Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me. One of them was: Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when, for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels, male and female, serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey? You'd still have five billion left in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. Now, you may remember me asking the question as well, a very interesting observation, that actually those strange little signs that actually flash "35" at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you're within or outside the speed limit -- those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment.
对我在TEDGlobal(TED全球会议)有印象的观众们 大概会记得我曾经提出过一些问题 直到现在仍然困扰着我。 有一个问题是这样的:为何政府要花费 60亿英镑 来提速欧洲之星列车 而仅仅花费十分之一的预算 就可以请到顶级名模们 为乘客们免费提供波得路堡红葡萄酒 让旅客们享受整个旅程 这样政府能省下50亿 乘客们还会要求火车减速 你大概也记得我的另一个问题 一个很有趣的观察 那些公路上奇怪的小标示牌 持续闪烁着“35“ 偶尔伴随着一个笑脸 或者愁脸 取决于你是否超速 它们其实比测速机 更有效地预防了车祸的发生 尽管后者以实施惩罚 来警戒驾驶人
So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is: The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible, as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied. So there seems to be a complete disconnect here. So what I'm asking for is the creation of a new job title -- I'll come to this a little later -- and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language. Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government, which is, of course, the largest organization of all, have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people.
因此这里有一种奇怪的失衡 在我们解决各种问题的时候 特别涉及到人类心理方面时 那即是各种组织和机构 往往倾向于 尽可能布置多的财力物力 施加压力 然而,最终人们的选择倾向 所受的影响 往往与其投入 成反比 这里就出现了一个完全的脱节 我认为应该出现一种新型的职业 我稍后会谈到 并且很有可能引出一个新的 英文名词 在我看来,众多大型组织 包括政府,这一最大的组织在内 都变得 与群众的实际需要 完全脱节了
Let me give you one example of this. You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger, okay, heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time. It may still be, for all I know. Now, all of you in this room, in one form or other, are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged. Just interested, did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all? So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity, you're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody, okay? By contrast, years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do, the most potent things are actually very, very small. This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class, it's the cruet salt and pepper set. Quite nice in itself, they're little, sort of, airplane things. What's really, really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought, which is, "I reckon I can heist these." However, you pick them up and underneath, actually engraved in the metal, are the words, "Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class." (Laughter) Now, years after you remember the strategic question of whether you're flying in a 777 or an Airbus, you remember those words and that experience.
就此举一个例吧 还记得美国在线与时代华纳的合并吧 它当时被称为有史以来最大的 单笔交易 据我所知,很有可能现在仍是 我想在座的各位,以这样或那样的途径, 都有可能是 两家合并公司(之一)的客户 那么,是否有人注意到 合并带来的任何变化? 所以除非你恰好是 两公司中某一个的持股者 或者是参与到这次“高利润活动”中的交易者或律师 否则实际上你根本没有体验到任何变化 其实这对所有人都毫无意义 与之相反的是,多年来的市场策划让我意识到 如果你要让别人记住 并感激你的所作所为 最有用的其实是那些非常非常小的事 这是在维珍大西洋航班的头等舱里 这是盐和胡椒调味瓶 他们看起来十分可爱,又无足轻重,类似于飞机上的免费用品 有趣的是每个人看到它们 心里都会偷偷地想 说不定我可以把它们带走 然而,当你拿起它们时 会发现底座刻着这样的话 盗于维珍大西洋航班头等舱 笑声 多年以后 当你早已忘记 当年坐的是波音777还是空中客机时 你会记得那段有趣的话和那次经历
Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar. Has anybody stayed there? It's the lift, it's a series of buttons in the lift. Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor. It starts with garage at the bottom, I suppose, appropriately, but it doesn't go up garage, grand floor, mezzanine, one, two, three, four. It actually says garage, funk, rhythm and blues. You have a series of buttons. You actually choose your lift music. My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max. It's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars, in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life.
同样的,这是在斯德克尔摩一个名为Lydmar的宾馆电梯里 有人住过那里吗 电梯里有一串按钮 看似平常 然而它们代表的并不是各个楼层 最下面的按钮是garage,没什么奇怪的 然而再往上却不是底层,中层楼,一,二,三,四 这些按钮上其实写着车库,朋克,蓝调 它们是供你选择电梯的音乐风格 我猜想在Lydmar酒店的电梯里 安装一个这样的系统 花费至多在500到1000镑 但说实话 这比绝大多数我们曾住过的酒店更让人印象深刻 尽管在那些酒店你常常被告知所住的房间才被装修过 耗资50万美元 但那不过使它显得 和你住过的其他酒店客房一个样
Now, these are trivial marketing examples, I accept. But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo, probably one of the leading experts in, effectively, the eradication of poverty in the developing world, actually spoke. And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which, in a business context or a government context, would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing. It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by, not only making it a social event -- I think good use of behavioral economics in that, if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated, your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone. But secondly, to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated. It's a tiny, tiny thing. If you're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says, "So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty?" you're not really confident standing up there saying, "I've got it cracked; it's the lentils," are you?
是的,这些都是微小的市场策划的案例。 在我最近参与的一次TED活动中, 杜芙洛(法国经济学家) 很可能是消除发展中国家贫困现状这一领域的 领头专家之一 也谈到了这样的案例 她提出了一个类似的方案 我对此很感兴趣 然而在商界和政界看来 这个方案是如此的微不足道 以至提出它显得让人尴尬 这个方案就是提倡孩子的疫苗接种 首先让它一种社会性活动 我认为这是对行为经济学很好的应用 如果你与另外几个母亲一起 带着孩子去接种 你将比独自去更有信心 更重要的是,为了鼓励接种 政府应给每个参与接种的人一公斤扁豆 这是一件很小很小的事 如果你是联合国科教文组织的一个高级官员 当某人问起:“那你要怎么 消除当今世界的贫困问题呢?“ 你不可能自信满满地回答 ”我搞定了,就用扁豆。“ 不是么?
Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them. And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there's a very, very strong disproportionality at work, that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that's applied. But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality. So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget. And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on. What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all. (Laughter) It's those people I'd quite like to create in the world going forward.
自夸的心理让我们总觉得 重要的问题 要用看起来重大且十分昂贵的方式 来解决 其实不然,行为经济学一再而再地表明 在人类干预和行为改变之间 其实存在着严重的比例失调 那些能够真正改变我们行为 和态度的事 其实不需要花费 其看似所需的财力 或物力 但机构的本身 决定了它无法习惯 这种不成比例 于是便造成机构中 负责解决问题的人 往往拥有巨额的预算 而一旦有了巨额预算 人们便不由自主地寻找费钱的方式去解决问题 当今我们缺乏的正是那些有 着巨大权利却分文没有的人 笑声 我希望在这日新月异的世界中 能出现这样的人才
Now, here's another thing that happens, which is what I call sometimes "Terminal 5 syndrome," which is that big, expensive things get big, highly-intelligent attention, and they're great, and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent, until you get down to the small detail, the usability, which is the signage, which is catastrophic. You come out of "Arrive" at the airport, and you follow a big yellow sign that says "Trains" and it's in front of you. So you walk for another hundred yards, expecting perhaps another sign, that might courteously be yellow, in front of you and saying "Trains." No, no, no, the next one is actually blue, to your left, and says "Heathrow Express." I mean, it could almost be rather like that scene from the film "Airplane." A yellow sign? That's exactly what they'll be expecting.
还有一个现象 我有时把它称之为“第五航站楼综合症” 它是指:要完成耗资巨大的重要事件 需要人们集中才智和精力 人们会取得很不错的成果,比如5号航站楼是绝对的宏伟摩登 然而直到你注意到一些小细节的实用性,就会发现 比如它的指示牌 其实是相当糟糕的 走出机场的“抵达”口后 你看到面前一个黄色的指示牌上写着“火车” 于是你跟随指示走上几百码 搜寻着新的指示牌 期待着黄色的“火车”标志 然而下一个却是蓝色的,在你的左方 上面写着“希斯罗高速” 这简直太像电影“飞机”里的搞笑场景了 黄色的指示牌?那正是他们所期待的。
Actually, what happens in the world increasingly -- now, all credit to the British Airport Authority. I spoke about this before, and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said, "Okay, what can you do?" So I did come up with five suggestions, which they are actually actioning. One of them also being, although logically it's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it, if it only serves two floors, it's actually bloody terrifying, okay? Because when the door closes and there's nothing for you to do, you've actually just stepped into a Hammer film.
实际上,当今世界越来越多地出现这种情况 全归功于英国机场当局(对细节的忽略) 我曾经也谈到过这个问题 当时一个睿智的人后来问我"好吧,那你说应该怎么办?“ 我给了他五个建议,而我的建议竟然被采纳了。 但是其中的一个建议 尽管逻辑上讲是不错的 即是电梯里不安上下键 但如果电梯只在两层楼间运作的话 那样其实是很恐怖的一件事 因为当门关上后 你什么都不用做了 仿佛此刻你一脚踏进了恐怖电影的场景里
(Laughter)
笑声
So these questions ... what is happening in the world is the big stuff, actually, is done magnificently well. But the small stuff, what you might call the user interface, is done spectacularly badly. But also, there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions. Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as "strategy" to actually solve them. I tried this exercise recently, talking about banking. They said, "Can we do an advertising campaign? What can we do and encourage more online banking?" I said, "It's really, really easy." I said, "When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they'd probably quite like to look at. The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance." I've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen.
这种种的问题都说明了,当今世界 重大的问题 被解决得很好 而细节问题,类似于用户连接口的问题 却解决得十分糟糕 同时,在解决这些细节问题时 人们往往陷入一种僵局 因为那些真正能够解决问题的人 往往权高位重,整天忙于 思考“战略性”的问题而不是实际地去解决 说到银行业,我最近遇到了这样一件事 一些银行业人士向我咨询“我们能够以广告来竞争吗? 我们怎样能推广银行在线业务呢 我说,“这其实相当简单。“ 比如,“当人们登陆到他们的网上银行里 是为了查看各种信息 而最不愿意看到的就是自己的结余。 我有一些朋友 从来没有用过自己银行的现金取款机 仅仅因为怕在屏幕上 看到自己的结余。
Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news? Okay, you simply wouldn't. I said, "If you make, actually, 'Tell me my balance.' If you make that an option rather than the default, you'll find twice as many people log on to online banking, and they do it three times as often." Let's face it, most of us -- how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine? And you're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large. Now, interesting that no single person does that, or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it. But what's interesting about that suggestion was that, to implement that suggestion wouldn't cost 10 million pounds; it wouldn't involve large amounts of expenditure; it would actually cost about 50 quid. And yet, it never happens.
谁愿意让自己得知坏消息呢? 我才不呢 我告诉他们,“如果你们把“显示我的结余”改为可选 而不是让它自动显示 那么你登陆网上银行的客户将会翻一番 并且登陆频率增加两倍 说实话,我们在座有多少人 会在取现后查看自己的收支状况? 还不用说按世界平均水平来看你们大多属于有钱人 看吧,一个也没有 或者说即使有也不愿承认自己会那样做 关于这些提议,有趣的是 要实行它花不了一千英镑 实际花得挺少 不过50磅左右 然而它至今没有被实行
Because there's a fundamental disconnect, as I said, that actually, the people with the power want to do big expensive things. And there's to some extent a big strategy myth that's prevalent in business now. And if you think about it, it's very, very important that the strategy myth is maintained. Because, if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors, it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company's success might actually lie somewhere else, in small pieces of tactical activity.
这就回到了我所说的严重脱节问题上 即有权的人 想做费钱的事 现在有一种策略误解现象 在商界很普遍 如果多加思考便会发现,其实是非常有必要 维持这种现状的 因为董事会得说服公司成员 任何集体的成功 都几乎完全归功于董事会所作的决策 这才能使薪水上巨大的差异 显得更加合理 而不是去承认公司的成功 其实在于许多别的方面 比如那些微不足道的战略性活动
But what is happening is that effectively -- and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn't helped this; lots of things haven't helped this -- business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy. It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate. It's a kind of mechanistic world that we'd all love to live in where, effectively, it sits very nicely on spreadsheets, everything is numerically expressible, and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success. That's the world people actually want. In truth, we do live in a world that science can understand. Unfortunately, the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases, very, very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects, and equally, vast areas of activity, enormous mergers, can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all. But it's very, very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we're living in such a world.
然而,现在的实际情况是—— 电子表格并没有促成这一状况 很多事情也与此无关—— 在商界和政界都有一种妒忌心理 它们希望这在个世界里 投入与产出是成正比的 我们都喜欢生活在一个 符合机械理论的世界里 所有的事物都可以通过数据 清晰地在电子表格上表示出来 而你在事物上所花的时间 将与你的收效成正比 这样的世界大家都渴望 而我们也的确生活在一个以科学为基调的世界 不幸的是,这里科学可能更接近于气象学 在很多情况下 微小的改变 也可能带来天翻地覆的变化 而恰恰相反,大范围的运作,巨大的公司合并 到头来却没有带来任何改变 但要我们承认这一点 是十分困难的
But what I'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach. That is actually strategy, and I'm not denying that strategy has a role. You know, there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot. And I'd be wrong to dis that completely. Moving over, we come, of course, to consultancy.
我想说的是,许多事情 将会变得更加容易 如果我们把问题分成这样四大类 这才是一种策略,当然不否认每种策略都有它的适用性 要知道,毕竟也有的事情是需要花费大量财力 才能取得大的成果 我不否认这一点 接下来我们就来说一下咨询方面
(Laughter)
笑声
I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way. I mean, Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model. He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services, (Laughter) no longer tied to a single monopoly provider, in many cases, sourcing things locally, and of course, the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing. So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that, I'm not sure.
在我看来,埃森哲(一家咨询公司,主要提供管理咨询,技术咨询和外包服务) 这样草率地抛弃泰格伍兹 是一件很不光彩的事 因为泰格实际上是遵循了埃森哲服务模式的 他为性服务建立起一个有趣的外包模式 笑声 不再被单一的供货商垄断(婚外性行为) 在很多情况下本地采购(性伴侣) 同时,在任何时候都能保证一到三个女孩供应 使得负载更加平衡 所以我实在搞不懂为什么埃森哲突然不喜欢泰格了
Then there are other things that don't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing. That's called trivia. But there's a fourth thing. And the fundamental problem is we don't actually have a word for this stuff. We don't know what to call it. And actually we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause.
还有一类事情尽管不需要花费太多,却无法取得任何成效 人们称之为琐碎 但最后这一类事情,即第四类 我们难以用言语来描述 我们不知如何指代它 而且我们很少花费资金 来寻找这类事 它们尽管微不足道,但却有可能带来大的改变 如果确实起了作用 那么它们将取得的成功绝对会远远超出 当初所投入的人力物力 和造成的干扰
So the first thing I'd like is a competition -- to anybody watching this as a film -- is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right. And the second thing, I think, is that the world needs to have people in charge of that. That's why I call for the "Chief Detail Officer." Every corporation should have one, and every government should have a Ministry of Detail. The people who actually have no money, who have no extravagant budget, but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay, but you'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English. And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers, then that fourth quadrant, which is so woefully neglected at the moment, might finally get the attention it deserves.
因此,首先我希望 每一个看过这次演讲的人都来参与这样一个竞赛 即为右下角的这第四种事物命 其次,我认为 这个世界需要有人来掌握这种事物 这就是为什么我呼吁“细节总官员”的设立 每个公司都应该有一个这样的职位 而每个政府都应该有一个细节部门 担任此职的人不应当有钱 或者豪华预算 并且要能意识这样一点 付双倍的代价有可能 在政府工作中 取得更大的政绩 但你也往往也能取得同样的效果 仅仅通过重新设计表格 并以更易懂的英文表述 如果我们的政界能设立一个细节部门 而商界有一个总细节长官 那么这第四类 常可悲地被人遗忘的事物 可能最终将得到其应有的关注
Thank you very much.
非常感谢大家