【英语生活】思想领袖讨人厌！

First we were employees, plain and simple. Then we were knowledge workers. After that came "Brand Me" and the notion that we were all CEOs of Me, Inc. Now our taste for hyperbole in describing our place in the economic order has become still more rarefied: what every modern worker aspires to be is a thought leader.The blame for this latest craze rests with the editor of Strategy and Business , a management magazine. In 1994, he needed a name for a new interview slot and came up with "Thought Leader". Back then it seemed a forgivably pompous title for the pompous thoughts of management gurus. Thirteen years on, it has come to be a much less forgivable name for any old fool in possession of an ego and a blog.

The title offends for three reasons, and pomposity is the least of them. It is inappropriately Orwellian: in free societies, thoughts can be provoked or stimulated or gathered. But not led. Worse still, no one seems quite sure what "thought leader" means. You might think that to qualify as a thought leader you needed to have a thought (preferably a new one) and be able to influence other people with it. Yet mostly when the term is used there is no sign of any thinking or leading going on at all.

This week the "Thought Leader Index 2007" is published by a new "communications and thought leadership consultancy" called Ledbury Group. It went around asking chief executives, trade union leaders, editors (all thought leaders themselves, one assumes) to name their favourite thought leaders. The result, surely, gives an up-to-date snapshot of what the term actually means.

Top of the list is Google. This presents the first challenge to my definition: Google has no thoughts and no brain with which to have them as it is a company. It might be brilliantly successful but is it a thought leader? It has only led my thoughts to the extent that I no longer retain any knowledge in my head, I just look everything up on its website instead. But I don't think that counts.

The next favourite thought-leading business is Apple. Again, I don't get it. Apple leads my wallet and my taste for gorgeous sleek gadgets, but not my thoughts. I am oddly forgiving each time my iPod breaks and hurry to the Apple store to replace it with a more glamorous model, but that's as far as it goes.

You could say both Goldman Sachs and McKinsey (respectively 8th and 9th place) suggest thoughts of a kind. Goldman's thought is "we are richer than you" and McKinsey's is "we are brainier than you". Both companies also transmit a more subliminal thought - "we know something you don't so stay close to us". Yet this is more a veiled threat than an idea, and so doesn't really count.

Of the top 10 companies, only the British retailer John Lewis (4th) has a proper, original thought and that is "we are owned by our employees". But on closer inspection that isn't a thought. It's a business model.

From this list of thought-leading companies, the concept seems to boil down to this: "thought leader" is simply a new and unhelpful way of saying successful.

The list of the top thought-leading individuals is just as baffling. The number one slot goes to Al Gore. This shows that to be considered a thought leader you don't have to have a thought of your own: it's fine to take someone else's. Gore's contribution was saying it very loudly, with some PowerPoint slides.

Bill Gates follows. I would classify him as a former thought leader. His was the idea that there should be a PC on every desk in every home, and very influential it was, too. But as for any other specific thought he has had, I can't think of one.

By contrast, David Cameron has a very clear thought: "I want to be prime minister". But the snag is that it's too early to know if the rest of Britain wants it too.

Gordon Brown fittingly makes it onto the list at number 10. Though if I were him my main thought would be: "Why the hell have I been ranked behind Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco, whose only thought is to build more and more hideous supermarkets?"

I am left none the wiser by the Thought Leader Index so for elucidation I've gone back to Google. For just $109 you can buy a book called How to Be a Thought Leader, written by nine leading thought leaders. In the blurb I couldn't see anything about thinking at all. It is all about "passion, relevance and reach".

A more helpful website offers the following definition: "A thought leader is a person or company that actively promotes and discusses ideas that are relevant to their peer base." If this is all it is, being a thought leader is a total doddle. But it also raises the more interesting question of why companies or people feel there is something so great about it. Surely the job of business leaders is to lead businesses, not to have original thoughts. The second may sometimes be a route to the first, but equally it may not be.

An analogy with my (somewhat inarticulate) sons is apt. By the above definition both are thought leaders as they actively promote and discuss World of Warcraft, a lethal and addictive computer game favoured by their peers. But what's so good about that? Indeed, I wish they'd stop leading thoughts and get on with their homework.

最初，我们是雇员，简单而明了。后来，我们是知识工人。接着，有了“自我品牌”(Brand Me)以及这样一种概念：我们都是“自我有限公司”(Me, Inc)的首席执行官。如今，在形容自己在经济次序中的位置方面，我们对夸张的爱好变得更高雅了：每位现代员工都渴望成为思想领袖。最近的这种狂热，应归咎于管理杂志《策略与商业》(Strategy and Business)的主编。1994年，他需要为一档新的采访节目找个名字，于是便想出了“思想领袖”（Thought Leader）这个词。回想当初，对于管理层领袖华而不实的想法而言，这个华而不实的头衔似乎是可以宽恕的。13年后，对于任何一个拥有博客的自负的老糊涂而言，这个头衔已经不那么值得宽恕了。

这个头衔令人不快有3个原因，华而不实是其中最无关紧要的一个。它的极权主义不合时宜：在自由社会，思想可以被煽动、激发或收集起来。而不能被领导出来。更糟的是，似乎没人非常确切地知道“思想领袖”是什么意思。你或许会认为，要成为合格的思想领袖，就需要有思想（最好是一种新思想），而且要能够用其影响他人。然而，在大多数使用这个词的时候，根本就没有任何思想或领导的迹象。

最近，一家新的“沟通和思想领袖咨询机构” Ledbury Group公布了“2007年思想领袖索引”(Thought Leader Index 2007)。它四处询问首席执行官、工会领袖、编辑（这些人都是人们认为的思想领袖），让他们说出自己最喜欢的思想领袖。当然，这些结果从一个侧面体现了这个词的最新含义。

排在名单首位的是谷歌(Google)。这是对我的定义的首个挑战：谷歌既没有思想，也没有容纳思想的头脑，因为它是一家公司。或许它取得了辉煌成功，但它算是思想领袖吗？它只是把我的思想引领到这样一种程度：我不再需要在头脑中保留任何知识，一切都到它的网站上去查就行了。但我并不认为这就算思想领袖。

人们中意的下一个思想引领型企业是苹果(Apple)。可我还是不明白。苹果引领着我的钱包和我对各种华丽的小玩意儿的偏好，但它却没有引领我的思想。奇怪的是，每次我的iPod出问题，我都十分宽容，赶紧跑到苹果专卖店里搞一个更迷人的型号来代替它，但仅此而已。

你可能会说高盛(Goldman Sachs)和麦肯锡公司(McKinsey)（分列第8位和第9位）表现出某种思想。高盛的思想是“我们比你富有”，而麦肯锡的是“我们比你有头脑”。两家公司还下意识地传递出一种思想——“我们知道一些你不知道的事，所以要跟我们保持联系”。然而，这与其说是一种思想，不如说是一种遮遮掩掩的恐吓，因此这实际上也不能算数。

在排名前10位的公司中，只有英国零售商约翰•刘易斯(John Lewis)（排名第四）有一种合理的、原创的思想，那就是“我们由员工拥有”。但进一步审视就会发现，这不是一种思想。而是一种商业模式。

从这个思想引领型公司名单中，似乎可以归结出这样一个概念：“思想领袖”只是一种新毫无用处的描述成功的新方式。

顶尖思想引领型个人名单同样令人丧气。第一名是阿尔•戈尔(Al Gore)。这表明，要想被视作思想领袖，你不一定非要有自己的思想：把别人的拿过来也可以。戈尔的贡献就在于他非常响亮地说了出来，而且还用了一些PowerPoint幻灯片。

比尔•盖茨(Bill Gates)紧随其后。我会将他列为曾经的思想领袖。他的想法是，在每个家庭的每张书桌上都应该有台电脑，这个想法非常有影响力。但至于他的其它想法，我再也想不出来了。

相比之下，大卫•卡梅隆(David Cameron)有一个非常清晰的想法：“我想当首相”。但问题是现在还不知道其他英国人是否也这么想。

戈登•布朗(Gordon Brown)合适地排在名单第10位。不过如果我是他，我的主要想法会是：“该死的，我为什么会排在特易购(Tesco)的特里•莱希爵士(Sir Terry Leahy)之后？他唯一的想法就是建设越来越多讨厌的超市。”

“思想领袖索引”并没有让我变得更明白，所以为了找答案我又上了谷歌。只需花109美元，你就能买一本叫做《如何成为思想领袖》(How to Be a Thought Leader)的书，其作者是9位知名的思想领袖。在这本书的简介中，我根本找不到任何有关思想的东西。里面说的全是“激情、中肯和影响范围”。

一个更有帮助的网站提供了以下定义：“思想领袖是能积极宣传和讨论与同仁相关的想法的个人或公司。”如果这就是全部，成为思想领袖完全是轻而易举的事。但这也提出了一个更有趣的问题，为什么公司或人们会觉得它有些不同寻常。当然，商业领袖的工作是领导公司业务，而不是拥有原创想法。排名第二有时可能会走向第一，但也可能不会。

这可以推广到我儿子身上（这只能意会，不能言传）。按上述定义，两个孩子都是思想领袖，因为他们积极宣传和探讨魔兽世界(World of Warcraft)，这是他们同辈人都喜欢的一种致命的、令人上瘾的电脑游戏。但这有什么好呢？的确，我希望他们停止引领思想，赶紧回去写作业。

译者/梁鸥