【英语社会】如何应对职场信息过量？

Traditional management is over. The internet has killed command and control. Now that everyone can analyse and ridicule their chief executive's every move almost before they've made it, it has become impossible to order people about.

This view is put forward by Carol Bartz, the new head of Yahoo, in The Economist's “The World in 2010”. It sounds pacey and plausible and for a second I was lulled into thinking that perhaps the “Niagara of information” really has changed management for ever. But then I looked around me. I saw lots of people at desks calmly doing what they were paid to do: working.

Command and control is not over and won't ever be. Bosses are still bosses. If mine tells me to do something, I'm inclined to get up off my bottom and do it. If Bartz's employees don't get off their bottoms when she tells them to, there is a problem – and it has nothing to do with the internet.

She is right that the amount of information available does change the way companies are run and the way we communicate with each other. But it seems that the only line of communication that has not changed is between boss and underling. It is all the other lines that have become distorted and muffled by the sheer amount of stuff out there.

In the past couple of weeks, I've come across two ways in which companies are managing this – and both of them are quite worrying.

The first comes from a friend who works in communications for a large organisation. She has noticed that her staff are responding to the information overload not by digesting too much of it, but by stopping to digest anything at all. She tells me that, in her company, the written word has lost almost all its power. No one reads e-mails any more – with the exception of those from the boss. Messages from anyone else are either deleted unread or given a cursory glance and then ignored. Messages on Twitter have slightly more impact, but 140 characters seem to be too many for some, and the sheer number of these messages means many of them miss their mark.

Her answer is to bypass the written word and convey simple messages in little snatches of video instead. Watching these snippets, I wanted to laugh. Here was a woman with a first class degree from Cambridge university talking as if she were a manically smiling children's TV presenter. The camera showed her delivering a simple, upbeat message before moving to a man who wrote the same message – “Keep it simple” – on a flip chart with a chunky felt tip marker.

Isn't that a bit patronising? I asked. Quite possibly, she replied. But because people seemed to be listening, she didn't care.

Other companies have decided to deal with too much information by giving up any attempt to manage it on the grounds that to do so costs too much. Since the recession began, many have closed their libraries and taken the axe to their knowledge management divisions, set up with such pride and optimism barely a decade ago. In one big consultancy, all the people who used to sort information into usable chunks have just been fired, and consultants have been told that they will have to “self-service their knowledge needs”.

This is almost certainly a mistake. Self-servicing our knowledge needs is something most of us are pretty bad at. Which is why, as Bartz points out, we need business leaders who will not only tell us what to do but help us know what to think.

Bartz argues that, in order to do this successfully, leaders must acquire two skills. First, they must listen more than before. I'm not so sure about this. The trouble with the information age is that there are so many people talking simultaneously. Leaders surely need to do not more listening but more ignoring. More than ever, the good leader surely needs to learn how to become selectively deaf.

The second skill is to find a way of dealing with the many beastly things that are written about them on the internet. It would be nice if we could expect leaders in the future to respond maturely to this wave of public criticism, but I'm not holding my breath. Because I can find no such grown-up strand in myself, I'm gloomy about finding it in others. There is plenty of horrid stuff on the internet written about me and even though I dare say I should hunt it down, read it and learn from it, I'm not going to. I'm going to stuff my fingers in my ears and carry on regardless.

传统的管理方式已寿终正寝。互联网让“命令-控制”模式不复存在。如今，人人都可以抢在老板之前，对他们的一举一动加以分析和奚落，对员工颐指气使已不再可能。

上述观点是雅虎(Yahoo)新任CEO卡罗尔•巴茨(Carol Bartz)在《经济学人》(The Economist)的年度特刊《2010年的世界》(The World in 2010)中提出的。它听上去十分新颖，也貌似有理，我差点儿就被哄弄住了，以为“信息洪流”或许真的彻底改变了管理方式。但随后我向四周张望了一下，看到许多人平静地趴在办公桌边，做着自己拿钱要做的事情：工作。

“命令-控制”模式并未消失，也永远不会消失。老板还是老板。如果我的老板吩咐我做件事，我会立刻起身去做。如果巴茨让手下做什么事，而他们没有立刻照办，就会有麻烦了——而这与互联网一点儿关系也没有。

巴茨说的不错，可获得的信息量，的确改变了公司运作以及我们相互沟通的方式。但看上去唯一没有改变的，就是老板与下属的沟通方式。被海量资讯歪曲和吞噬掉的，都是其它方面。

过去几周，我偶然见识了企业应对此类现象的两种手段，而它们都令人颇为担忧。

第一个事例来自一位就职于某大型机构公关部的朋友。她注意到，她的员工对信息过载的反应并不是尽可能多地消化，而是停止消化一切信息。她告诉我，在她们公司，书面文字几乎全然失效。没人还会阅读电子邮件——老板的邮件除外。来自其他任何人的信息，要么未经阅读就被删除，要么匆匆扫上一眼，就被丢到一边。Twitter上的信息影响要略大一些，但对于有些人而言，140个字母似乎太多了，而信息量过大也意味着，许多消息都无法有的放矢。

她的对策是避开书面文字，利用视频片断来传达简单的信息。看着这些视频，我忍不住想笑。这位拥有剑桥大学(Cambridge)一级学位的女士，说起话来就像是一名笑得呲牙咧嘴的儿童节目主持人。在显示她传达了一则简短而欢快的口信后，镜头转向了一位正在用一支粗记号笔在一块展示板上书写同样一条信息——“尽量简单”——的男士。

这是不是有一点儿让人领情的味道？我问道。她回答，很有可能。但由于人们看起来在认真听，所以她并不在乎。

面对过量信息，另外一些公司则决定放弃一切管理信息的尝试，理由是这样做的成本过高。自从经济衰退开始以来，许多公司都关闭了图书馆，大幅裁减信息管理部门——而此时距他们得意、乐观地设立这些部门，不过短短十年时间。在一家大型咨询公司，负责分类整理资料的所有员工都刚刚被炒掉，而咨询顾问则被告知，他们将不得不“自己动手寻找所需资料”。

几乎可以肯定，这是一种失策。自己找资料是我们大多数人都很不擅长的事。这正是为何像巴茨所指出的那样：我们不仅需要商业领袖告诉我们该做些什么，还要帮助我们知道该想些什么。

巴茨认为，为了成功做到这一点，高管们必须具备两项技能。首先，他们必须比以往更多地倾听。我对此把握不大。信息时代的麻烦在于，同时有许多人在讲话。管理者更应该做地肯定不是聆听，而是忽略。优秀的管理者比以往任何时候都更应学会如何选择性失聪。

第二项技能，是找到应对互联网上大量有关自己的恶毒言论的办法。如果我们能够指望管理者今后能成熟地应对这种公开批评声浪，那再好不过，但我做不到屏息以待。由于我在自己身上压根找不到这种成熟的特质，因此，看到其他人拥有这个本事，我会感到十分沮丧。网上有太多关于我的可怕言论，尽管我敢说自己应该搜索出来，读上一读，并从中学习，但我并不打算这样做。我会继续一意孤行，用手塞住耳朵。

译者/陈云飞