文章来源：《经济学人》May 14th 2022 期 Business 栏目

The woolliest words in business

商业中最模糊的词语

Bartleby

巴托比

Innovation. Sustainability. Purpose. Yuck

创新、可持续性、目的、令人反感

May 14th 2022

FIRE-FIGHTING FOAM starves the flames of oxygen. A handful of overused words have the same deadening effect on people’s ability to think. These are words like “innovation”, “collaboration”, “flexibility”, “purpose” and “sustainability”. They coat consultants’ websites, blanket candidates’ CVs and spray from managers’ mouths. They are anodyne to the point of being useless.

【1】deadening 麻痹的
【2】anodyne （尤指通过不表达强烈的感情或意见而）不得罪人的，一团和气的；温和的
[释义] intended to avoid causing offence or disagreement, especially by not expressing strong feelings or opinions

消防泡沫可以让火焰与氧隔绝。一些过度使用的词汇也会对人们的思维能力产生同样的抑制作用。这些词包括“创新”、“合作”、“灵活性”、“目的”和“可持续性”。它们覆盖在顾问的网站上，在候选人的简历上，并从管理者的口中说出来。它们是不得罪人的，以至于毫无用处。

These words are ubiquitous in part because they are so hard to argue against. Who really wants to be the person making the case for silos? Which executive secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation officer? Is it even possible to have purposelessness as a goal? Just as Karl Popper, a philosopher, made falsifiability a test of whether a theory could be described as scientific, antonymy is a good way to work out whether an idea has any value. Unless its opposite could possibly have something to recommend it, a word is too woolly to be truly helpful.

【1】silo（公司、机构或系统内部与其他单位不联系、不了解、不合作的）孤立单位

这些词之所以无处不在，部分原因是它们难以反驳。谁真的想成为为孤立组织辩护的人？哪位高管暗地里渴望成为首席停滞官？有没有可能把无目的作为一个目标？正如哲学家卡尔·波普尔将可证伪性作为一种检验理论是否可以被描述为科学的标准，反义词是衡量一种观点是否有价值的好方法。除非它的反义词可能有什么可取之处，否则一个词太模糊了，不会有真正的帮助。

Woolliness is the enemy of accuracy as well as utility. A word like “sustainability” is so fuzzy that it is used to encompass everything from a business that thinks sensibly about the long term to the end of capitalism. This column may well count as sustainable because it keeps recycling the same ideas. The lack of precision opens the door to grandstanding and greenwashing. Earlier this year Morningstar, a data provider, culled 1,200 funds from its European sustainable-investment list after a closer review of their prospectuses and annual reports. Regulators in America and Europe have been scrambling to define standards of sustainability disclosure.

【1】greenwash 绿色外衣 [指机构为树立对环境负责的公众形象而散布的虚假信息]
【2】open the door to (sth) 使…成为可能；为（新事物）敞开大门，为（新事物）铺平道路
【3】cull 剔除

模糊不仅是实用的敌人，也是准确性的敌人。像“可持续性”这样的词是如此模糊，以至于它可以用来涵盖从理性思考长期问题的企业到资本主义终结的一切。这个专栏很可能被认为是可持续的，因为它一直在重复同样的想法。准确性的缺乏为哗众取宠和“漂绿”敞开大门。今年早些时候，数据提供商Morningstar在对招股说明书和年报进行了更仔细的审查后，从其欧洲可持续投资基金名单中剔除了1,200只基金。美国和欧洲的监管机构一直在争先恐后地制定可持续信息披露的标准。

Woolliness also smothers debate about whether you can have too much of a good thing. Take “innovation”, for example. Too much innovation can be a turn-off for customers. A recent paper from Yingyue Luan and Yeun Joon Kim of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge looks at the effect of perceived novelty on the response of audiences to films. The researchers find that there is a sweet spot in experimentation, where films are distinctive enough to pique curiosity but not so radical that they up-end expectations. In that space between “Home Alone 4” and “Tenet” lie the real moneymaking opportunities.

【1】turn-off 讨厌的事物；讨厌的人
【2】pique 激起

模糊也会平息关于好东西是否泛滥的争论。以“创新”为例。太多的创新可能会让客户感到厌烦。剑桥大学贾奇商学院的Yingyue Luan和Joon Kim最近发表了一篇论文，研究新鲜感对于“观众对电影反应”的影响。研究人员发现，在实验中有一个最佳点，即电影要有足够的独特性来激发好奇心，但又不能太过激进，以至于颠覆人们的预期。在《小鬼当家4》和《信条》之间的空间里存在着真正的赚钱机会。

Innovation can also be trying for employees. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently looked at factors that predicted high levels of attrition among companies’ workforces. To their surprise, they found that employees were more likely to leave firms—like Tesla and Nvidia—with high levels of innovation. The authors hypothesise that the long hours and high pressure that typify innovative cultures can lead to higher staff turnover.

对员工来说，创新也是令人厌烦的。麻省理工学院的研究人员最近研究了预测公司员工高流失率的因素。令他们惊讶的是，他们发现员工更有可能离开像特斯拉和英伟达这样创新水平高的公司。作者假设，创新文化所代表的长时间工作和高压力会导致更高的员工流动率。

“Collaboration” is another word that repays closer scrutiny. It can be marvellous: boundaries dissolved, expertise and ideas flowing. But collaboration can also run wild. It often means having more and more people on every email thread and in every meeting. It can paralyse decision-making, as everyone and their dog gets to weigh in with their view. (To be fair, the dog often makes the most useful points.)

【1】weigh in with sth 发表；提出

“合作”是另一个值得仔细审视的词。它可以很棒：界限消失，专业知识和想法在流动。但合作也可能失控。这通常意味着每一封邮件和每一次会议上都有越来越多的人。它会使决策瘫痪，因为每个人和他们的狗都可以提出他们的观点。(说句公道话，狗通常会提出最有用的观点。)

And the rewards that flow from collaborativeness are uneven. “The No Club”, a new book by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart, examines the disproportionate amount of “non-promotable work” done by women—tasks like covering absences, organising logistics and mentoring. Collaboration is a much less attractive proposition if helping others means spending less time on the sort of work that gets recognised when it is time to hand out actual promotions.

而且来自合作的回报是不均衡的。Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund和Laurie Weingart的新书《The No Club》调查了女性完成的大量的“非晋升性工作”——比如补缺、组织后勤和指导等。如果帮助他人意味着花更少的时间在那些实际升职时得到认可的工作上，那么合作就不那么有吸引力了。

A host of other woolly words also mask genuine trade-offs. The supremely fluffy notion of “purpose” disguises hard-edged questions of how managers should balance the interests of multiple stakeholders. “Flexibility” sounds like a boon to workers, but the reality for employees of coping with last-minute changes to schedules is often very different. The MIT study found that having a regular schedule was six times more powerful as a predictor of blue-collar-employee retention than having a flexible schedule.

许多其他模糊的词也掩盖了真正的权衡。“目的”这个极其模糊的概念掩盖了管理者应该如何平衡多个利益相关者利益的尖锐问题。“灵活性”听起来像是员工的福利，但对员工来说，现实是不同的，他们需要应对日程安排会在最后一分钟变化的情况。麻省理工学院的研究发现，有规律的工作时间比灵活的工作时间相比蓝领员工留存率高出六倍。

Traits like innovativeness or collaborativeness are still qualities for firms to aspire to. And this is not an argument for constant qualification of what is meant: the one way to make “purpose” more annoying is to put the word “smart” in front of it. But it is a plea for managers to use woolly words thoughtfully. They are not going away, but they do not have to suffocate mental activity.

创新精神或合作精神等特质仍然是企业追求的品质。这并不是对其意义进行不断限定的论点：让“目的”变得更烦人的一种方法是在它前面加上“smart”这个词。但这是在恳求经理们深思熟虑地使用含混不清的词语。它们不会消失，但它们不会扼制精神活动。