经济学人阅读｜扉页文章 How to cope with middle age?|business|firm|middle|with|经济学

08.02｜经济学人阅读｜扉页文章 How to cope with middle age?

经济学人The Economist是一份英国的英文新闻周报，分八个版本于每周五向全球发行，编辑部位于伦敦，创办于1843年9月。

经济学人是一本综合性新闻评论刊物，有商业、国家和地区、经济和金融、科学和技术五大类。其中文章文风紧凑且严谨，对语言精准运用，展现出一种克制的风趣幽默，常运用双关语调侃。

经济学人对于英语考试的重要性不言而喻，其文章常常出现在雅思托福、SAT、GRE、GMAT、考研英语、四六级、MTI和CATTI的阅读理解真题中。

今天给大家分享的是经济学人2020年8月1日期刊的扉页文章，也是社论Leaders的第一篇：How to cope with middle age。

这篇文章主要是对谷歌在上周参与反垄断会议作出的社论，文章认为谷歌已经遇到了公司的中年危机，公司规模庞大，极易丧失其创造性和敏捷性；业务成熟，无法拓展新的发展领域；员工众多，团队争执频繁；地位上升，政府监管其市场垄断。文章为谷歌提出了三个应对措施：各部门合为一体利用规模优势；拆分部门精简团队；抑或是完全根据程序员的思路走。文章在末尾应用了微软和苹果公司应对其中年危机的方式，告诉谷歌还是应该不忘初心、勇于探索新领域。

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How to cope with middle age

谷歌如何应对企业中年危机

IT MAY BE just 21 years old, but Google is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. As so often in such cases, all seems well on the surface. Every day its search engine handles 6bn requests, YouTube receives 49 years’ worth of video uploads and Gmail processes about 100bn emails. Thanks to its dominance of online advertising, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made a profit of $34bn last year. Beyond its core operations, it is a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and self-driving cars. Along with the bosses of Amazon, Apple and Facebook, its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, was grilled this week by lawmakers in Washington, DC, who fret that America’s tech giants need to be restrained because they are so profitable. Crisis? What crisis?

谷歌可能只有21岁，但她却已经处于中年危机了。一般情况下，他从表面看起来一切都很好。他的搜索引擎每天需要处理60亿个请求，YouTube每天需要上传时长达49年的视频内容，Gmail每天需要处理了大约1000亿封电子邮件。由于其在网络广告领域的主导地位，谷歌的母公司Alphabet去年实现了340亿美元的利润。除核心业务外，谷歌还是人工智能、量子计算和自动驾驶汽车的世界领导者。本周，华盛顿特区的议员们询问了谷歌的CEO桑达尔·皮查伊与亚马逊、苹果、Facebook的老板们，议员们认为美国的科技巨头们收益过于巨大而必须被管制。那么问题来了，谷歌的中年危机？什么危机？

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Being hauled before Congress is, on the face of it, a sign of success. But it also marks a difficult moment for Google’s leaders: the onset of corporate middle age. This is a problem as old as business itself. How do companies sustain the creativity and agility that made them great, even as they forge a culture and corporate machine that is built to last? For Google the transition is especially dramatic because its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, tried from the start to build a firm in which this moment would never arrive. As Google prepared to go public in 2004 they declared that it was not a conventional company, and “we do not intend to become one”. They hoped playground-like offices, generous perks and a campus atmosphere would allow it to retain the agility and innovation of a startup as it grew. The appearance of wrinkles on the corporate forehead is an admission of failure.

表面上看，被放到国会上讨论是一个公司成功的标志。但这对于谷歌领导人而言也标志着一个困难的时刻：公司的中年危机来了。这是一个与商业一样古老的问题。公司在打造一个持久的公司文化和公司运作的同时，如何保持创造性和敏捷性？是这些让一家公司变得优秀。对于谷歌而言，这种转变尤其引人注目，因为其创始人拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林在创业之初就试图让这一时刻永远不会到来。当谷歌于2004年准备上市时，他们宣布这不是一家传统企业，并表示“我们不打算成为传统企业中的一员”。他们希望办公室可以像操场一样，高额的补助津贴和校园一样的氛围能够使谷歌保持其在初创之时所拥有的创造性和敏捷性。一旦公司的额头上出现了皱纹，便是一种失败的象征。

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The signs of ageing are apparent in Google’s maturing business, its changing culture and its ever-more-entwined relationship with government. Take the business first. The firm is running up against growth constraints in its near-monopolies of search and online-advertising tools. Its market share in search ads is around 90%. Unearthing other gold mines has proved difficult. None of the ambitious “moonshot” projects into which Alphabet has poured billions, such as delivery drones and robots, has been a breakout success. To keep growing, Google is having to try to muscle in on the turf occupied by big tech rivals, such as cloud computing and enterprise software and services.

谷歌的业务日趋成熟、其企业文化不断变化、与政府之间的关系更加紧密，这些迹象都说明了谷歌在逐渐衰老。谷歌几乎垄断了搜索工具和在线广告，这让其遇到了发展的瓶颈。它在搜索和广告中的市场份额约为90％。而进入其他的市场又是十分困难的。Alphabet雄心勃勃投入数十亿美元的“月球计划”项目（例如无人机和机器人）都没有取得突破性的成功。但是为了保持增长，谷歌不得不去努力介入大型科技竞争对手所占据的市场，例如云计算以及企业软件服务。

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The cultural challenge is fuzzier but no less urgent for a firm that is proud of its unusual corporate character. The freewheeling ethos that was so successful in Google’s early days has become a liability. It works much less well at scale. Google now has nearly 120,000 employees, and even more temporary contractors. Doing things from the bottom up has become harder as the workforce has grown larger and less like-minded, with squabbles breaking out over everything from gender politics and the serving of meat in cafeterias to Google’s sale of technology to police forces.

文化挑战是模糊的，但对于以不寻常的公司性格为荣的企业来说，文化挑战同样也是紧迫的。在谷歌早期随心所欲的精神是十分成功的，如今这一精神已经成为了一种责任。但是当公司规模变大后，这种精神的效果却并不好。谷歌现在拥有将近12万名员工，甚至还有更多的临时承包商。随着人员队伍的扩大和大家的意见相左，自下而上地去做事情变得越来越困难，争执到处都会存在，从性别政治，自助餐厅提供的肉食到谷歌向警察出售技术等一切事情。

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The third sign of lost youth, the attention of trustbusters, has long looked inevitable. As big tech has grown, so have its interactions with government—as an institution to lobby, as a customer and as a regulator. America’s Justice Department is poring over Google’s online-ads businesses and may soon file an antitrust suit. Scrutiny is unlikely to wane as the tech titans break out of their silos and compete more. Indeed, regulators may take it as a sign of broadening power.

How should Google respond? To be both innovative and mature is a hard trick to pull off. History is littered with failed attempts. In giving it a go, the firm has to decide whom it puts its faith in: managers, investors or geeks?

谷歌不再年少的第三个迹象，即长期以来客户对其信任度的破坏。随着大型科技的发展，谷歌作为游说机构，客户和监管者，与政府之间的互动越来越多。美国司法部正在调查谷歌的在线广告业务，并可能很快将对谷歌提起反垄断诉讼。随着技术巨头离开自己的优势市场并参与更多的市场竞争，对科技巨头的审查是不太可能取消的。当然，监管机构可能会将其视为权力扩张的标志。

那么谷歌应该如何回应？既要创新又要成熟，是一项艰巨的任务。历史充斥着失败的尝试。放手一搏，公司必须决定相信谁：总经理，股东还是程序员？

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The first route would involve taking a strong dose of managerial medicine to become a more tightly run conglomerate. The archetype for this approach is GE in its heyday under Jack Welch, who persuaded shareholders that sprawling businesses could work well, provided they were run by expert managers. But it turned out that GE was disguising weaknesses in its industrial units by leaning on its financial arm, GE Capital. GE’s subsequent woes offer a warning of the peril of relying on one hugely successful division to subsidise less profitable units elsewhere—as Google does with its advertising business.

第一个方法是引入强大的管理团队，使谷歌成为一个经营更为紧密的集团。这种方法的原型是在杰克·韦尔奇在通用电气公司时的全盛时期，他说服股东，让公司只由专家经理来经营，这样扩展业务便可以很好地运作。但这却变成了，通用电气公司过度依赖资本优势，用金融部门掩盖了工业部门的劣势。通用电气随后的困境警告了我们，依靠一个非常成功的部门来补贴其他利润较低的部门，是十分危险的，就像谷歌在其广告业务中所做的那样。

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If doubling down on the conglomerate model is not the answer, what about the opposite approach: spinning off, selling or closing some units and returning money to shareholders? That would please many investors. By some calculations, Alphabet is worth $100bn less than the sum of its parts. Spinning off YouTube would increase competition in internet advertising—a handy sop to regulators—as well as unlocking value. It might be worth more than Netflix, because it need not pay for content, most of which is user-generated. But the experiences of firms like AT&T and IBM highlight the danger that downsizing hollows out innovation. And while Google might hope to retain its distinctive culture in whittled-down form, the truth is that no matter how much it wants to be as youthful and free-spirited as Peter Pan, it is no longer a startup.

如果利用集团模式让企业优势加倍不是好的出路，那相反的方法又会如何呢：拆分，出售或关闭一些部门并将资金返还给股东？这种方式会让许多投资者满意。通过计算，Alphabet的市值比其各个部门的总和少1000亿美元。如果将YouTube剥离开来，将会增加线上广告的竞争，这对于监管机构而言是轻而易举的事，并且可以释放市值。YouTube可能比Netflix更有价值，因为它不需要为内容付费，其中大部分内容是用户自己制作的。但是AT＆T和IBM等公司的经验却展现了缩小公司规模会削弱创新能力的危险。尽管谷歌可能希望以缩减公司规模的形式来保留其独特的文化，但事实是，即便谷歌想要像彼得潘一样年轻气盛、自由奔放，它都不再是一家创业公司了。

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That leaves trusting the geeks. Becoming a glorified venture-capital outfit has appeal, but the woes of SoftBank’s Vision Fund warn of hubris. Google would do better to examine how two older tech giants overcame their own mid-life crises (and near-death experiences): Microsoft, nearly broken up by antitrust regulators, and Apple, which spent years in the wilderness before Steve Jobs returned to reinvent it as a maker of portable devices. Both bounced back by rediscovering their core purpose and applying it in a new way. Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has reinvented itself as a provider of cloud-based software tools and services, rather than its Windows operating system. And Apple, previously known for its elegant, easy-to-use computers, has minted money by applying its genius to smartphones.

那如果是相信程序员这一方法呢。这将使谷歌风光无限，并对风险投资机构颇具吸引力，但软银的愿景基金的困境给了人们一个警告。谷歌最好可以参考一下两个年纪较大的科技巨头是如何克服自己的中年危机的（以及他们濒临死亡的经历）：微软，几乎被反垄断监管机构解散了；苹果，在史蒂夫·乔布斯为公司重振雄风之前做了好几年的便携式设备制造商。两者的反弹都是通过重新发现其核心价值并以新的方式提供服务。微软在萨蒂亚·纳德拉的领导下，已经重塑了自我，成为了基于云的软件工具和服务的提供者，而不只是提供Windows操作系统。苹果公司以前以其优雅，易于使用的计算机而闻名，而现在它将其天才应用到了智能手机上。

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Could Google similarly identify what it does best and apply it in new areas? It could decide its mission is helping consumers trade their personal data for goods and services; or using AI to solve more of the world’s problems; or being the data processor of net-enabled gadgets. At the moment it is betting on almost everything. Indiscipline can lead to unexpected innovations, but more often saps vitality. Google’s best way forward is to follow the advice often given to victims of a mid-life crisis: slim down, decide what matters and follow the dream.

谷歌是否可以像微软和苹果公司一样，确定其最擅长的领域并将其应用于新的领域？它的使命可以是帮助消费者将其个人数据用于商品和交易服务；或使用人工智能解决世界上更多的问题；或成为网络工具的数据处理器。目前，谷歌把押注放在了几乎所有的事物上。随心所欲可能会出现意想不到的创新，但更多时候是会丧失其活力。谷歌最好的前进方法是遵循已经经历了中年危机的企业所提供的建议：精简公司架构，决定某一个方向并跟随自己的梦想。