【英语生活】又是创业时代

Where some see only gloom right now, entrepreneurs see opportunity. As the risk-averse withdraw, braver business leaders will step forward. An enthusiastic
special report in The Economist this month anticipates a new golden age for entrepreneurship, declaring it an idea whose time has come. Its “triumph” is already assured. But when chief executives and other senior managers look within their organisations, do they see a lot of (frustrated) entrepreneurs waiting eagerly to put ideas forward? Somehow I doubt it. Even if they do, how comfortable are business leaders with the idea of encouraging, still less investing in, new ventures at a time like this?

“Companies tend to view their entrepreneurs with ambivalence,” says Julian Birkinshaw, professor of strategic and international management at London Business School. “In principle, there is enormous enthusiasm for them. In practice, there can also be great suspicion. People wonder whether there is empire building going on, or if the suggested ideas are really all a bit self-aggrandising. In the worst case there may be fears that something outright fraudulent is being done.”

In his 2003 book, Inventuring, Prof Birkinshaw explained what companies had to gain by encouraging entrepreneurial activity internally. He offered this clever (if now slightly dated) example: think of an executive arriving at Heathrow airport on a Virgin Atlantic flight. On the Heathrow Express train into town, he calls his office on an Ericsson phone. Then, on his IBM laptop, he does some shopping at Tesco.com, which he pays for with an Egg credit card.

Not one of these activities would have been possible had a parent company – Virgin, BAA, Ericsson, IBM, Tesco and the Prudential – not been brave enough to launch new business ventures. If the barriers to new ideas had been set too high, that valuable entrepreneurial ambition would have been frustrated.

“Stewards conserve. Entrepreneurs create.” So wrote Gary Hamel in a Harvard Business Review article in 1999 called “Bringing Silicon Valley Inside”. “Face it,” he added, “out there in some garage, an entrepreneur is forging a bullet with your company's name on it.”

Prof Hamel wrote this celebrated article partly out of frustration at the corporate world's reluctance to embrace the lessons of the then fashionable “new economy”. The subsequent bursting of that bubble led business people to be deeply sceptical about its alleged virtues.

Re-reading the article, and discounting some of its more extravagant claims, you also find some terse good sense about businesses' failure to back new ideas.

“Big companies are not markets, they're hierarchies,” Prof Hamel wrote. “The guys at the top decide where the money goes. Unconventional ideas are forced to make a tortuous climb up the corporate pyramid . . . You wanna try something new, something out of bounds, something that challenges the status quo? Good luck . . . but management veterans are not usually the best ones to judge the merits of investing in entirely new business models or making radical changes to existing models.”

A decade later, and some of that original Hamelian gusto has been recaptured by The Economist's highly optimistic report. But talk of a renaissance in entrepreneurship is not all hype. Clearly the fast-developing powerhouses of China and India can boast huge numbers of start-ups and passionate business builders. And there are hopeful signs in the developed economies, too, to be found in what is perhaps an unexpected quarter: the business schools.

Where once business school students might have regarded classes on entrepreneurship as trivial and almost beneath them, today they are among the most heavily subscribed courses of all. Business schools talk proudly of alumni who only a few years after graduating are running their own companies (and, increasingly, social enterprises too).

I got a flavour of this at a breakfast seminar at London Business School last week. As one attendee, a recent MBA graduate, pointed out, while some of his contemporaries may have headed down the traditional post-B-school route of investment banking or strategy consulting, starting his own company meant putting much more of his business education and training into practice. Marketing, finance, leadership, strategy, organisational behaviour: all the old lecture notes were coming in handy. This wasn't necessarily the case for his classmates.

How can businesses square the circle, encouraging risk taking but avoiding recklessness? It is indeed by bringing Silicon Valley, or perhaps we might say the disciplines of venture capital, inside.

“You would have to meet several VCs before raising funds in the outside world,” says LBS's Prof Birkinshaw. “Companies need to have effective filters in place to reject the bad ideas and let only the good ones through. Corporate entrepreneurs should succeed almost in spite of the system, not because of it.”

To a true entrepreneur, that will sound like the kind of challenge that is impossible to resist.

在目前一些人只看到黯淡的地方，创业者却发现了机会。当避险人士撤出市场时，勇敢的企业领袖将继续前进。《经济学人》(The Economist)本月发表的一份热情洋溢的特别报告预计，创业者将迎来新的黄金时代，报告还宣布创业的时机已经成熟，其“成功”已是确定无疑。但当首席执行官和其他高级管理人员审视其公司内部时，他们是否看到大量（失望的）创业者正热切地等待提出想法？对此我有些怀疑。即便创业者提出了想法，企业领袖对于在这个时候鼓励创建新企业、减少投资的想法满意吗？

“企业倾向于以矛盾的心态看待他们的企业家。”伦敦商学院(LBS)战略和国际管理教授朱利安•伯金肖(Julian Birkinshaw)表示，“原则上来说，他们怀有巨大的热情，实际上，他们可能还充满极大的怀疑。人们想知道帝国大厦能否持续，或者提出的想法是否确实有些自吹自擂。在最坏的情况下，人们可能担心，这是彻头彻尾的欺骗。”

在《风险投资》(Inventuring)（2003年出版）一书中，伯金肖解释了通过鼓励企业内部创业活动，企业必须得到什么。他举了一个聪明的例子（如果现在看来有点过时的话）：假设一位高管乘坐英国维珍航空公司(Virgin Atlantic)的航班抵达希思罗机场(Heathrow Airport)。在乘坐希思罗机场快线(Heathrow Express)进城时，他用爱立信(Ericsson)手机给办公室打电话，然后用IBM笔记本在Tesco.com上购物，并通过Egg信用卡付账。

要不是母公司——维珍(Virgin)、机场管理局(BAA)、爱立信、IBM、特易购(Tesco)和保诚保险(Prudential)——勇于创建新的企业，那么上述活动就无法进行。如果对新创意设置过高的障碍，那些宝贵的企业家梦想将会受挫。

在《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review) 1999年发表的一篇名为《将硅谷精神带进企业内部》(Bringing Silicon Valley Inside)的文章中，加里•哈默尔(Gary Hamel)写道：“管理者守护，企业家创造。”“正视它吧，”他补充道，“在某个修车厂，一位创业者正在制造一颗子弹，上面有你公司的名字。”

哈默尔教授撰写这篇著名文章的部分原因是，企业界不愿从当时流行的“新经济”中吸取教训，这让他感到失望。随后互联网泡沫的破裂使得商业人士对其所谓的好处深感怀疑。

如果重新阅读这篇文章，去掉一些更为过分的观点，你还会对企业未能支持新创意的情况得到一些简洁清楚的认识。

“大公司不是市场，它们等级森严。”哈默尔写道，“处于最顶端的那些公司决定着资金的去向。非传统想法被迫曲折地沿着企业金字塔向上攀登……你希望尝试一些新的、超出范围、挑战现状的想法？祝你好运……但在对投资全新业务模式或对现有模式做出根本性改变的益处做出判断方面，管理层的老将们通常并非最佳人选。”

10年后，哈默尔最初的一些理念在《经济学人》这篇高度乐观的报告中得到了体现。但有关企业家精神复苏的言论并非欺骗。很明显，快速发展的中国和印度两大经济体可以自夸拥有大量初创企业和充满激情的企业缔造者。同时在发达国家，我们也可以在一个意料之外的领域——商学院——发现充满希望的迹象。

商学院学生曾经认为关于企业家精神的课程并不重要，几乎看不起它们，如今，它们却成为了学生们选课最多的课程。商学院会自豪地谈起一些校友在毕业仅仅几年后就开始经营自己的公司（和越来越多的社会企业）。

在伦敦商学院上周举行的一个早餐会上，我感受到了这一点。正如一位最近毕业的MBA与会者指出的那样，虽然同时代的一些人可能遵循在从商学院毕业后进入投行或战略咨询行业的传统路线，但创建自己的公司意味着把自己接受的商业教育和培训更多地付诸实践。市场营销、金融、领导力、战略以及组织行为：所有这些旧的课堂笔记都会派得上用场。但他的同学不一定如此。

企业怎么能做不可能的事，在鼓励冒险的同时又避免鲁莽呢？实际上，方法是把硅谷精神，或我们所说的风险资本纪律引入公司内部。

“在从外部世界筹集资金之前，你必须与数家风险投资公司会面，”伦敦商学院的伯金肖表示，“企业需要建立一个有效的过滤机制，拒绝糟糕的创意，只让那些优秀的创意通过。不管有没有这种机制，企业创业者都应成功，而不是因为这种机制才能成功。”

对一个真正的创业者而言，这听起来像是某种不可能克服的挑战。

译者/君悦