在前些日子上映的《华尔街》(Wall Street)续集《华尔街：金钱永不眠》(Money Never Sleeps)中，戈登•盖科(Gordon Gekko)告诉我们，“理想主义会扼杀交易”。这句话堪称整部影片最辛辣的台词，对那些宣扬商业是“为善者诸事顺”的人来说，不啻为一记响亮的耳光。实际上，与第一部影片一样，整部续集也是对骇人行为的一种有悖于常理的致敬。
不过，尽管盖科是虚构出来的人物，但Facebook创始人马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)却是影片《社交网络》(The Social Network)中再真实不过的主角——该片是今秋好莱坞又一部商战大片。扎克伯格不仅被描绘为雄心勃勃（当然，这是一名创业家应该具备的素质），还报复心重、狠毒、表里不一，甚至缺乏最基本的社交技巧。
前段时间在接受奥普拉•温芙瑞(Oprah Winfrey)采访时，扎克伯格这样评价这部影片：“许多情节都是虚构的，但即使是制片人也不会否认这一点。他们编造了一个精彩的故事。我的人生就这个样子，我知道它并不那么激动人心。过去六年，我在编码上花了大量心血，一心扑在工作上。但也许把这段经历当做一场场派对和（像影片中）这样疯狂的一出戏来回忆，是件很有意思的事情。”
我们在过去30年涌现出的诸多科技伟人身上，都见证过类似的故事。据大多数人的描述，年轻时期的比尔•盖茨(Bill Gates)差不多同样可怕——他冲手下的员工大叫大嚷，在打造微软(Microsoft)期间，霸道地打压竞争对手。
据称，史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)在创建苹果(Apple)期间，曾逼迫其研发工程师长时间工作，而且，无论对同事还是竞争对手，都表现得不屑一顾。
可是，有多少诸如此类的故事被写入了管理学教材？为何没有哪位大师站出来告诉我们，最大限度地挖掘一家企业潜力的办法就是加大施压，直到所有人都陷入绝望和疲惫不堪？然后再给他们套上某种心理上的光环。
为什么要让好莱坞来告诉我们那些我们早已明了的事情——商场上的成功人士，并不总是最可爱的人？若想像扎克伯格、盖茨或盖科那样成功，可能需要一些极其不招人待见的特性。
我曾听黑石集团(Blackstone Group)首席执行官史蒂夫•施瓦茨曼(Steve Schwarzman)讲述企业中竞争力的重要性。要想在私人股本业出头，你真的必须强硬。他说的在理。
但两个月前发生了一件事情。施瓦茨曼将美国总统巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)威胁要对私人股本投资增税，比作“希特勒1939年入侵波兰”。他事后道了歉，但一名亿万富翁暴躁地将增税比作二战，这种竞争精神显然太过头了。
但普通的经理人是如何理解这一切的？这就像你们出席一个谈判研讨会，学习如何创造“双赢”局面，但你们当中有些人疑心——正如一位企业律师曾经对我讲的——“唯一的双赢局面是同一个人赢两次”。
就在你下载最新的多样化和性骚扰规定时，扎克伯格却如火箭般将你甩到身后，晋身亿万富豪——他在创建Facebook之前的上一次创业是建立一个网站，邀请用户根据身体魅力为哈佛女生排名。
《快速球宣言》(Hardball: Are Your Playing to Play or Playing to Win?)是为数不多的几本探讨这种商界阴暗面话题的书籍之一。在此书中，来自波士顿咨询集团(Boston Consulting Group)的两位咨询师乔治•斯托克(George Stalk)和罗伯•拉契诺尔(Rob Lachenauer)写道：“在商界，胜者行事粗暴，从不道歉。”他们称，强硬不是说去犯法或欺诈，而是无情地竞争，手段近乎残忍，目标绝对明确。这当然与“人际能力”无关。
《快速球宣言》列出了5种“必需的获胜行为”：“锲而不舍地专注于竞争优势”；“竭力将竞争优势最大化”，不要为擅长某件事而沾沾自喜，而是尽可能做得更好；“避免直接进攻”，因为除非你势不可挡，否则最好是暗中出招；“发掘人的获胜心”，驱使他们变成如饥似渴、有强烈竞争欲望的野兽；“知道警戒线在哪儿”，逼近这条线，但别越界。
他们接下来列出了5种需要“无情”采用的策略。它们是：“摧毁竞争对手的利润点”；“骄傲地剽窃”；“蒙骗竞争对手”；在拥有“巨大、势不可挡的力量”后加以释放；“提高竞争对手的成本”——这是在你摧毁他们的利润、剽窃、使诈，并打得他们丧失意识时使出的最后一招。
“我们说的是强硬，不是施虐，”他们写道。“没错，你希望竞争对手寝食难安，但不要表现得太明显，以免让人觉得你是在欺负人。事实上，你希望你周围的人——你需要他们的直接回应——为你鼓劲加油。而他们当中许多人会这样做，因为他们会分享你的这些策略所创造出的财富。”
无法做到强硬或是采取更为极端的衍生策略，即使你体面地作战，却可能连一丝安慰都无法获得。但如果成功了，你将可以动用整个世界的资源来赎罪——不管好莱坞如何描绘你。
philip@philipdelvesbroughton.com
译者/陈云飞
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001035341
In Money Never Sleeps, the just released sequel to Wall Street, Gordon Gekko tells us that “idealism kills deals”. It is the most pungent line in the film, and a bracing rejoinder to anyone who argues that business is about “doing well by doing good”. In fact, the whole film, like the original, is a perverse homage to appalling behaviour.
But whereas Gekko is fictional, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is the all-too-real central character in The Social Network, the other business world blockbuster of the autumn. Mr Zuckerberg is not just portrayed as ambitious, a reasonable trait in the founder of a start-up, but also as vengeful, vicious, duplicitous and devoid of even the most basic social skills.
Interviewed by Oprah Winfrey last week, Mr Zuckerberg said of the film: “A lot of it is fiction, but even the film-makers will say that. They’re building a good story. This is my life, I know it’s not that dramatic. The last six years have been a lot of coding and focus and hard work. But maybe it will be fun to remember it as partying and all this crazy drama.”
It is a story we have seen before among the technology greats of the past 30 years. The young Bill Gates, by most accounts, was a similar kind of nightmare, screaming at his staff and elbowing aggressively past rivals as he built Microsoft.
When he founded Apple, Steve Jobs was said to push his developers to work ungodly hours and to treat both colleagues and competitors with contempt.
And yet how much of this makes it into the management books? Where is the guru who tells us that the way to get the most out of an organisation is to ratchet up the pressure until everyone is desperate and frazzled? And then to run psychological rings round them?
Why is it left to Hollywood to tell us what we already know, that those who succeed in business are not always the most likable people? That to succeed on the epic scale of a Zuckerberg, Gates or Gekko, may require some deeply unpalatable traits?
I once heard Steve Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, talk about the importance of competitiveness in his business. To win in private equity, you really have to hustle. Fair enough.
But then came the incident last month, when he compared President Barack Obama’s threats to raise taxes on private equity investments to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939”. He has since apologised but when a multibillionaire testily compares a tax rise to the second world war, that spirit of competitiveness has evidently gone too far.
But what is the ordinary manager to make of it all? There you sit in a negotiation seminar learning about creating “win-win” situations, while part of you suspects that, as one corporate lawyer once put it to me, “the only win-win situation is one where the same person wins twice”.
There you are downloading the latest rules on diversity and sexual harassment, while Mr Zuckerberg, whose last venture before Facebook was a website that invited users to rank female students at Harvard by physical attractiveness, rockets past towards billions.
In Hardball: Are Your Playing to Play or Playing to Win?, one of the few books to address this issue of business’s dark side, George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, two consultants at Boston Consulting Group, wrote: “Winners in business play rough and don’t apologise.” They argued that hardball is not about breaking the law or cheating, but about relentless competition, bordering on brutality, and absolute clarity of purpose. It is certainly not about “people skills”.
The Hardball way lists five “fundamental behaviours of winning”: “focus relentlessly on competitive advantage”; “strive for extreme competitive advantage”, don’t be happy just being better at something, but try to be much, much better; “avoid attacking directly”, because unless you have overwhelming force, you are better off being sneaky; “exploit people’s will to win”, by motivating them to become slavering, hyper-competitive beasts; and “know the caution zone”, play to the edges of the pitch, but not beyond.
They then list five strategies to be deployed in “bursts of ruthless intensity”. These are: “devastate rivals’ profit sanctuaries”; “plagiarise with pride”; “deceive the competition”; “unleash massive and overwhelming force” once you have it; and “raise competitors’ costs”, the final turn of the ratchet after you have destroyed their profits, copied, tricked and beaten them unconscious.
“Hardball is tough, not sadistic,” they write. “Yes, you want rivals to squirm, but not so visibly that you are viewed as a bully. In fact, you want the people in your world – the same ones you demand straight answers from – to cheer you on. And many of them will, as they share the riches your strategies generate.”
Fail at hardball, or its more extreme derivations, and you may not even have the consolation of having fought a decent fight. But succeed, and you will have all the resources in the world to buy your way to redemption – however Hollywood depicts you.
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