一個地冒出來，剛過世不久的舞蹈家羅曼菲對賴聲川深刻的合作印象，就是優雅而不拚命。在指導劇團排演時，他像放風箏一般，讓每個演員自由翱翔在他的創意天空，偶爾拉拉線，適時引導方向而已。 這種從容的創意究竟是如何來的？當然不是天上掉下來給他的禮物，賴聲川最近出的一本新書，談的主題正是他的創意從何而來。 「對我來說，創意是一種潛能。」談到這個主題，他非常願意分享。在他認為，創意的學習應該在兩個領域，一是藝術，二是生活，這兩個領域賴聲川從不缺席，也熱烈參與。他可以手上同時進行表演工作、寫書、翻譯，也懂得暫時放下手邊一切，到印度旅行體驗，或是追逐足球熱。 賴聲川說，每個人都有創意，每個人身上也都藏有一具神秘電腦，重點是你是不是一直在累積你的人生經驗、你的人生素材。這種不斷累積存檔的效果就是創意的來源，一旦需要靈感，體內的神秘電腦就能從不同類別的檔案中抓取。檔案類別愈多、愈清楚，就愈能獲得好的靈感。可惜的是，很多人不知道自己有創意能力，總是吸入無用的資訊垃圾。 台灣缺乏創意環境 談到台灣的創意環境，「我們甚至連說故事都說不好。」賴聲川說。就像前幾年許多廣告都讓他很感冒，連看五、六次還看不懂，「連基本的表達都說不清楚。」談到這裡他覺得這又是環境使然。「看看我們的小孩吧！再看看巴黎的小孩，他們每天上學看到的是什麼？而我們小孩每天上學看到的街道景象又是什麼？」 台灣的城市缺乏理性的結構，讓小孩也失去對比例、結構、秩序的觀察，而這些都是培養創意的基礎。 少了這些基本觀察，創意在台灣變成人云亦云，別人說好就一窩蜂追逐，只在包裝上爭奇鬥豔，對這些假創意之名，實則標新立異的亂象，賴聲川說：「你不覺得我們現在的流行歌曲都是唱給12歲以下的人聽的？」老實說，還真的是如此，就連幼稚園小朋友都愛唱流行歌曲，因為它的押韻方式跟兒歌頗像，讓小朋友容易琅琅上口。 忠於自己內心的聲音 對於創意的話題，賴聲川雖然有一籮筐的觀察心得，不過，他又認為台灣還是有很多創意人喜歡的地方，因為還有很多尚未開發，所以擁有更多可能。當年29歲的賴聲川就是看到這個契機，所以即使他在柏克萊大學念博士時是以第一名的優異成績畢業，即使他留在美國絕對會有燦爛的前景，但是他選擇回台灣開墾劇場工業的土壤。 賴聲川說，這個決定需要一點勇氣，但是他選擇聽從內心的聲音。這個聲音告訴他應該要做的事，而不是想要的東西。後來的發展當然出乎他意料之外，但是這些年來他還是繼續忠於自己內心的聲音，忠於 自己想表達的創作。 無論是對創意或是對生命，賴聲川都有很深刻的看法，他認為：「一個人如果過了30歲之後還沒有自己的看法，他在這個世界上會吃很多虧，也不知道生活該如何過。」看似隨性的賴聲川其實是懂得過日子的，可以承擔，也可以放下；可以很入世，也可以很出世地看待生命。如此悠遊往返，是他的際遇，也是他自己促成的因緣。 賴聲川 The Management MythForwarded by a friend of mine. Kind of long but worth reading it for sure. For me, it is the first time to know the story of Mr. Taylor and the origin of the morden management education. Also, kind of surprised to know the Mck's involvement in Enron's scandal. Have to say that I agree with the most comments the author gives on MBA education.
June 2006 Issue
The Management Myth Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don't get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead. By Matthew Stewart During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don't have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn't seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like "out-of-the-box thinking," "win-win situation," and "core competencies." When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration. After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature Partly, I wanted to "process" my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I'd think, like, I'd rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist? Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: "How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?" The man behind this question was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and, by most accounts, the founding father of the whole management business. Taylor was forty-three years old and on contract with the Bethlehem Steel Company when the pig iron question hit him. Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as laborers loaded ninety-two-pound bars onto rail cars. There were 80,000 tons' worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American War. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste there, he was certain. After hastily reviewing the books at company headquarters, he estimated that the men were currently loading iron at the rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day. Taylor stormed down to the yard with his assistants ("college men," he called them) and rounded up a group of top-notch lifters ("first-class men"), who in this case happened to be ten "large, powerful Hungarians." He offered to double the workers' wages in exchange for their participation in an experiment. The Hungarians, eager to impress their apparent benefactor, put on a spirited show. Huffing up and down the rail car ramps, they loaded sixteen and a half tons in something under fourteen minutes. Taylor did the math: over a ten-hour day, it worked out to seventy-five tons per day per man. Naturally, he had to allow time for bathroom breaks, lunch, and rest periods, so he adjusted the figure approximately 40 percent downward. Henceforth, each laborer in the yard was assigned to load forty-seven and a half pig tons per day, with bonus pay for reaching the target and penalties for failing. When the Hungarians realized that they were being asked to quadruple their previous daily workload, they howled and refused to work. So Taylor found a "high-priced man," a lean Pennsylvania Dutchman whose intelligence he compared to that of an ox. Lured by the promise of a 60 percent increase in wages, from $1.15 to a whopping $1.85 a day, Taylor's high-priced man loaded forty-five and three-quarters tons over the course of a grueling day—close enough, in Taylor's mind, to count as the first victory for the methods of modern management. Taylor went on to tackle the noble science of shoveling and a host of other topics of concern to his industrial clients. He declared that his new and unusual approach to solving business problems amounted to a "complete mental revolution." Eventually, at the urging of his disciples, he called his method "scientific management." Thus was born the idea that management is a science—a body of knowledge collected and nurtured by experts according to neutral, objective, and universal standards. At the same moment was born the notion that management is a distinct function best handled by a distinct group of people—people characterized by a particular kind of education, way of speaking, and fashion sensibility. Taylor, who favored a manly kind of prose, expressed it best in passages like this: … the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is. From a metaphysical perspective, one could say that Taylor was a "dualist": there is brain, there is brawn, and the two, he believed, very rarely meet. Taylor went around the country repeating his pig iron story and other tales from his days in the yard, and these narratives formed something like a set of scriptures for a new and highly motivated cult of management experts. This vanguard ultimately vaulted into the citadel of the Establishment with the creation of business schools. In the spring of 1908, Taylor met with several Harvard professors, and later that year Harvard opened the first graduate school in the country to offer a master's degree in business. It based its first-year curriculum on Taylor's scientific management. From 1909 to 1914, Taylor visited Cambridge every winter to deliver a series of lectures—inspirational discourses marred only by the habit he'd picked up on the shop floor of swearing at inappropriate moments. Yet even as Taylor's idea of management began to catch on, a number of flaws in his approach were evident. The first thing many observers noted about scientific management was that there was almost no science to it. The most significant variable in Taylor's pig iron calculation was the 40 percent "adjustment" he made in extrapolating from a fourteen-minute sample to a full workday. Why time a bunch of Hungarians down to the second if you're going to daub the results with such a great blob of fudge? When he was grilled before Congress on the matter, Taylor casually mentioned that in other experiments these "adjustments" ranged from 20 percent to 225 percent. He defended these unsightly "wags" (wild-ass guesses, in M.B.A.-speak) as the product of his "judgment" and "experience"—but, of course, the whole point of scientific management was to eliminate the reliance on such inscrutable variables. One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results. Yet Taylor never published the data on which his pig iron or other conclusions were based. When Carl Barth, one of his devotees, took over the work at Bethlehem Steel, he found Taylor's data to be unusable. Another, even more fundamental feature of science—here I invoke the ghost of Karl Popper—is that it must produce falsifiable propositions. Insofar as Taylor limited his concern to prosaic activities such as lifting bars onto rail cars, he did produce propositions that were falsifiable—and, indeed, were often falsified. But whenever he raised his sights to management in general, he seemed capable only of soaring platitudes. At the end of the day his "method" amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch! The trouble with such claims isn't that they are all wrong. It's that they are too true. When a congressman asked him if his methods were open to misuse, Taylor replied, No. If management has the right state of mind, his methods will always lead to the correct result. Unfortunately, Taylor was right about that. Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies). Curiously, Taylor and his college men often appeared to float free from the kind of accountability that they demanded from everybody else. Others might have been asked, for example: Did Bethlehem's profits increase as a result of their work? Taylor, however, rarely addressed the question head-on. With good reason. Bethlehem fired him in 1901 and threw out his various systems. Yet this evident vacuum of concrete results did not stop Taylor from repeating his parables as he preached the doctrine of efficiency to countless audiences across the country. In the management literature these days, Taylorism is presented, if at all, as a chapter of ancient history, a weird episode about an odd man with a stopwatch who appeared on the scene sometime after Columbus discovered the New World. Over the past century Taylor's successors have developed a powerful battery of statistical methods and analytical approaches to business problems. And yet the world of management remains deeply Taylorist in its foundations. At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it. The managerial revolution must be counted as part of the great widening of economic opportunity that has contributed so much to our prosperity. But, insofar as it pretends to a kind of esoteric certitude to which it is not entitled, management theory betrays the ideals on which it was founded. That Taylorism and its modern variants are often just a way of putting labor in its place need hardly be stated: from the Hungarians' point of view, the pig iron experiment was an infuriatingly obtuse way of demanding more work for less pay. That management theory represents a covert assault on capital, however, is equally true. (The Soviet five-year planning process took its inspiration directly from one of Taylor's more ardent followers, the engineer H. L. Gantt.) Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest—not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class. I can confirm on the basis of personal experience that management consulting continues to worship at the shrine of numerology where Taylor made his first offering of blobs of fudge. In many of my own projects, I found myself compelled to pacify recalcitrant data with entirely confected numbers. But I cede the place of honor to a certain colleague, a gruff and street-smart Belgian whose hobby was to amass hunting trophies. The huntsman achieved some celebrity for having invented a new mathematical technique dubbed "the Two-Handed Regression." When the data on the correlation between two variables revealed only a shapeless cloud—even though we knew damn well there had to be a correlation—he would simply place a pair of meaty hands on the offending bits of the cloud and reveal the straight line hiding from conventional mathematics. The thing that makes modern management theory so painful to read isn't usually the dearth of reliable empirical data. It's that maddening papal infallibility. Oh sure, there are a few pearls of insight, and one or two stories about hero-CEOs that can hook you like bad popcorn. But the rest is just inane. Those who looked for the true meaning of "business process re-engineering," the most overtly Taylorist of recent management fads, were ultimately rewarded with such gems of vacuity as "BPR is taking a blank sheet of paper to your business!" and "BPR means re-thinking everything, everything!" Each new fad calls attention to one virtue or another—first it's efficiency, then quality, next it's customer satisfaction, then supplier satisfaction, then self-satisfaction, and finally, at some point, it's efficiency all over again. If it's reminiscent of the kind of toothless wisdom offered in self-help literature, that's because management theory is mostly a subgenre of self-help. Which isn't to say it's completely useless. But just as most people are able to lead fulfilling lives without consulting Deepak Chopra, most managers can probably spare themselves an education in management theory. The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it's worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants' recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it's almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year. In one episode, when I got involved in winding up the failed subsidiary of a large European bank, I noticed on the expense ledger that a rival consulting firm had racked up $5 million in fees from the same subsidiary. "They were supposed to save the business," said one client manager, rolling his eyes. "Actually," he corrected himself, "they were supposed to keep the illusion going long enough for the boss to find a new job." Was my competitor held to account for failing to turn around the business and/or violating the rock-solid ethical standards of consulting firms? On the contrary, it was ringing up even higher fees over in another wing of the same organization. And so was I. In fact, we kind of liked failing businesses: there was usually plenty of money to be made in propping them up before they finally went under. After Enron, true enough, Arthur Andersen sank. But what happened to such stalwarts as McKinsey, which generated millions in fees from Enron and supplied it with its CEO? The Enron story wasn't just about bad deeds or false accounts; it was about confusing sound business practices with faddish management ideas, celebrated with gusto by the leading lights of the management world all the way to the end of the party.
If you believed our chief of recruiting, the consulting firm I helped to found represented a complete revolution from the Taylorist practices of conventional organizations. Our firm wasn't about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the pursuit of profit. It was about love. We were very much of the moment. In the 1990s, the gurus were unanimous in their conviction that the world was about to bring forth an entirely new mode of human cooperation, which they identified variously as the "information-based organization," the "intellectual holding company," the "learning organization," and the "perpetually creative organization." "R-I-P. Rip, shred, tear, mutilate, destroy that hierarchy," said über-guru Tom Peters, with characteristic understatement. The "end of bureaucracy" is nigh, wrote Gifford Pinchot of "intrapreneuring" fame. According to all the experts, the enemy of the "new" organization was lurking in every episode of Leave It to Beaver. Many good things can be said about the "new" organization of the 1990s. And who would want to take a stand against creativity, freedom, empowerment, and—yes, let's call it by its name—love? One thing that cannot be said of the "new" organization, however, is that it is new. In 1983, a Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, beat the would-be revolutionaries of the nineties to the punch when she argued that rigid "segmentalist" corporate bureaucracies were in the process of giving way to new "integrative" organizations, which were "informal" and "change-oriented." But Kanter was just summarizing a view that had currency at least as early as 1961, when Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker published an influential book criticizing the old, "mechanistic" organization and championing the new, "organic" one. In language that eerily anticipated many a dot-com prospectus, they described how innovative firms benefited from "lateral" versus "vertical" information flows, the use of "ad hoc" centers of coordination, and the continuous redefinition of jobs. The "flat" organization was first explicitly celebrated by James C. Worthy, in his study of Sears in the 1940s, and W. B. Given coined the term "bottom-up management" in 1949. And then there was Mary Parker Follett, who in the 1920s attacked "departmentalized" thinking, praised change-oriented and informal structures, and—Rosabeth Moss Kanter fans please take note—advocated the "integrative" organization. If there was a defining moment in this long and strangely forgetful tradition of "humanist" organization theory—a single case that best explains the meaning of the infinitely repeating whole—it was arguably the work of Professor Elton Mayo of the Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Mayo, an Australian, was everything Taylor was not: sophisticated, educated at the finest institutions, a little distant and effete, and perhaps too familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis for his own good. A researcher named Homer Hibarger had been testing theories about the effect of workplace illumination on worker productivity. His work, not surprisingly, had been sponsored by a maker of electric lightbulbs. While a group of female workers assembled telephone relays and receiver coils, Homer turned the lights up. Productivity went up. Then he turned the lights down. Productivity still went up! Puzzled, Homer tried a new series of interventions. First, he told the "girls" that they would be entitled to two five-minute breaks every day. Productivity went up. Next it was six breaks a day. Productivity went up again. Then he let them leave an hour early every day. Up again. Free lunches and refreshments. Up! Then Homer cut the breaks, reinstated the old workday, and scrapped the free food. But productivity barely dipped at all. Mayo, who was brought in to make sense of this, was exultant. His theory: the various interventions in workplace routine were as nothing compared with the new interpersonal dynamics generated by the experimental situation itself. "What actually happened," he wrote, "was that six individuals became a team and the team gave itself wholeheartedly and spontaneously to cooperation … They felt themselves to be participating, freely and without afterthought, and were happy in the knowledge that they were working without coercion." The lessons Mayo drew from the experiment are in fact indistinguishable from those championed by the gurus of the nineties: vertical hierarchies based on concepts of rationality and control are bad; flat organizations based on freedom, teamwork, and fluid job definitions are good. On further scrutiny, however, it turned out that two workers who were deemed early on to be "uncooperative" had been replaced with friendlier women. Even more disturbing, these exceptionally cooperative individuals earned significantly higher wages for their participation in the experiment. Later, in response to his critics, Mayo insisted that something so crude as financial incentives could not possibly explain the miracles he witnessed. That didn't make his method any more "scientific." Mayo's work sheds light on the dark side of the "humanist" tradition in management theory. There is something undeniably creepy about a clipboard-bearing man hovering around a group of factory women, flicking the lights on and off and dishing out candy bars. All of that humanity—as anyone in my old firm could have told you—was just a more subtle form of bureaucratic control. It was a way of harnessing the workers' sense of identity and well-being to the goals of the organization, an effort to get each worker to participate in an ever more refined form of her own enslavement. So why is Mayo's message constantly recycled and presented as something radically new and liberating? Why does every new management theorist seem to want to outdo Chairman Mao in calling for perpetual havoc on the old order? Very simply, because all economic organizations involve at least some degree of power, and power always pisses people off. That is the human condition. At the end of the day, it isn't a new world order that the management theorists are after; it's the sensation of the revolutionary moment. They long for that exhilarating instant when they're fighting the good fight and imagining a future utopia. What happens after the revolution—civil war and Stalinism being good bets—could not be of less concern Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we're talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it's just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group. The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better. In the 5,200 years since the Sumerians first etched their pictograms on clay tablets, come to think of it, human beings have produced an astonishing wealth of creative expression on the topics of reason, passion, and living with other people. In books, poems, plays, music, works of art, and plain old graffiti, they have explored what it means to struggle against adversity, to apply their extraordinary faculty of reason to the world, and to confront the naked truth about what motivates their fellow human animals. These works are every bit as relevant to the dilemmas faced by managers in their quest to make the world a more productive place as any of the management literature. In the case of my old firm, incidentally, the endgame was civil war. Those who talked loudest about the ideals of the "new" organization, as it turned out, had the least love in their hearts. By a strange twist of fate, I owe the long- evity of my own consulting career to this circumstance. When I first announced my intention to withdraw from the firm in order to pursue my vocation as an unpublishable philosopher at large, my partners let me know that they would gladly regard my investment in the firm as a selfless contribution to their financial well-being. By the time I managed to extricate myself from their loving embrace, nearly three years later, the partnership had for other reasons descended into the kind of Hobbesian war of all against all from which only the lawyers emerge smiling. The firm was temporarily rescued by a dot-com company, but within a year both the savior and the saved collapsed in a richly deserved bankruptcy. Of course, your experience in a "new" organization may be different. My colleagues usually spoke fondly of their years at business school. Most made great friends there, and quite a few found love. All were certain that their degree was useful in advancing their careers. But what does an M.B.A. do for you that a doctorate in philosophy can't do better? The first point to note is that management education confers some benefits that have little to do with either management or education. Like an elaborate tattoo on an aboriginal warrior, an M.B.A. is a way of signaling just how deeply and irrevocably committed you are to a career in management. The degree also provides a tidy hoard of what sociologists call "social capital"—or what the rest of us, notwithstanding the invention of the PalmPilot, call a "Rolodex." For companies, M.B.A. programs can be a way to outsource recruiting. Marvin Bower, McKinsey's managing director from 1950 to 1967, was the first to understand this fact, and he built a legendary company around it. Through careful cultivation of the deans and judicious philanthropy, Bower secured a quasi-monopoly on Baker Scholars (the handful of top students at the Harvard Business School). Bower was not so foolish as to imagine that these scholars were of interest on account of the education they received. Rather, they were valuable because they were among the smartest, most ambitious, and best-connected individuals of their generation. Harvard had done him the favor of scouring the landscape, attracting and screening vast numbers of applicants, further testing those who matriculated, and then serving up the best and the brightest for Bower's delectation. Of course, management education does involve the transfer of weighty bodies of technical knowledge that have accumulated since Taylor first put the management-industrial complex in motion—accounting, statistical analysis, decision modeling, and so forth—and these can prove quite useful to students, depending on their career trajectories. But the "value-add" here is far more limited than Mom or Dad tend to think. In most managerial jobs, almost everything you need to know to succeed must be learned on the job; for the rest, you should consider whether it might have been acquired with less time and at less expense. The best business schools will tell you that management education is mainly about building skills—one of the most important of which is the ability to think (or what the M.B.A.s call "problem solving"). But do they manage to teach such skills? I once sat through a presentation in which a consultant, a Harvard M.B.A., showed a client, the manager of a large financial institution in a developing country, how the client company's "competitive advantage" could be analyzed in terms of "the five forces." He even used a graphic borrowed directly from guru-of-the-moment Michael Porter's best- selling work on "competitive strategy." Not for the first time, I was embarrassed to call myself a consultant. As it happens, the client, too, had a Harvard M.B.A. "No," he said, shaking his head with feigned chagrin. "There are only three forces in this case. And two of them are in the Finance Ministry." What they don't seem to teach you in business school is that "the five forces" and "the seven Cs" and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think. Case studies may provide an effective way to think business problems through, but the point is rather lost if students come away imagining that you can go home once you've put all of your eggs into a two-by-two growth-share matrix. Next to analysis, communication skills must count among the most important for future masters of the universe. To their credit, business schools do stress these skills, and force their students to engage in make-believe presentations to one another. On the whole, however, management education has been less than a boon for those who value free and meaningful speech. M.B.A.s have taken obfuscatory jargon—otherwise known as bullshit—to a level that would have made even the Scholastics blanch. As students of philosophy know, Descartes dismantled the edifice of medieval thought by writing clearly and showing that knowledge, by its nature, is intelligible, not obscure. Beyond building skills, business training must be about values. As I write this, I know that my M.B.A. friends are squirming in their seats. They've all been forced to sit through an "ethics" course, in which they learned to toss around yet more fancy phrases like "the categorical imperative" and discuss borderline criminal behavior, such as what's a legitimate hotel bill and what's just plain stealing from the expense account, how to tell the difference between a pat on the shoulder and sexual harassment, and so on. But, as anyone who has studied Aristotle will know, "values" aren't something you bump into from time to time during the course of a business career. All of business is about values, all of the time. Notwithstanding the ostentatious use of stopwatches, Taylor's pig iron case was not a description of some aspect of physical reality—how many tons can a worker lift? It was a prescription—how many tons should a worker lift? The real issue at stake in Mayo's telephone factory was not factual—how can we best establish a sense of teamwork? It was moral—how much of a worker's sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to harness for its purposes? The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don't know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much. The idea that philosophy is an inherently academic pursuit is a recent and diabolical invention. Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and most of the other great philosophers of history were not professors of philosophy. If any were to come to life and witness what has happened to their discipline, I think they'd run for the hills. Still, you go to war with the philosophers you have, as they say, not the ones in the hills. And since I'm counting on them to seize the commanding heights of the global economy, let me indulge in some management advice for today's academic philosophers: Expand the domain of your analysis! Why so many studies of Wittgenstein and none of Taylor, the man who invented the social class that now rules the world? Hire people with greater diversity of experience! And no, that does not mean taking someone from the University of Hawaii. You are building a network—a team of like-minded individuals who together can change the world. Remember the three Cs: Communication, Communication, Communication! Philosophers (other than those who have succumbed to the Heideggerian virus) start with a substantial competitive advantage over the PowerPoint crowd. But that's no reason to slack off. Remember Plato: it's all about dialogue! With this simple three-point program (or was it four?) philosophers will soon reclaim their rightful place as the educators of management. Of course, I will be charging for implementation. 7/23/2006 买什么我比较了一下，如果以收益率来看，分三个时期： 1。2005年5月4日-2005年12月31日：彻底的熊市 2。2005年5月4日-2006年7月21日：熊市+牛市 3。2006年1月4日-2006年7月21日：牛市
有如下8个基金在以上3个时间段入选业绩前30： 广发小盘成长LOF/上投摩根中国优势/鹏华中国50/广发稳健增长/长城久泰中标300/广发聚富/湘财荷银行业精选/易方达策略成长
如果考虑到华夏大盘在2006年以后的优异表现，好像也应该把它列入考虑范围。根据其他个人偏好，我基本上偏向于：广发小盘成长LOF/上投摩根中国优势/鹏华中国50/广发稳健增长/湘财荷银行业精选
当然还必须具体看他们建仓前10位的股票，对于广发小盘成长LOF里面的股票非常陌生，有点让我犹豫，当然不可能我喜欢这些基金经理选的所有的股票，但是起码自己不是那么反感一些股票吧。
其他的管理费都是一样，1.5%. 申购费来说上投摩根中国优势//鹏华中国50/最便宜，1%。 另外我在想：既然我是看好指数要上升，是不是买ETF就好。可是，为什么从历史数据来说ETF的表现并不好？
还需要继续作业，否则没有办法跟老爸交作业。 7/21/2006 Dividends do matter for a defensive strategyQuote from http://tickersense.typepad.com/Flight to QualitySince the S&P 500 topped out on May 8th, the index is down 6.77% (although it may seem like more). We broke the index's members into deciles by dividend yields to see how stocks with higher payouts have performed. We also measured the performance of the 113 S&P 500 stocks that pay no dividends. Since May 8th, the stocks that offer no dividends are down 13.90% while the decile of stocks with the highest dividend yields is down just 1.87%. Looking at the table below, the top 3 deciles by yields are down less than the index as a whole, while the rest are under performing.
7/20/2006 The Good News in Bad NewsBrilliant interview from Barron's.com. Larry Haverty, PM of Gabelli Global Multimedia Trust (GGT) predicts that one of two things will happen. One is a return of 1982, which represents a soft landing. The other scenario is a repeat of 1974, a hard landing. The interesting part of the interview is that Mr. Haverty gives his recommendations on stock pickings given these totally different possbile scenarios, which means to make money in either situation. He isolated three types of stocks that have merit in the consumer sector:
1. Unscathed entities: phenomenal businesses + terrific fundamentals: Yahoo, News Corp, Las Vegas Sands, Apple, Best buy
2. Totally mispriced: Home depot, E.W Scripps
3. Gaining higher share of consumer spending: gaming industry: Body Gaming, MGM, Harrah's Entertainment, International Game Technology, Pinnacle Entertainment
Also, he thinks P/FCF falling b/w 8-13 is fairly reasonable, if not relatively cheap. 7/18/2006 最近在听听完了Jacqueline du Pré的6张CD, 就像大多数的评论一样，都会不由自主地比较她和马友友。自己完全不懂谱子之类，可是还是毫不犹豫的偏爱du pre，为了她的excessive passion, deep-down love and emotional commitment, 更多的就只能感叹道: 这样的一个女人！
没有办法想象世界上有一个男人能这样表达音乐，她是上帝的奇迹。 7/17/2006 为了少生病，还是必须锻炼今天早上去看病，其实就是一点感冒，不过咳嗽得厉害，晚上很长时间没有办法睡觉。 因为忘记带医保卡，所以都是自费，虽然也可以报销，没什么差别。不过在排队1个多小时以后，医生先生的第一句话就是：自费还是报销？都不问我的病到底什么症状？除了打针以外，还给我开了其他5-6种药，真是成果不少，其中的维沙欣是一种抗生素，我是打算不吃这个药了，真的一场感冒也需要吃抗生素？ 7/15/2006 不是我的茶刚才看完了Pride & Prejudice, 说老实话，从小时候就没有喜欢过Jane Austen的小说，看完电影我更是同意： 真的不是我的茶，同样是写小社会圈子里的人情世故，Oscar Wild 更让人觉得味劲十足。当然女演员的眼睛真的很漂亮，yes, she has fair fine eyes.
唯一让我难忘的是Dario Marianelli的配乐。 7/14/2006 The Irrational Allure of Growth Stocks By MARK HULBERT from Barron.com on July 06,2006
WHICH DO YOU FIND MORE INTOLERABLE? Losing money when the market declines, or not making as much as the market when it rises? In my experience, most investors are quick to answer that it is the first of these two scenarios that they would have a harder time enduring. After all, who likes to lose money? But, according to almost all money managers I talk to, it is the second scenario that -- when push comes to shove -- investors actually can't stand. This became particularly evident in the late 1990s, when value strategies seriously lagged the overall stock market for several years running. That era was dominated by growth stocks in general and high-tech and Internet-related issues in particular. Money managers reported that it was the very rare client who was willing to tolerate making only a couple of percents per year while the most popular growth stocks were rising by 20%, 30% and more. Those value-oriented advisers who were willing to stick to their guns enjoyed the last laugh during the 2000-2002 bear market, of course, when their stocks held their own -- or even produced handsome gains -- while the overall market dropped like a rock. This psychological perspective on investing helps to explain what otherwise is a mystery: Why growth stocks continue to be so much more popular than value stocks. (Indeed, the lion's share of investment newsletters in this country focus on growth stocks.) Value strategies historically have produced higher long-term returns than growth strategies, while at the same time losing a lot less during bear markets. On paper, at least, that would appear to make following value strategies a veritable no-brainer. The missing ingredient that resolves the mystery is a psychological factor that might be called "keeping up with the Joneses." Because of this factor, investors find value strategies to be significantly riskier than growth strategies. Why doesn't "keeping up with the Joneses" work against growth strategies during bear markets, when value strategies typically are performing much better? It may to some extent. But investors tend to stay quiet about their losses, and only brag when they are making the big bucks. It's easier to lose money when others are losing than it is to lag the market when everyone else appears to be winning big. This is what John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he wrote that it is better for one's reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. Quantifying this psychological dimension is not easy, however. But earlier this month I came across an intriguing way of doing so: Focus on how a strategy performs in those months when the overall market is performing the best. This approach was discussed in the June 30 edition of the "Investment Review" that is published by Ford Equity Research. This advisory service falls closer to the value end of the growth-versus-value spectrum than most of the newsletters tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest (HFD). Indicative of this orientation is its performance since the beginning of 2000, close to the top of the bull market: Over the six and one-half years from then until mid-June, according to the HFD, its recommended stocks produced a gain of 10.6% annualized, versus a total return of just 0.3% annualized for the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index. In its latest issue, Ford Equity Research focused on just those months over the last decade in which the average stock rose by at least 5%. They presumably were those months in which the "keep up with the Joneses" factor would have been felt the most strongly. Ford Equity Research then measured how each of a number of different stock selection strategies performed during these months. Not surprisingly, momentum stocks shone. Such stocks are those that, at any given time, have performed the best over the trailing several months, of course, and they tend to continue outperforming for a while longer -- to exhibit momentum, in other words. In 97% of these months on which Ford focused, momentum stocks outperformed the overall stock market. No wonder momentum strategies are so popular. They almost always perform well during those periods when investors' psychological desire to beat the market is strongest. At the opposite end of the spectrum, consider stocks picked according to Ford Equity Research's value strategy, which is proprietary. They outperformed the overall market in fewer than half the months in which the market was strongest. In fact, on average, stocks picked according to Ford's value model actually lost money during these months in which the overall market performed so well. Despite performing so poorly during these months, however, value stocks performed wonderfully over the entire period that Ford focused on in its study. In fact, they had the best overall performance of any strategy that Ford measured. That's because momentum stocks performed particularly poorly when value stocks did well. So there's the trade-off: On the one hand is a momentum strategy that performs extremely well when the market is hot, but requires followers to tolerate big losses when the market is falling. And on the other is a more value-oriented strategy that produces mediocre returns at best when the market is hot but shines when the market is falling. My 26 years of tracking investment newsletters has inclined me to believe that neither approach is better than the other. Choosing between them depends on taking this crucial psychological dimension into account. If you are someone who finds it intolerable not to "keep up with the Joneses" when the market is hot -- and there is no shame in admitting that this is the case -- then you should be a growth-stock investor. But if, in contrast, you are someone who is willing to be a market laggard when the market as a whole is going crazy, then value investing is probably the way to go. You most likely will be rewarded with superior long-term results. 7/12/2006 老米，看到你的留言老米，
看到你在我这儿的留言，真的是你吗？还是不太敢确定，那么多那么多年没有再见过你，不过知道你还是很坚持自己的理想，也许单纯不再有了，可是pure还在吧？
很想你，可有的时候又害怕去探访你，毕竟像自己这样功利的人，会打搅你那片纯净的天空。希望你和家人都平安。以前，你像个大哥哥般，耐心的听我的喋喋不休，还总是带着微笑。我一直都记得的，你的善良。
因为你的留言又把我带回了大学的日子，那个时候，自己还假模假样的读读文艺作品。
而 為這大清早光 裡的談話 我獻上那些襤褸的 在你眼前磨損的日子 同時不知在我被鬆開以前 還有多少這種日子 全部留下的只有你放 在你創造物口中的這首歌
Leonard Cohen的传记电影不知道什么地方能买到，尽管是在大学毕业后才知道他。“我獻上那些襤褸的 在你眼前磨損的日子”， 为老米，还有其他或许已经不太多联系的朋友。
7/10/2006 就去做吧大哥问我应不应该做这样一个决定，我回答不出，我知道自己的弱点就在于很多时候无法放下一些面子的东西，特别在管理人员上面。大哥说他今天又回去翻看他的红宝书—胡雪岩，终于下定决心，要下这步棋。
有些担心，赌钱不过就是输，赌人有的时候就是押上最宝贵的资产：时间和信任。自己唯一能做的不过是鼓励他找自己的想法去做，既然帮不了什么忙。 它像旋律般轻柔地走过一周最轻松的时候，又听到邢子青的声音，都快成了我最熟悉的声音了。 今天，介绍的是布拉姆斯的三首小提琴奏鳴曲，是1983年:Itzhak Perlman / Violin, Vladimir Ashkenazy / Piano合奏的，好像更多的人喜欢的是G大调，自己却更爱听d小調第三號，尤其是它的第一乐章。有一种悲伤，穿过58岁的布拉姆斯的心中，好像在这个晚上都能让人看到。 7/9/2006 Everyday is A Winding Road刚刚在电视里看到Sheryl Crow治疗breast cancer的消息，在她和Lance Armstrong分手以后。有的时候，不知道什么地方能让自己有取之不竭的勇气。
外面的月亮很圆很亮，到罗森的时候，真想从冰柜里拿出冰啤酒来，自己放纵一下，小小的喝一把。  可惜不会喝。再说，还需要头脑清醒地洗衣服。7/8/2006 偷偷笑刚才在出租车里，司机在放着以前老的流行歌曲，他还跟着歌声一起字正腔圆的唱着，好像我这个乘客根本不存在。从张惠妹的’解脱’，到叶倩文的‘选择’，还有范晓宣，我则是装作看书，其实一直在偷偷笑，这个司机还真快乐。
也不由得想起那些在车里听过的音乐，窗外经过的街景，和那些谈过的话。很感激生活，自己已经有过那么多的快乐，所以现在的我还是要经常偷偷笑。 7/6/2006 扶不起的四川肥阿斗这个问题还真不好办，打个比方来说吧。今天我去找了现在的公婆，提出与他们的儿子分手的请求，因为我心仪了另外一个在街头做便利店生意的人。婆婆于是对我语重心长的说：他们这个儿子出身都是高尚的，身边打交道的都是鸿儒，没有不会说流利英文的白丁，这些才配得上我所受的教育背景。婆婆还让我耐心点，许诺带我进入更高级的社交圈子，把我列入重点观察培养的名媛对象。我对婆婆说：我的兴趣在于开便利店，每天跟草根阶层到交道，实实在在做点小生意，拿着被汗水揉捏过的钞票，才真正符合我的性格。婆婆说：何必那么辛苦？人已经在上面了，为什么还要到下面去，跟没有文化的人一起共事。婆婆最后要求我再考虑一下，不要可惜了我那么强的background，也不希望H家族浪费错置了我这个资源。
回到上海，经常听到别人对我说的一句话就是：你怎么能做这种事呢？（连同那种可惜/不解的眼神，后面的含义可是多多）。不过，这些反而不能困扰我，只是觉得中国人的不切实际，有些迂腐的可笑。其实，可能也是由于社会分工的不同，有的人天生就适合干白领，高屋建瓴的领导别人工作，而我可能更适合做做搬货，上货架，卖东西的草根工作。实在没有办法伪装成一个白领。所以，该怎么走，想来listen to my heart也就可以了。 7/4/2006 Mutual Fund CandidateAfter reading its investment philosophy of Findlay Park, I checked out its performance. Stellar. And 1% of management fee is very reasonable and relatively cheap. Consulting on China BusinessJust realized wrong linke before. An interesting article. The writer believes that the companies need to:
- understand detailed business process in China - understand industrial purchasing behaviour in China - know competitive environment in China However, the consultants only bring data on macro level and industrial level, because of their lack of real on-site China knowledge, which, in his view, is the major challenges encountered by China consultant. 7/3/2006 阿兰胡埃斯昨天晚上，很偶然的听到Concerto de Aranjuez,只是放了第二乐章，从来没有想到吉他的协奏曲会达到这样的效果。刚才看了一点关于它的介绍文章。
也有人说它的灵感来自树林的风。阿兰胡埃斯，美的让人落泪。 入市分险多，投资须谨慎最近像这样以纳斯达克的名义敛财的纠纷越来越多。
好像看上去，OTCBB/粉单不同于NASDAQ的差别在于，在OTCBB/Pink Sheets的公司不需要listing requirement,粉单甚至连经过审计的会计报表都不需要提供。相对靠铺的可能是small cap，起码有listing requirement. 藏龙卧虎列席完大哥餐厅里的每周例会，已经是9点过了。说实话，大哥开会的功力比较了得，不但思路很清晰，重点突出，关键在于如何应对下面员工的反弹/意见,说到底drive/manage people是需要行业经验作基础的，否则如何服人？
然后，又去了另外一家餐厅，跟店老板交流了一下，直到12点钟。说我的心里话，那就是什么MBA的教育，他们这些实际生意场上锻炼出来的，才是真正熟练运用了那些商业原理，从没有想过小小餐厅的老板能如此有想法，注意总结，注意细节。说到一点，用心和坚持，把小事情做好都很了不起。他们也许不会像7-11的铃木敏文成就那样的事业，可是他们认真的实践了自己的企图心。
我对大哥说：真是处处藏龙卧虎。大哥笑笑说：那是因为你的生活太小太单纯。 |
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