《Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds (Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit) 》读书笔记

 

1. 而在组织中处于较低层级、真正与客户打交道的人们——那些往往并没有真正参与策略制定过程的人们——会认为管理层陷入了幻想之中，于是他们只是耸耸肩，继续做自己原本在做的事情。
2. 战略所需要的并非越来越精确的内部视角，而是一种“外部视角”——通过将其他高管及其所在企业在其他战略决策环境中所取得的数千种经验数据纳入自己的战略讨论中，来引导讨论的方向。
3. 因此，人们似乎更倾向于制定一些与去年相比仅有细微差异的计划，将资源分散投入到整个业务中，而不是把所有赌注押在某个特定业务单元的成功上。
4. 即便如此，演讲者仍然可以利用自己所掌握的内部信息来操纵数据。例如，那些负责汇报自己所在业务部门情况的演讲者，显然比在场的其他人拥有更大的信息优势。比如，分析过去的业绩表现本应是一件简单的事情——因为事后回顾总能让人看得一清二楚——但实际上并非如此。在战略讨论会上，往往存在一些过于微妙的扭曲，这些扭曲在讨论过程中很难被察觉。演讲者可能会通过排除那些自己所在业务部门表现不佳的地区或市场细分市场，从而让数据看起来更理想；而对于那些糟糕的业绩表现，他们则可能会将其归因于一些一次性因素，比如天气、重组措施、新进入市场的竞争者，或是监管政策的变化。有时，人们对市场的分析方式会彻底剥夺所有有价值的洞察力——最终，人们讨论的往往只是医院里患者的平均体温这类毫无意义的数据。
5. 然而，正如我们许多人从个人经验中了解到的那样，这种“曲棍球杆理论”很少能够真正奏效。不过，对于争取那些至关重要的初期运营资金来说，这确实是一种很有效的谈判手段。
6. 一些高管会想办法摆脱这些虚伪的竞争手段。例如，当杰克·韦尔奇担任通用电气的首席执行官时，他明确规定旗下所有业务都必须在各自的市场中排名第一或第二。然而他逐渐发现，一些企业领导者会重新定义自己的市场范围，以便能够宣称自己在这些市场中处于第一或第二的位置。于是他要求所有相关人员重新界定市场范围，使得自己在这些市场中的市场份额低于10%，从而彻底打破这种通过缩小市场范围来虚报排名的高招。
7. 杰克·尼科尔森在电影《几个好人》中以杰瑟普上校的角色说道：“你们想要真相？但你们根本无法承受真相带来的冲击！”我们在生活中都明白，直言不讳往往会带来风险，因此我们甚至无法想象会有哪位高管会直接告诉首席执行官自己的业务部门遇到了麻烦，而且自己也不清楚原因所在。这样的高管面临的后果，恐怕远比受到轻微的惩罚要严重得多。人们的自尊心、他们的职业生涯、他们所获得的奖金、他们在组织中的地位，以及他们用来推动业务发展的各种资源——在很大程度上都取决于他们能否令人信服地展示自己的战略以及自己业务的发展前景。想想人们在交友网站上精心打造那些“成功”的个人资料吧：那些照片和所提供的事实与现实往往相差甚远，但他们的目的就是能够获得第一份回复，从而避免被直接忽略。在商业领域，我们也经常能看到这类现象。有些管理者在谈判桌上会展现出远大的愿景和强大的能力，从而要求获得超出实际需要的资源。其他人会采取一些保守的做法来避免承担风险，同时会竭力确保自己能够超额完成目标。当所有人都在采取这些策略时，你为什么还要成为那个坚持现实主义的人呢？
8. 认知偏差的研究表明，专家们在收集到更多数据后往往会变得更加自信——尽管这些额外的数据其实并不会让他们的预测变得更准确。
9. 那些属于低频发生、不确定性极高的问题，正是人类大脑最不擅处理的类型。人们往往会陷入许多已被充分记录在案的无意识认知偏差之中——比如过度自信、锚定效应、损失厌恶倾向、确认偏误、归因错误等等。这些偏差的存在其实是为了帮助我们在做决策时筛选信息。
10. 由于恐惧所引发的心理短视，我们的祖先在看到狮子时，只会专注于一件事，那就是尽快逃离危险。因此，我们的大脑进化出了许多“捷径”（用专业术语来说，就是各种启发式思维方式），这些方法隐藏在潜意识的深处。在现代生活中，这些捷径确实能够帮助我们做出各种决策——我们似乎都相当擅长这方面的能力，甚至可以说非常擅长。
11. 在这里，我们的大脑已经进化成了一种类似于祖先逃避狮子的那种“边缘系统自动驾驶模式”。然而，当我们在高不确定性的环境下，偶尔被迫做出那些具有重大影响的决策时，这些无意识的思维捷径反而会扭曲决策的结果。而恰恰就是在战略会议室里，我们才会面临这样的情况。
12. 即使是最经验丰富的高管，在面对这类情况时也只拥有有限的经验以及识别模式的能力。决策往往是在充满不确定性的环境中做出的，而其结果可能要数年之后才会显现出来。在此期间，各种人为因素、市场因素、滞后效应以及各种“干扰因素”都可能干扰任何战略规划者的预测能力，导致最终的实际结果与最初制定的战略计划毫无关联。试图改进自己的战略决策能力，就如同试图蒙着眼睛练习高尔夫球，却要等到三年后才能知道自己的球是否真的进了洞一样——这种做法根本无法带来任何实质性的效果。
13. 原因很简单：当面对诸如加入器官捐献计划这类复杂的决策时，我们往往会不知所措，最终选择什么都不做。无论这种选择是“自愿参与”还是“自愿不参与”，我们往往都会不加思考地填写表格，而不会去仔细查看相关选项。事实上，我们的潜意识比我们想象的要强大得多。
14. 损失厌恶心理。“我们不愿意因为追求那些不切实际的想法而使现有的基础状态受到威胁。我们确实认可那些为开发替代性策略或开拓新业务领域所付出的努力，但最终我们认为，这些尝试带来的风险远远超过了可能带来的收益”——尽管现有的基础状态其实正处于危险之中。
15. “故意拖延进度”。 “我可不想拿自己的职业生涯去冒险。我只愿意同意那些我有把握能够完成的任务。我的声誉正处于危险之中，我绝不能成为那个导致部门预算超支的人。”事实上，个人对于风险的态度往往与整个企业的立场不同。 • “追求短期利益”。 “反正三年后也会有人来接手这个部门。我只需要在接下来的几年里尽力提升业绩，拿到丰厚的奖金并获得晋升机会罢了——或者，也有可能被竞争对手挖走。”“企业高管的动机并不一定与股东的动机一致。” “要么按我的方式来做，否则就会出问题。” “我对这家企业以及这个行业的了解，比首席执行官和董事会都要深入。他们只能相信我所说的话。如果我说某件事太难完成了，那它确实太难了；如果我得不到所需的资源，那么这就是我无法完成任务的借口。”作为企业的高层管理者，他们拥有内部信息，而首席执行官和董事会往往别无选择，只能接受他们所描述的实际情况。 “我的绩效完全取决于各项数据指标。人们评价我的标准就是这些数据，而不是我的工作方式或工作态度。”
16. 你希望所有的人都能朝着同一个方向努力，但实际上，他们的动机各不相同，而且信息也存在着严重的不对称性。虽然首席执行官们会努力为公司的整体发展谋利，但那些向他们汇报工作的人，无疑会更关心自己负责的业务部门以及那些在自己手下工作的人。他们怎么可能不关心呢？我们都知道，那些让所在业务取得成功的人，才会得到奖励。大多数情况下，人们并不是坏人；他们只是天生就适合参与这种“游戏”。事实上，一个企业领导者所具备的地位和影响力，在很大程度上，恰恰反映了他们在这种“游戏”中表现得有多出色。
17. 战略制定涉及一系列复杂的动机，而这种过程本身也属于一场复杂的“博弈”。执行者们远没有一个所有人都能共同聚焦的单一目标；他们需要同时进行多项工作：协商明年的预算、争夺资源、将职责分配给他人、维护并推进之前的承诺、给董事会留下好印象、以及增强更广泛利益相关者的信任。他们明白，自己必须制定出一个能够带来15%增长的战略，才能真正获得自己所期望的10%成果；而其中最关键的因素就是预算。因此，战略讨论只不过是这场博弈中的开场白而已。
18. 在麦肯锡过去十年发表的研究成果中，或许最受广泛关注的那项研究表明：那些能够迅速将资本重新配置到新的增长领域的企业，其业绩往往优于那些采取稳态发展策略的企业。然而，从战略的社会影响角度来看，企业们仍然倾向于采取所谓的“平均分配资源”的策略——将有限的资源均匀地分配到整个企业体系中，尽管很明显，在某些领域中，机会要远多于其他领域。
19. 当内部视角未受到任何质疑时，就最容易形成有缺陷的战略。这种状况会使人产生一种关于未来发展结果的虚假确定性。许多人——事实上是绝大多数人——在制定战略时，都仿佛自己是这场竞争中的唯一参与者，几乎完全忽略了其他竞争者也在制定各自的战略。
20. 在企业中，社会环境往往会奖励那些过于自信的人：有谁是因为提交了一份预测增长前景并不乐观的报告而获得晋升的呢？有些人由于长期阅读自助类书籍，甚至会认为设定“具有挑战性的目标”就能激励人们努力工作，而不管这些目标有多不切实际。
21. 其规模从数亿增加到数十亿，而纳德拉在2014年初被任命为首席执行官。2006年，当飞利浦旗下的半导体业务部门NXP被分拆出来并交由私人资本机构运营时，鉴于该行业的“胜者通吃”特性，NXP的高层管理团队果断地重新分配了投资方向。NXP重点投入了移动设备与数字产品所需的芯片开发领域，这些项目需要耗费大量资源；同时，该公司也在身份识别芯片及汽车电子芯片领域进行了大规模投资。由于这些选定市场的发展速度极为迅速，NXP在接下来的十年里，其市场价值增长了五倍。
22. 当企业的增长速度与投资回报率都能同步提升时，真正的奇迹才会发生。如果在这两个方面都表现出色，企业获得进一步发展的机会就会大大增加——这种机会的概率高达19%。正是这种规模收益递增的现象才是关键所在：每一次增长都会使企业变得规模更大，同时也使其运营效率更高。那些依托共同的、可共享的知识产权建立起来的企业，那些具有网络效应或平台效应的企业，以及那些固定成本较高但因此能够实现大规模规模经济的企业，往往都具备规模收益递增的特点。
23. 然而，让我们感到惊讶的是，许多公司确实觉得自己发展得很快，但在与竞争对手相比时却毫无进展。很多时候，那些为提高生产效率而付出的努力，要么因为定价问题而被白白浪费掉，要么更糟糕的是，被组织内的其他部门占为己有——这就是人们常说的“香肠效应”：你从一端挤压，脂肪就会流到另一端。
24. 巴斯夫认为，其“联合生产”模式在提升世界级生产效率方面发挥了关键作用。“联合生产”这一概念源自巴斯夫的核心生产基地——这些基地能够生产多种最终产品，从而实现产能的灵活调配以及各类生产要素的协同使用。目前，巴斯夫在全球拥有六家这样的生产基地：其中两家位于欧洲，两家在北美，另外两家在亚洲。如今，“联合生产”模式已渗透到巴斯夫的各个业务领域，而不仅仅局限于生产流程之中，这种模式在整个企业中营造了一种合作、知识共享、创新与高效运营的文化氛围。这种模式有效降低了资本、运营成本以及人力资源的消耗，从而显著提升了生产效率。生产力至关重要，尤其是当你的企业已经跻身行业顶尖行列时，这一优势就显得更为突出。
25. 恩智浦从飞利浦分拆出来时，旗下拥有14个业务部门。随着时间的推移，恩智浦将所有资源集中到了其中2个业务领域，从而释放出了其他业务所需的资金和人力。在汽车电子与身份识别这两个领域所做出的这些关键决策——通过全面调整资源配置来实现——为恩智浦带来了连续的成功。可以说，那些被重点投入资源以推动发展的业务部门，正是恩智浦取得成功的关键所在。

 

 

《Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds (Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit)》

 

 168个笔记

 You are not alone

• how about a third scenario? the strategy is agreed on. It all looks good on paper, and there is loads of compelling backup. but, some-how, deep down, everybody senses that the strategy is nothing more than hopeful thinking. It is a little too kind to the egos of the people who made it and a little too unwilling to embrace the harsh reality of competition. People two or three levels down in the organization—the ones who engage with actual customers, the ones who often weren’t really part of the strategy process—conclude that management is stuck in a bubble, roll their eyes, and just get on with what they were doing. all that “new” strategy ends up being good for is justifying some uneconomic projects—the ones labeled “strategic” because they lose 那么，第三种情况又如何呢？大家就这一策略达成了共识，从理论上来看，这个策略确实很不错，也拥有许多令人信服的支持依据。然而，不知为何，在内心深处，每个人都觉得这个策略只不过是一种一厢情愿的想法罢了。这种策略对制定它的人们的自尊心来说未免过于宽容了，同时也过于回避了竞争中的残酷现实。而在组织中处于较低层级、真正与客户打交道的人们——那些往往并没有真正参与策略制定过程的人们——会认为管理层陷入了幻想之中，于是他们只是耸耸肩，继续做自己原本在做的事情。最终，所有这些“新”策略，只不过被用来为一些不具经济效益的项目找借口罢了；这些项目之所以被贴上“战略性”的标签，只是因为它们注定会失败而已。

 Where is the outside view?

• When changing times demand a really big shift in strategy, this inside view turns out to be even more of a problem. It’s an inside view of the wrong world, and you are caught blindsided. 当时代的变化要求人们必须对战略进行重大调整时，这种“内部视角”反而会成为一个更大的问题——因为这种视角所反映的其实是一个错误的现实，因此人们会措手不及，被突如其来的变化所困扰。
• rather than an ever-more-precise inside view, strategy needs an “outside view,” where data about the thousands of other experiences by other executives and their companies in other strategy rooms are brought into your own strategy room to shape the discussion. Why benchmark just your operational kPIs when you could have an equally compel-ling, objective reference point for your strategy? Why not calibrate how good your strategy really is against a broad set of comparative data? 战略所需要的并非越来越精确的内部视角，而是一种“外部视角”——通过将其他高管及其所在企业在其他战略决策环境中所取得的数千种经验数据纳入自己的战略讨论中，来引导讨论的方向。既然有这样一种客观、具有说服力的参考依据，为什么还要仅仅依据自身的运营关键绩效指标来评估战略效果呢？为什么不利用这些广泛的对比数据来衡量自己战略的实际效果呢？

 Making big moves happen

• the chances of your strategy succeeding, calibrated against a verifiable yardstick of corporate performance. In the sports world, golf announcers can tell the odds that a pro will make a putt of a certain length, because the data on all the putts by all the pros have been compiled. Football stats buffs can tell you the odds that a team will win based on the score, the quarter, the number of first downs, and the name of the quarterback, because all that data have been aggregated across league games over many years. the same sort of data is now available about corporate strategy. 你的策略成功的可能性，是依据企业绩效这一可被验证的标准来衡量的。在体育领域，高尔夫解说员能够根据所有职业高尔夫选手的推杆数据，判断他们完成特定距离推杆的成功概率；同样，足球数据爱好者也可以根据比赛得分、比赛阶段、首次进攻次数以及四分卫的名字，来预测一支球队获胜的概率——因为这些数据都是多年来在各个联赛中积累起来的。如今，关于企业战略的类似数据也已经变得可供人们使用了。
• Making big moves happen 促成重大变革的发生to get ahead of ourselves a little bit: the data show, in particular, that many companies are simply not bold enough—their strategies are not designed for big moves. all too often, the result is incremental improvements that have companies just playing along with the rest of their industries. We are sure you’ve seen it yourself: even if there is a major busi-ness opportunity and someone comes in with a breakthrough idea, it tends to get whittled down. the idea feels too risky; too different from what other players are doing. Some people might feel left out. It seems safer to come up with a plan that just varies slightly from last year’s, to spread resources across the whole business rather than bet heavily on the break-out of one single unit. 让我们稍微提前预测一下未来的发展趋势：数据显示，许多企业确实缺乏足够的勇气，它们的战略根本不是为取得重大突破而制定的。因此，这些企业往往只能进行一些渐进式的改进，从而在行业中跟随着其他企业的步伐发展。你肯定也注意到了这一点：即使出现了重大的商业机会，也有人提出了具有突破性的想法，但这些想法往往最终会被削弱或放弃。因为这些想法被认为风险太大，与其他企业的做法差异太大；有些人可能会因此感到被排斥在外。因此，人们似乎更倾向于制定一些与去年相比仅有细微差异的计划，将资源分散投入到整个业务中，而不是把所有赌注押在某个特定业务单元的成功上。

 The journey ahead of us

• We recently saw one ceo ask his team for aggressive growth plans. 我们最近看到有一位首席执行官要求他的团队制定积极的增长计划。he got them back and liked many of them—only to have to cut back because there was no way to fund them all. In the end, he did not want to frustrate all but a few of his team by disproportionately allocating resources to the likely break-outs, and instead granted some resources to all the businesses. needless to say, none of them were funded well enough to achieve a real breakthrough. another ceo asked his team for bold moves and received an m&a idea for growing a new service business in the US. the idea passed a rigorous due diligence process, but then he got cold feet. yet another ceo came up with a plan to leapfrog to 5g mobile communications technology that would have provided a temporary competitive advantage in europe, but then felt the board was unlikely to approve that bold plan and self-censored the proposal to protect himself. he settled on a plan that was not much more than an extension of the past. 他拿回了那些项目，其中很多他都很喜欢——但最终还是不得不削减投入，因为根本没有足够资金来支持所有这些项目。最后，他不想因为将资源过度分配给那些最有潜力取得成功的项目，而让团队中的大部分成员感到失望，于是决定给所有项目都分配一些资源。当然，这些项目并没有得到足够的资金支持，因此都没有取得真正的突破。另一位首席执行官要求他的团队提出大胆的行动方案，结果他们提出了一个通过并购来在美国发展新的服务业务的方案。这个方案经过了严格的评估流程，但最终他还是放弃了这个计划。又有一位首席执行官提出了一个计划，打算迅速采用5G移动通信技术，这一举措本可以在欧洲为他的企业带来暂时的竞争优势，但他后来认为董事会不太可能批准这个大胆的计划，因此为了自保，他主动放弃了这个提案。最终，他选择了一个其实只不过是对过去做法的简单延续而已的计划。
• The journey ahead of us 我们前方的这段旅程We intend to take you now on a journey through the strategy room that will eventually get you to a better chance of knowing the right big moves—and to an understanding of the social side of strategy that will let you actually execute those moves. For now, we will leave you with the assertion that our insights dovetail. the data—the outside view—play a big role in giving you a chance to successfully address the problems caused by the social side of strategy and its drag toward inertia, toward small moves that feel safe. In many ways, our insights resemble the discoveries of behav-ioral economists, which trace all the way back to herbert Simon in 我们现在打算带您走进战略规划室，通过这段旅程，您将更有机会了解那些正确的、具有重大影响的决策方案，并且会深入理解战略中涉及社会层面的因素，这些理解将帮助您真正将这些决策方案付诸实践。目前，我们只想向您强调一点：我们的见解与数据——也就是那些来自外部视角的信息——在帮助您成功解决那些由战略中的社会层面因素所引发的问题、以及那些导致人们倾向于采取那些看似安全、但实际上效果有限的措施方面，发挥着至关重要的作用。在很多方面，我们的见解与行为经济学家们的研究发现是相似的，而这些研究的起源可以追溯到赫伯特·西蒙。
• 10 S t r at e g y b e y o n d t h e h o c k e y S t I c k 10、超越冰球棒的战略思考the 1950s but which have really gathered steam over the past couple of decades with both daniel kahneman and more recently richard thaler earning nobel Prizes in economics. traditionally, economists considered everyone to be acting rationally, which led to rigorous-seeming curves that were easy to comprehend but in the real world rarely predicted actual behavior. It turned out that people don’t view their lives as a series of utility curves. behavioral economists shed light on how people think and behave. 这些理论可以追溯到20世纪50年代，但在过去几十年里发展势头日益强劲——丹尼尔·卡内曼和理查德·塞勒都因在经济学领域的贡献而获得了诺贝尔奖。传统上，经济学家认为每个人的行为都是理性的，因此他们构建出的那些看似严谨的模型虽然易于理解，但在现实世界中却很少能准确预测人们的行为。事实上，人们并不会将自己的生活视为一系列遵循某种效用函数的决策过程。行为经济学家通过研究揭示了人们的思维方式与行为模式。like these behavioral economists, we have learned that purely rational approaches—the next 3 × 3 matrix, the latest best-practice case studies—rarely help in achieving breakthroughs in strategy. but observations of what’s really going on in the strategy rooms—and in the boardrooms of corporations all over the globe—give us hope that it is actually possible to generate an outside view that will improve the quality of strategy and, consequently, business performance. after a long series of spirited discussions with many of your peers and our partner colleagues around the world, we feel ready to shed new light on what’s going on in the strategy room. 与这些行为经济学家一样，我们也认识到：纯粹理性的分析方法——比如那些3×3矩阵模型或最新的最佳实践案例研究——几乎无法帮助我们在战略制定上取得突破。然而，通过对全球各地企业战略决策室及董事会内部实际情况的观察，我们发现：其实完全有可能从外部视角出发，从而提升战略制定的质量，进而改善企业的经营绩效。在与世界各地的许多同行以及我们的合作伙伴进行了深入讨论之后，我们觉得现在已经准备好为人们揭示战略决策室里究竟发生了什么。based on our empirical observations and insights, we will take the strategy discussion out of the realm of the theoretical and into the realm of actual behavior, then lay out our data so that you yourself can shape new, more fruitful conversations with your team. 根据我们的实证观察与分析，我们将把这种策略讨论从理论层面转移到实际行为层面，然后展示我们的数据，这样你们就可以自己与团队展开新的、更具成效的讨论。
• If we do this right, you will have a chance to raise your game in many ways, so that you: 如果我们能够把这件事做好，你将有机会在很多方面提升自己的能力，从而实现以下目标：• Improve the quality of strategy proposals that are discussed in your strategy room• engage in a very different, more collaborative and learning- oriented strategy dialogue with your team• experience more authenticity, more rigor, and better challenges in your strategy room• make less biased, better strategy decisions, calibrated against the empirics of an outside view• lead your team with more courage to make big moves, take calculated risks, and more vigorously commit to the execution of your strategies to help you tame the social side of strategy, we’ll start by exploring why it’s so hard to manage. then we’ll lay out a new way of tracking progress based on comparisons against the whole universe of compa-nies, not just against your prior performance or against your industry. We’ll go into depth about how to think about the 10 key variables (which we refer to collectively as your endowment, your trends, and your moves), so you can figure your odds of success—and improve them while there’s still time. Finally, at the end of the book, we will share with you very practical advice, eight shifts designed to help you change the dynamics in your strategy room. For instance, we will explain how to turn the strategy process from a staccato event into a continually evolving conversation. We’ll explain how to get away from spreading resources thinly and actually re-allocating resources to potentially big winners; how to change your focus from setting budget targets and toward generating big moves; how to end sandbagging; and more. these shifts can make your strategy process far more effective and, we hope, a lot more energizing, too. What will you need to do? Just two things: get ready to embrace the social side of strategy, and be prepared to throw open the windows of your strategy room to allow for a data-driven, outside view to enter the discussion. If you are ready to do so, you will experience your own business and your own leadership team in a new way; you will develop better strategies; and you will have a better chance of executing them well. In short, you will have a better shot at beating the odds. • 提高在战略讨论会上提出的战略方案的质量； • 与团队开展一种截然不同、更具协作性且以学习为导向的战略对话； • 在战略讨论会上感受到更多的真实性、更高的严谨性，以及更具挑战性的讨论内容； • 基于外部观点所提供的实证数据，做出更加客观、合理的战略决策； • 带领团队以更大的勇气采取重大行动、承担经过深思熟虑后的风险，并更加全力以赴地执行各项战略计划。 为了帮助你们更好地应对战略实施过程中所涉及的社会层面问题，我们首先会探讨为什么管理这些社会因素会如此困难。然后，我们将提出一种新的方法来追踪进展——这种评估方式是基于与整个企业群体的比较，而不仅仅是你之前的表现或你所在行业的平均水平。我们会详细讲解如何分析那10个关键变量（我们将这些变量统称为“你的基础条件”、“你的发展趋势”以及“你的行动策略”），这样你就能算出自己成功的概率，并在还有时间的时候采取措施来提高这一概率。最后，在这本书的结尾部分，我们会向你提供一些非常实用的建议，这八条建议旨在帮助你改变自己战略决策过程中的运作方式。例如，我们将解释如何将战略制定过程从一个零散、孤立的流程转变为一个持续发展、不断演变的对话过程。我们会说明如何避免资源分配过于分散，而是将资源重新分配给那些有潜力取得重大成功的领域；如何将关注点从设定预算目标转变为推动实质性的进展；如何杜绝那些敷衍了事、不认真执行的做法等等。这些改变会让你的战略制定过程变得高效得多，我们也希望这些改变能为你带来更多的动力和活力。那么，你需要做些什么呢？只有两点需要注意：首先，要准备好接受策略中涉及社交层面的因素；其次，要敞开策略讨论室的“大门”，让那些基于数据、来自外部视角的观点能够参与到讨论中来。如果你愿意这样做，你就会以一种全新的方式来认识自己的企业和领导团队，从而制定出更优秀的策略，并且更有机会成功执行这些策略。简而言之，这样你就能更好地战胜各种挑战。

 1 Games in the strategy room—and why people play them

• 2025/12/22 发表想法

  战略角度的信息茧房

  
  

  原文：Strategy is precisely the wrong problem for human brains and the right problem for playing games, especially when the “inside view” goes unchecked.  M 对于人类大脑来说，战略规划恰恰属于那些不适合被处理的问题；而在进行游戏时，战略规划反而是正确的处理方式——尤其是当那些“内部视角”没有受到任何约束或审查的时候。

• Strategy is precisely the wrong problem for human brains and the right problem for playing games, especially when the “inside view” goes unchecked.  M 对于人类大脑来说，战略规划恰恰属于那些不适合被处理的问题；而在进行游戏时，战略规划反而是正确的处理方式——尤其是当那些“内部视角”没有受到任何约束或审查的时候。

 The social side of strategy, in action

• The results are rarely a serious problem. it’s not often that you end up having existential issues like those at kodak, blockbuster, or nokia—those high-profile cases get so much attention partly because they’re rare. but, even when a strategy “succeeds,” the wins too often remain small.1 The strategy rarely moves the needle very far in the right direction, at least for any length of time. it’s not so much that the rocket veers off course in midair; it is more often a failure to launch with enough energy to shoot for the moon. You’ve spent all that time and effort and only climbed how far over the last year? 这些结果通常并不会构成什么严重的问题。像柯达、Blockbuster或诺基亚那样面临生存危机的情况其实并不常见——这些备受关注的案例之所以会受到如此多的关注，部分原因就在于它们确实属于罕见事件。然而，即便某种策略“取得了成功”，所带来的收益往往也相当有限。这种策略很少能在正确的方向上产生实质性的影响，至少在较长的时间内是这样。问题并不在于火箭在飞行途中偏离了轨道，而更常常在于它缺乏足够的推力来朝着目标前进。你耗费了大量的时间和精力，但最终所取得的进展仅仅比去年多了一点而已，这难道不令人失望吗？

 The dreaded hockey stick

• 2025/12/22 发表想法

   

  
  

  原文：that further investments in their own business are not warranted, that the company should consider re-allocating resources to other busi-nesses, cutting back, or even exiting? That just never happens—in strategy presentations, it seems that everyone is a winner. all the time. 是否意味着进一步投资于自身的业务已不再有必要，公司是否应该考虑将资源重新分配到其他业务领域，或者缩减投资规模，甚至干脆退出相关业务？但这种情况实际上从未发生过。在各种战略规划报告中，似乎每个人都总是被描绘成赢家。 ceos are, of course, no dummies. They have seen these games played before, and many would readily admit that they had to play some of these themselves along the way. even ceos would acknowledge giving their plans a risk haircut before presenting them to the board. 首席执行官们当然不是傻瓜。他们早就见识过这类把戏，而且很多人也会坦承，在自己担任领导职务的过程中，也曾不得不采用过类似的手段。就连首席执行官们也会承认，在将计划提交给董事会之前，他们总会先对这些计划进行相应的调整，以降低其中可能存在的风险。 even then, the presenter can still manipulate the data by relying on the inside view. For one, somebody presenting about her business unit has a distinct knowledge advantage over everyone else in the room. Looking at past performance, for instance, should be straight-forward, based on 20/20 hindsight—but it’s not. So often, there are distortions that are too subtle to catch while conversing in the strategy room. Market share can be defined favorably by excluding geographies or segments where the presenter’s business unit is weak. Poor perfor-mance can be attributed to one-off items such as the weather, restruc-turing efforts, new market entrants, or a regulatory change. Markets may be “summarized” in a way that removes all insight—people end up talking to each other about the average temperature of the patients in a hospital.3

• even then, the presenter can still manipulate the data by relying on the inside view. For one, somebody presenting about her business unit has a distinct knowledge advantage over everyone else in the room. Looking at past performance, for instance, should be straight-forward, based on 20/20 hindsight—but it’s not. So often, there are distortions that are too subtle to catch while conversing in the strategy room. Market share can be defined favorably by excluding geographies or segments where the presenter’s business unit is weak. Poor perfor-mance can be attributed to one-off items such as the weather, restruc-turing efforts, new market entrants, or a regulatory change. Markets may be “summarized” in a way that removes all insight—people end up talking to each other about the average temperature of the patients in a hospital.3 即便如此，演讲者仍然可以利用自己所掌握的内部信息来操纵数据。例如，那些负责汇报自己所在业务部门情况的演讲者，显然比在场的其他人拥有更大的信息优势。比如，分析过去的业绩表现本应是一件简单的事情——因为事后回顾总能让人看得一清二楚——但实际上并非如此。在战略讨论会上，往往存在一些过于微妙的扭曲，这些扭曲在讨论过程中很难被察觉。演讲者可能会通过排除那些自己所在业务部门表现不佳的地区或市场细分市场，从而让数据看起来更理想；而对于那些糟糕的业绩表现，他们则可能会将其归因于一些一次性因素，比如天气、重组措施、新进入市场的竞争者，或是监管政策的变化。有时，人们对市场的分析方式会彻底剥夺所有有价值的洞察力——最终，人们讨论的往往只是医院里患者的平均体温这类毫无意义的数据。
• The dreaded hockey stick 令人畏惧的曲棍球杆The inside games soon get us to the hockey stick, the icon of the social side of strategy shown in exhibit 1.  这些内部博弈很快就把我们引向了“曲棍球杆”这一象征——正如展览1中所展示的，它代表着策略在社交层面所扮演的角色。hockey sticks are everywhere. You might even say that “business plan” is the technical term for a hockey stick. We have all seen the graphs that show revenue and profit heading straight for the sky a few years out: “all that’s needed is a bit of an investment for the first year or two, a bit of tolerance for some losses, then you can start booking huge numbers. it’s going to be a great business. if we can just get some additional resources today, and you stick with us through a couple of lean years, we’ll produce a rocket headed toward the stars.” as many of us have seen from personal experience, these hockey sticks rarely work out, but they are a great way of bargaining for resources for that all-important first-year operating budget. People 曲棍球杆随处可见。甚至可以说，“商业计划书”其实就是曲棍球杆这种工具的另一种说法。我们都见过那些图表，它们显示企业的收入和利润在短短几年内就会呈直线上升的趋势： “只需要在最初的一两年里投入一些资金，稍微忍受一些初期亏损，之后就能开始获得巨额利润。这一定会是一门非常成功的生意。只要我们现在能获得一些额外的资源，而你们也能在我们经历那些艰难的初期阶段时继续支持我们，那么我们就会创造出一条通往成功的道路。” 然而，正如我们许多人从个人经验中了解到的那样，这种“曲棍球杆理论”很少能够真正奏效。不过，对于争取那些至关重要的初期运营资金来说，这确实是一种很有效的谈判手段。
• There is one more reason why you can’t not present a hockey stick as a manager: everyone else does it! if you did not do it, even though you know the projection is “off reality,” you would send a signal that you lack confidence in your business. Presenting hockey sticks is a ritual, for all to partake in. So, hockey sticks it is.  还有另一个原因，说明为什么作为管理者，你不能不使用“曲棍球杆”这种比喻来展示预测数据：因为其他所有人都在这么做！如果你不这样做，即使你明知这种预测与现实情况不符，你也会给人一种信号，让人觉得你对自己的业务缺乏信心。使用“曲棍球杆”这种比喻其实是一种大家都会参与的惯例。所以，还是得用“曲棍球杆”吧。
• Some executives find ways to cut through the gamesmanship. When Jack Welch was ceo of general electric, for instance, he declared that all his businesses needed to be #1 or #2 in their markets. but, he found over time that business leaders redefined their markets so they could claim to be #1 or #2. he then demanded that everyone come up with a market definition in which they had less than 10 percent market share, thereby creating a breakthrough in the denominator game.4 一些高管会想办法摆脱这些虚伪的竞争手段。例如，当杰克·韦尔奇担任通用电气的首席执行官时，他明确规定旗下所有业务都必须在各自的市场中排名第一或第二。然而他逐渐发现，一些企业领导者会重新定义自己的市场范围，以便能够宣称自己在这些市场中处于第一或第二的位置。于是他要求所有相关人员重新界定市场范围，使得自己在这些市场中的市场份额低于10%，从而彻底打破这种通过缩小市场范围来虚报排名的高招。
• Far more typically, though, the social side of strategy turns the strategy conversation into some form of a beauty contest in which participants want to look good, and the data they present are care-fully selected to underscore the right impression. in a speech at the annual global partner meeting of Mckinsey, the then-ceo of a major Las Vegas casino operator said: “Whenever i arrive at one of our properties and meet the general manager, he would inevitably tell me that everything is going great—regardless of their actual performance. 然而，更为常见的情况是，战略讨论中的社交因素会使得这种讨论变成某种“选美比赛”：参与者都希望自己给他人留下良好的印象，因此他们所呈现的数据也会经过精心挑选，以便能够传达出自己希望表达的信息。在麦肯锡年度全球合作伙伴会议上，一位拉斯维加斯大型赌场运营商的时任首席执行官这样说道：“每当我来到我们的任何一家赌场，与总经理会面时，他总会告诉我一切进展得都非常顺利——而实际上，他们的经营状况未必真的如此。”

 Can we handle the truth?

• They would always deliver an impressive speech on why their business was going well or, if it lost money, why it was just about to get better—a whole lot better. [Sighs] i just wish i met once, just once, a guy who would walk up to me and say: ‘Man, things are not well down here, and, to tell you the truth, i can’t tell which way is up. i really have no idea why things are heading south—but we are on it, rolling up our sleeves to turn this sucker around.’ ” 他们总是能够发表一些令人印象深刻的演讲，解释为什么自己的生意进展顺利，或者如果生意出现了亏损，也会说明情况很快就会好转——而且会变得好很多。[叹息] 我真希望自己能遇到这样一个人：他可以直接走到我面前，对我说：“老兄，我们现在的情况不太好，说实话，我甚至不知道该往哪个方向努力。我真的不明白为什么事情会变得这么糟糕，但我们在努力改变这种局面，正在全力以赴地扭转这一局面。”
• Can we handle the truth? 我们能够面对真相吗？Why aren’t people as open as we wish they were? Why are they politi-cally correct? remember the movie Tootsie and a classic interaction between Michael (dustin hoffman) and Julie (Jessica Lange)? Michael has fallen for Julie but has no idea how to approach her. dressed in drag as Tootsie, and now a confidante for Julie, he hears her lament about how men are always hitting on her and saying she’d love a man who could just be honest. Thinking he’s cracked the code, Michael, no longer in drag, says to Julie exactly what she said she hoped to hear from a man. She slaps him. hard. Then she walks away. We may think that we want the truth, but, if we are honest, we might not always want it. Jack nicholson says as colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” We’ve all learned along the way that bluntness is risky, so we can’t even imagine an executive who would tell the ceo that their business unit was in trouble and that they had no idea why. That executive would probably have a lot more to fear than a slap on the wrist. People’s egos, their careers, their bonuses, their status in the orga-nization, the resources they get to fund the growth of their business—all depend to a large extent on how convincingly they present their strategies and the prospects of their business. Think about how far people go in creating “successful” profiles on dating websites—neither the pictures nor the facts have much resemblance to reality, but the goal is to get that first reply and avoid the abyss of being swiped away. We’ve all seen these games in business, too. Some managers proj-ect vision and competence at the negotiating table, claiming more resources than are warranted. others sandbag to avoid risky moves and make triple-sure they overachieve on their targets. When everyone else is playing games, why would you stand out as the sole voice of realism? 为什么人们并不像我们希望的那样坦诚呢？为什么他们在言谈举止上总是那么谨小慎微、遵循所谓的“政治正确”呢？还记得电影《托蒂》中迈克尔（达斯汀·霍夫曼饰演）和朱莉（杰西卡·兰格饰演）之间的那段经典对话吗？迈克尔爱上了朱莉，但却不知道该如何接近她。后来他化装成托蒂，成为了朱莉的密友，听到了她抱怨男人总是对她献殷勤，还说她多么希望遇到一个能够坦诚相待的男人。以为自己终于明白了她的心思，迈克尔不再伪装，直接说出了朱莉内心渴望听到的那些话。结果她狠狠地打了他一耳光，然后走开了。我们可能会认为自己渴望真相，但说实话，我们并不总是真的需要真相。杰克·尼科尔森在电影《几个好人》中以杰瑟普上校的角色说道：“你们想要真相？但你们根本无法承受真相带来的冲击！”我们在生活中都明白，直言不讳往往会带来风险，因此我们甚至无法想象会有哪位高管会直接告诉首席执行官自己的业务部门遇到了麻烦，而且自己也不清楚原因所在。这样的高管面临的后果，恐怕远比受到轻微的惩罚要严重得多。人们的自尊心、他们的职业生涯、他们所获得的奖金、他们在组织中的地位，以及他们用来推动业务发展的各种资源——在很大程度上都取决于他们能否令人信服地展示自己的战略以及自己业务的发展前景。想想人们在交友网站上精心打造那些“成功”的个人资料吧：那些照片和所提供的事实与现实往往相差甚远，但他们的目的就是能够获得第一份回复，从而避免被直接忽略。在商业领域，我们也经常能看到这类现象。有些管理者在谈判桌上会展现出远大的愿景和强大的能力，从而要求获得超出实际需要的资源。其他人会采取一些保守的做法来避免承担风险，同时会竭力确保自己能够超额完成目标。当所有人都在采取这些策略时，你为什么还要成为那个坚持现实主义的人呢？

 Playing the inside game

• Playing the inside game 玩“内部游戏”even though boards and investors are always demanding progress—and we all certainly expect that of ourselves—just holding position is often already an accomplishment. competition is tough. Think about it: While you’re locked up in your own strategy room, the very same discussions are happening across town in your competitor’s strategy room, as well. although we all seem to just focus on the issues in front of us, we are also making the treadmill run a little faster for everyone. Silicon Valley pioneer bill Joy said: “no matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else.”5 it’s true, and competitors will always work diligently to counteract your strategy, or will pursue just about the same opportunities that you see. 尽管董事会和投资者总是要求取得进展——我们自己也当然会这样要求自己——但仅仅能够保持现状，往往就已经是一种成就了。竞争确实非常激烈。试想一下：当你自己埋头在战略规划室里的时候，你的竞争对手也在他们的战略规划室里进行着同样的讨论。虽然我们似乎都只关注眼前的问题，但实际上，我们都在让整个竞争环境变得更加激烈。硅谷的先驱比尔·乔伊说过：“无论你是谁，大多数聪明人都为别人工作。”这句话确实没错。竞争对手们总会不懈努力，试图抵消你的战略部署，或者追求那些与你看到的一模一样的机会。but if you’re like the vast majority of those in the strategy rooms around the world, you aren’t very focused on what’s happening in those other strategy rooms or on the smart ideas of your competitors. You’re seeing an “inside view” and are playing more of an inside game. The inside view often prevails in strategy rooms because they are tightly sealed. What comes into the room is basically what the participants bring in with them. That is generally a great deal of relevant experi-ence, carried in the brains and memories of a few executives. a lot of data and information comes into the room, too, but it is typically focused on your own company, a handful of key competitors, and your own industry. a lot of information stays outside the room. The air gets stuffy and recycled. People are “reading their own mail.” Strategies can also be constrained because they are being devel-oped “bottom up,” as each business unit projects how it will perform over the coming years. Those plans, which are rolled up into the company-wide strategy, are rarely calibrated against outside data to see how similar growth plans historically fared at similar businesses in similar situations. 但如果你和世界上绝大多数处于战略决策室中的人一样，你并不会太关注其他战略决策室里正在发生什么，也不会关注竞争对手们提出的那些聪明想法。你拥有的是一种“内部视角”，因此你更多地是在参与那些“内部游戏”。由于战略决策室通常是封闭的，这种“内部视角”往往会占据主导地位——进入这些房间的信息，基本上就是参与者们自己带来的东西。而这些信息，通常就是那些高管们头脑中和记忆中所储存的大量相关经验。也有大量的数据和信息被纳入分析范围，但这些信息通常只涉及你自己的公司、少数几家主要竞争对手以及你所在的行业；还有很多信息被排除在分析之外。这种封闭式的分析环境会导致信息流通不畅，人们往往只关注与自己相关的内容。此外，由于战略制定是“自下而上”进行的——每个业务部门都会预测自己在未来几年的发展情况——这些战略也容易受到局限。最终被整合成公司整体战略的这些计划，很少会参考外部数据来评估：在类似的情况下，其他企业类似的成长计划在过去取得了怎样的成效。nobel laureate daniel kahneman explained in his brilliant book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, how the realities of the outside world can disappear and be replaced by what he labeled “the inside view.” The inside view leads people to extrapolate from their own experiences and data, even when they are attempting something they’ve never done before. kahneman says even he has fallen victim to the bias while designing a new syllabus and textbooks for the Ministry of education 诺贝尔奖得主丹尼尔·卡内曼在他那本精彩的著作《思考，快与慢》中解释了：外部世界的现实是如何消失的，以及它们是如何被他称之为“内在视角”的东西所取代的。这种“内在视角”会促使人们根据自己的经验与掌握的数据来进行推理，即使他们正在尝试一些从未做过的事情。卡内曼自己也承认，在为教育部设计新的教学大纲和教科书时，他曾受到这种偏见的影响。

 Send in the guru

• in israel.6 The team, relying on their experiences in other endeavors, initially projected that they would finish in 1½ to 2½ years. When kahneman looked at how similar teams had performed on similar proj-ects, he learned that 40 percent of similar teams never finished and that those that did needed 7 to 10 years. The good news is that his team did finish, but it needed 8 years, more than three times as long as they predicted. The sheer length of the strategy process can also galvanize the inside view. Studies of cognitive biases show that experts become more confident as they gather more data—even though the additional data might not make the experts’ projections any more accurate.7 在以色列，这个团队凭借他们在其他项目中的经验，最初预计自己需要1.5到2.5年才能完成这项任务。然而当卡内曼研究那些类似团队在类似项目中的表现时，他发现：有40%的类似团队最终未能完成任务，而那些成功完成的团队也花费了7到10年的时间。幸运的是，他的团队最终还是完成了任务，但实际耗时为8年，这一时间远远超出了他们最初的预测。事实上，这种漫长的项目执行过程反而会加剧“内视偏差”的影响。认知偏差的研究表明，专家们在收集到更多数据后往往会变得更加自信——尽管这些额外的数据其实并不会让他们的预测变得更准确。
• overconfidence is self-reinforcing, too. it leads people to ignore contradictory information, which makes them more confident, which makes them more likely to ignore contradictory information. . . . as weeks and months go by, and the spreadsheets get larger and more detailed, an unwarranted sense of confidence can take hold. it turns out that the more we know, the more dangerous we are. The inside view reigns. We convince ourselves that we have a winning plan this year even though we continue doing pretty much what we’ve always done. Look at how precise economic projections are—and how wrong. in the US, the government produces annually 45,000 pieces of economic information, and the private sector generates 4 million more, leading to forecasts that may run to multiple decimal points. The forecasts are reassuring. The prognosticators are smart folks. Yet, most economists didn’t predict the three most recent recessions in the US, in 1990, 2001, and 2007, and didn’t even see the recessions happening after they’d started. The initial estimate for growth in the US economy in the fourth quarter of 2008 was –3.8 percent. The actual drop turned out to be –9 percent. “nobody has a clue. it’s hugely difficult to forecast the business cycle,” said Jan hatzius, chief economist at goldman Sachs.8 Yet we still act as though we can predict to a decimal point or two. 过度自信也会产生自我强化的效果。它会导致人们忽视那些与自己观点相矛盾的信息，而这种忽视反而会让他们更加自信，进而使他们更有可能继续忽略那些矛盾的信息……随着时间的推移，当相关数据表格变得越来越庞大、越来越详细时，一种毫无根据的自信感就会逐渐形成。事实上，我们知道的越多，往往就越危险。由于我们掌握了内部信息，就会说服自己今年一定会有成功的计划，尽管我们实际上仍在重复过去一直在做的事情。看看那些经济预测吧——它们看似非常精确，但实际上却常常大错特错。在美国，政府每年会发布45,000份经济数据，而私营部门还会生成另外400万份相关数据，因此这些预测结果往往会包含很多小数位。这些预测结果看起来似乎令人放心，因为进行预测的人都是非常聪明的人。然而，大多数经济学家并没有预见到美国在1990年、2001年和2007年发生的那三次经济衰退，甚至在这些衰退开始之后，他们也没有及时察觉到它们的发生。2008年第四季度，人们最初预计美国经济的增长幅度将为负3.8%，但实际上经济下滑幅度达到了负9%。 “根本没有人能搞清楚到底发生了什么。”“预测商业周期的难度非常大，”高盛首席经济学家扬·哈齐乌斯说道。然而，我们仍然表现得好像自己能够将预测结果精确到小数点后一两位一样。

 The wrong problem for human brains

• low-frequency, high-uncertainty problems for which the human brain is least adapted. People are prone to many well-documented unconscious cognitive biases—overconfidence, anchoring, loss aversion, confirmation bias, attribution error, etc.11 These biases exist to help us filter information for decision making. Think about one of our ancestors wandering across the plains of africa. on the occasion of that chap coming across a lion, the chances of him being part of our gene pool today are relatively low if he started to think about the clouds, the beauty of the landscape, or the prospects of finding a meal for the day. They all are possibly interesting or even important topics, but not species-extending in the face of a lion. With fear-induced myopia, our ancestor focused on one thing, and one thing only, and that was getting away when seeing a lion. So, our brain came with a lot of shortcuts (heuristics, in technical terms) that lurk in the deeper parts of the subconscious mind. They can sure help with day-to-day decision making in our modern lives—we all seem pretty good at that, maybe even extremely good. Just think of how good we are at driving a car; even the dopiest person seems to get by okay on the road. no, the issue is not the daily decisions, where we get countless opportunities to practice and where mistakes yield immediate and possibly painful feedback. here, our brains have evolved to run on sort of a limbic autopilot like that of the ancestor avoiding the lion. These unintentional mental shortcuts can distort the outcomes, though, when we are forced to make big, consequential decisions, infrequently, and under high uncertainty. and these are exactly the ones we confront in the strategy room. 那些属于低频发生、不确定性极高的问题，正是人类大脑最不擅处理的类型。人们往往会陷入许多已被充分记录在案的无意识认知偏差之中——比如过度自信、锚定效应、损失厌恶倾向、确认偏误、归因错误等等。这些偏差的存在其实是为了帮助我们在做决策时筛选信息。试想，我们的某个祖先在非洲的大草原上行走时，如果他在遇到狮子的时候，开始去思考云朵的颜色、风景的美妙，或者当天能否找到食物，那么他今天能够成为我们基因库中的一员的可能性，其实就会大大降低。这些话题或许都很有趣，甚至非常重要，但在面对狮子这样的危险时，它们却无助于我们逃避威胁。由于恐惧所引发的心理短视，我们的祖先在看到狮子时，只会专注于一件事，那就是尽快逃离危险。因此，我们的大脑进化出了许多“捷径”（用专业术语来说，就是各种启发式思维方式），这些方法隐藏在潜意识的深处。在现代生活中，这些捷径确实能够帮助我们做出各种决策——我们似乎都相当擅长这方面的能力，甚至可以说非常擅长。想想我们开车的技术吧：即使是最不擅长驾驶的人，似乎也能在道路上安全地行驶。不，问题并不在于那些日常决策——因为在日常决策中，我们拥有无数机会来练习自己的能力，而且犯错也会立即带来反馈，这些反馈可能是令人痛苦的。在这里，我们的大脑已经进化成了一种类似于祖先逃避狮子的那种“边缘系统自动驾驶模式”。然而，当我们在高不确定性的环境下，偶尔被迫做出那些具有重大影响的决策时，这些无意识的思维捷径反而会扭曲决策的结果。而恰恰就是在战略会议室里，我们才会面临这样的情况。
• even the most seasoned executives have only limited experience and pattern recognition in these situations. decisions are taken under uncer-tainty, and results may not show up for years. in the meantime, any num-ber of human factors, market factors, lag factors, and “noise” can intrude and overwhelm any strategist’s ability to predict an outcome. What actu-ally happens may have little to do with the quality of the strategy. Trying to improve your strategic decision making is like trying to improve your golf game by practicing blindfolded, and not finding out if your ball went into the hole for 3 years. 即使是最经验丰富的高管，在面对这类情况时也只拥有有限的经验以及识别模式的能力。决策往往是在充满不确定性的环境中做出的，而其结果可能要数年之后才会显现出来。在此期间，各种人为因素、市场因素、滞后效应以及各种“干扰因素”都可能干扰任何战略规划者的预测能力，导致最终的实际结果与最初制定的战略计划毫无关联。试图改进自己的战略决策能力，就如同试图蒙着眼睛练习高尔夫球，却要等到三年后才能知道自己的球是否真的进了洞一样——这种做法根本无法带来任何实质性的效果。

 The biased mind

• The biased mind 带有偏见的思维consider the decision on whether to donate your organs in the event of an untimely death—it seems a very important one that would typi-cally involve considerable contemplation. but in reality, it turns out that something as minor as the design of the driver’s license appli-cation form—whether it is an opt-in or an opt-out—makes all the difference. in denmark, where the program is opt-in, 4 percent of the population donate organs, while neighboring Sweden, where donation is opt-out, reports 86 percent participation. opt-in netherlands is at merely 28 percent even after lots of marketing spend, while its opt-out neighbor belgium reports 98 percent participation. opt-in germany is at 12 percent, while opt-out neighbors France, austria, hungary, and Poland are all north of 99 percent.12 The simple explanation is that, when confronted with complex decisions such as signing up for an organ donation program, our minds tend to stall, and we decide—nothing. We tend to go with the form without checking the box, no matter whether it’s opt-in or opt-out. The subconscious brain is more powerful than we think.  在面对意外死亡时是否捐献器官这个问题上，人们通常会认真思考、慎重做出决定——这确实是一个非常重要的决定。然而事实上，一些看似微不足道的因素，比如驾照申请表的设计方式——是采用“自愿参与”还是“默认参与”的方式——却会带来截然不同的结果。在丹麦，由于采用“自愿参与”的制度，只有4%的人口选择捐献器官；而在邻国瑞典，由于采用“默认参与”的制度，这一比例高达86%。在荷兰，尽管政府投入了大量宣传资金，但采用“自愿参与”制度后，只有28%的人选择捐献器官；而其邻国比利时则因为采用“默认参与”制度，使得98%的人选择了捐献器官。在德国，选择参与的比例仅为12%，而邻近国家法国、奥地利、匈牙利和波兰的选择参与比例都超过了99%。原因很简单：当面对诸如加入器官捐献计划这类复杂的决策时，我们往往会不知所措，最终选择什么都不做。无论这种选择是“自愿参与”还是“自愿不参与”，我们往往都会不加思考地填写表格，而不会去仔细查看相关选项。事实上，我们的潜意识比我们想象的要强大得多。
• here are some of our all-time-favorite biases that we see in strategy rooms: 以下是一些我们在战略会议中经常遇到的、最令人印象深刻的偏见现象：• Halo effect. “our 6 percent profit growth last year reflected our decision to continue investing in digital, and, in the face of tough trading conditions, we remained ruthless on costs”—a team giving itself a pat on the back even though the whole market also grew profits by 6 percent.13 • 光环效应。 “去年我们6%的利润增长，正是由于我们决定继续在数字化领域进行投资；而且，在市场环境极为严峻的情况下，我们依然坚决地控制成本”——尽管整个市场的利润也都增长了6%，但这个团队仍在自我表扬。13• Anchoring. “We forecast 8 percent growth next year, plus or minus 1 percentage point, depending on the demand environment. We will achieve this by pushing even harder on our current projects”—so 8 percent is the starting point of the negotiation, whether or not it should be.• Confirmation bias. “We’ve put lots of work into analyzing the rea-sons why this will work” [but no work into the reasons why it won’t]. “We’ve also heard that our top competitor is exploring this opportu-nity” [so it must be a good idea]. good luck with trying to stop the momentum for that project.• Champion bias. “We have a great team behind us; we’ve succeeded on projects like this before. You should have the confidence in us to do it again”—deflecting attention from the merits of the project alone.14 • “基准定位”：“我们预计明年经济增长率为8%，这一数字可能会上下波动1个百分点，具体取决于市场需求状况。为了实现这一目标，我们将更加努力地推进现有的项目。”因此，8%这个数字就成了谈判的起点，无论这个目标是否真的可行。 • “确认偏误”：“我们花费了大量精力来分析为什么这个方案会成功，”但却完全没有考虑过这个方案可能失败的原因；“我们还听说我们的主要竞争对手也在研究这个机会”，“所以这个方案肯定是个好主意”。不过，想要阻止对方推进这个项目，恐怕会相当困难。 • “支持者偏见”：人们总是倾向于支持自己所认同的观点或方案。“我们有一支非常优秀的团队支持着我们；我们之前也成功完成过类似的项目。你们应该对我们有信心，相信我们能够再次取得成功。”——这种说法其实是在转移人们对项目本身质量的关注。14
• • Loss aversion. “We don’t want to put our baseline at risk by chas-ing blue sky ideas. We really appreciate the hard work that’s gone into alternative strategies and new business lines, but ultimately we think the risks outweigh the benefits”—even though the exist-ing baseline might be under threat.
• • 损失厌恶心理。“我们不愿意因为追求那些不切实际的想法而使现有的基础状态受到威胁。我们确实认可那些为开发替代性策略或开拓新业务领域所付出的努力，但最终我们认为，这些尝试带来的风险远远超过了可能带来的收益”——尽管现有的基础状态其实正处于危险之中。

 Now . . . add social dynamics to the mix

• When you bring together a bunch of people with shared experiences and shared goals, they typically wind up telling themselves stories, gen-erally favorable ones—and we are in the perfect den for these biases to flourish. a study found, for instance, that 80 percent of executives believed that their product stood out against the competition—and that 8 percent of customers agreed.15 This sort of confirmation bias is why people read publications with the same political bent that they have. People may try to challenge themselves, but they really want to nod their heads as their beliefs are confirmed.16 当你把一群拥有共同经历和共同目标的人聚集在一起时，他们往往会给自己编造一些故事，而这些故事通常都是对他们自己有利的。而我们所处的环境恰恰为这种偏见的发展提供了完美的条件。例如，有一项研究发现，80%的高管认为他们的产品在竞争中具有优势，而只有8%的顾客认同这一观点。这种“确认偏误”正是人们为什么会去阅读那些与自己政治立场相同的出版物的原因。人们可能会试图挑战自己的固有观念，但实际上，他们更希望看到自己的信念得到证实。
• agency problems are fueled by incongruences between manage-ment and other stakeholders. here are just a few of the more promi-nent ways that managers may act in their own interest, and not purely in that of the enterprise and its stakeholders: 代理问题之所以会产生，主要是因为管理层与其他利益相关者之间的利益诉求存在矛盾。以下只是管理者可能出于自身利益而非完全为了企业及其利益相关者的利益而采取的一些典型行为方式：
• • “Sandbagging.” “i’m not going to put my neck on the line. i’m only going to agree to a plan that i know for sure i can deliver. My reputation is on the line, and i can’t risk being the one divi-sion that misses budget.” The reality is that individuals will often have a different attitude toward risk than their overall enterprise does.• “The short game.” “Someone else will be running this division in 3 years, anyway. i just need to milk performance for the next cou-ple of years, get a good bonus and the next promotion—or maybe get poached by our competitor.” The motivations of the executive are not automatically aligned to those of the owners.• “My way or your problem.” “i know this business and this indus-try better than the ceo and better than the board. They’ll just have to believe what i tell them. if i say it’s too hard, it’s too hard. if i don’t get the resources i ask for, then there’s my excuse for not delivering.” The line executive has inside knowledge, and often the ceo and board have little choice but to accept their version of the truth.• “I am my numbers.” “i get judged by my numbers, not by how • “故意拖延进度”。 “我可不想拿自己的职业生涯去冒险。我只愿意同意那些我有把握能够完成的任务。我的声誉正处于危险之中，我绝不能成为那个导致部门预算超支的人。”事实上，个人对于风险的态度往往与整个企业的立场不同。 • “追求短期利益”。 “反正三年后也会有人来接手这个部门。我只需要在接下来的几年里尽力提升业绩，拿到丰厚的奖金并获得晋升机会罢了——或者，也有可能被竞争对手挖走。”“企业高管的动机并不一定与股东的动机一致。” “要么按我的方式来做，否则就会出问题。” “我对这家企业以及这个行业的了解，比首席执行官和董事会都要深入。他们只能相信我所说的话。如果我说某件事太难完成了，那它确实太难了；如果我得不到所需的资源，那么这就是我无法完成任务的借口。”作为企业的高层管理者，他们拥有内部信息，而首席执行官和董事会往往别无选择，只能接受他们所描述的实际情况。 “我的绩效完全取决于各项数据指标。人们评价我的标准就是这些数据，而不是我的工作方式或工作态度。”
• i spend my time. i’m just going to work hard enough to hit my targets, but not a lot more.” one’s supervisor can’t directly observe the quality of effort, and results can be noisy signals—were those poor results a noble failure; were those great results dumb luck?  我只是在尽自己最大的努力去实现目标而已，并不会付出更多的努力。上司无法直接观察到一个人所付出的努力程度，而最终取得的成果也可能具有很大的不确定性——那些糟糕的结果究竟是出于高尚的尝试而导致的失败，还是纯粹是运气使然？那些优异的成绩又是否只是偶然的幸运呢？
• You have people who you’d hope are all pulling in the same direc-tion, but in reality, they have very different motivations and certainly asymmetric information. While ceos will try to optimize for the over-all success of their companies, those who report to them will for sure care a lot more about their individual business units and about those who work for them. how can they not? We all know that the people whose business thrives will be the ones who get rewarded. People, for the most part, are not bad; they’re just perfectly evolved to play the game. in fact, much of a business leader’s stature might reflect just how good he or she is at playing it. based on attribution bias, you are your numbers, so they’d better be good, no matter how you get there. Let’s not forget incentives, either. There are too many to recount all of them here, and they go way beyond financial remuneration. Presenting in front of your superiors or your peers is a matter of pride. Your track record is a matter of ego. Your team wants protection. charles Munger and Warren buffett used to say: “95 percent of behavior is driven by personal or collective incentives,” only to later correct themselves: “The 95 percent was wrong; it is more like 99 percent.”20 你希望所有的人都能朝着同一个方向努力，但实际上，他们的动机各不相同，而且信息也存在着严重的不对称性。虽然首席执行官们会努力为公司的整体发展谋利，但那些向他们汇报工作的人，无疑会更关心自己负责的业务部门以及那些在自己手下工作的人。他们怎么可能不关心呢？我们都知道，那些让所在业务取得成功的人，才会得到奖励。大多数情况下，人们并不是坏人；他们只是天生就适合参与这种“游戏”。事实上，一个企业领导者所具备的地位和影响力，在很大程度上，恰恰反映了他们在这种“游戏”中表现得有多出色。根据归因偏差的理论，你实际上就是那些数字的体现，因此无论你是通过何种方式取得这些成绩，这些数字都必须是好的。我们也不要忘记激励因素的作用——这样的激励因素实在太多，在这里一一列举根本不可能，而且它们的作用远远超出了金钱报酬的范围。在上级或同事面前展示自己的成果，会让人感到自豪；而自己的业绩记录，更是与个人的自尊心息息相关。你的团队也会希望得到保护。查尔斯·芒格和沃伦·巴菲特曾经说过：“95%的行为都是由个人或集体层面的激励因素所驱动的”，但后来他们又纠正了自己的观点，认为“这个比例应该是99%”。
• Strategy involves a complex set of motivations in a complex game. Far from having a single goal that everyone can focus on, exec-utives are negotiating next year’s budget, competing for resources, delegating responsibilities to others, maintaining and escalating prior commitments, impressing the board, inspiring confidence among a broader set of stakeholders—all at the same time. They know that they have to craft a strategy that claims to generate a 15 percent increase to get the 10 percent they really want, and they know that the main act is the budget. The strategy discussion is just the opening salvo.  战略制定涉及一系列复杂的动机，而这种过程本身也属于一场复杂的“博弈”。执行者们远没有一个所有人都能共同聚焦的单一目标；他们需要同时进行多项工作：协商明年的预算、争夺资源、将职责分配给他人、维护并推进之前的承诺、给董事会留下好印象、以及增强更广泛利益相关者的信任。他们明白，自己必须制定出一个能够带来15%增长的战略，才能真正获得自己所期望的10%成果；而其中最关键的因素就是预算。因此，战略讨论只不过是这场博弈中的开场白而已。
• Perhaps the most widely read piece of research that Mckinsey has published in the past decade showed that companies that rapidly re-allocate capital to new growth businesses outperform those that take a steady-state approach.21 Yet, the social side of strategy is such that companies still tend to take what is known as a “peanut butter” approach—spreading a thin layer of resources smoothly across the whole enterprise, even though it’s clear that opportunities are far greater in some areas than in others. 在麦肯锡过去十年发表的研究成果中，或许最受广泛关注的那项研究表明：那些能够迅速将资本重新配置到新的增长领域的企业，其业绩往往优于那些采取稳态发展策略的企业。然而，从战略的社会影响角度来看，企业们仍然倾向于采取所谓的“平均分配资源”的策略——将有限的资源均匀地分配到整个企业体系中，尽管很明显，在某些领域中，机会要远多于其他领域。

 When the inside view remains unchecked

• With everyone competing so hard for resources, it’s tough to make decisions about winners and losers. Picking winners may sometimes be easier, but it’s definitely hard to starve a business with less potential, especially if the leader has been around a long time or the business is a big part of the company’s history. 由于所有人都在为争夺资源而激烈竞争，因此很难确定哪些企业是赢家、哪些是输家。有时候，辨别赢家或许相对容易一些，但要让那些潜力较小的企业陷入困境却绝对是一件困难的事——尤其是当这些企业的领导者已经任职很长时间，或者这些企业在公司的发展史上占据了重要地位的时候。
• no matter the precise motivation, executives will use every bit of social power they have to improve the chances of their business succeeding. We’ve seen people do all sorts of things. We’ve even seen one executive, the president of one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world, be denied the resources he felt he needed and then rally loyal members of the board to get the ceo fired. That story, by the way, did not end well for the insurgent, who was soon ushered out the door, nor for the company. but the point is: even if we don’t like to acknowledge it, we are social creatures and covet status in the tribe. This was an excellent trait from an evolutionary perspective, when it was important to be the big gorilla in the jungle, but can be an obstacle when developing good strategies. 无论出于何种动机，高管们都会利用自己所拥有的一切社会影响力来增加企业成功的几率。我们见过各种各样的事情：甚至有一位世界顶级消费电子企业的总裁，因为未能获得他认为必要的资源，便联合董事会中忠于自己的成员将首席执行官赶下了台。不过，这个故事的结局对那些发起反抗的高管以及企业本身来说都并不理想。但关键在于：尽管我们不愿承认，我们终究是社会性动物，渴望在群体中获得地位。从进化的角度来看，这是一种非常优秀的特质——在丛林中，成为“最强者”确实至关重要；然而，在制定有效的战略时，这种特质却可能成为障碍。

• 2025/12/23 发表想法

  内在估值法

  
  

  原文：When the inside view remains unchecked 当这种内省行为没有受到任何约束或监督时…… The best breeding conditions for creating a flawed strategy are when the inside view remains unchallenged, creating a false sense of cer-tainty about what will happen. Many—in fact, very many—people do strategy as if they were the only horse in the race, almost ignor-ing that competitors are making strategies, too. People try to throw good money after bad so past decisions don’t reveal themselves to be mistakes. Those in the strategy room are confident because they have accounted for all the risk they can see—not realizing that the perils are in the risks they can’t see. So often, good performance is attributed to superior management, and bad performance is blamed on market conditions. 当内部视角未受到任何质疑时，就最容易形成有缺陷的战略。这种状况会使人产生一种关于未来发展结果的虚假确定性。许多人——事实上是绝大多数人——在制定战略时，都仿佛自己是这场竞争中的唯一参与者，几乎完全忽略了其他竞争者也在制定各自的战略。人们往往会试图用更多的资源来弥补之前的错误，从而避免让过去的决策暴露出其缺陷。那些身处战略制定团队中的人之所以充满信心，是因为他们认为已经考虑到了所有显而易见的风险；然而他们却没有意识到，真正的危险往往隐藏在那些他们无法预见的风险之中。因此，往往好的业绩会被归功于卓越的管理能力，而糟糕的业绩则会被归咎于市场环境。

• When the inside view remains unchecked 当这种内省行为没有受到任何约束或监督时……The best breeding conditions for creating a flawed strategy are when the inside view remains unchallenged, creating a false sense of cer-tainty about what will happen. Many—in fact, very many—people do strategy as if they were the only horse in the race, almost ignor-ing that competitors are making strategies, too. People try to throw good money after bad so past decisions don’t reveal themselves to be mistakes. Those in the strategy room are confident because they have accounted for all the risk they can see—not realizing that the perils are in the risks they can’t see. So often, good performance is attributed to superior management, and bad performance is blamed on market conditions. 当内部视角未受到任何质疑时，就最容易形成有缺陷的战略。这种状况会使人产生一种关于未来发展结果的虚假确定性。许多人——事实上是绝大多数人——在制定战略时，都仿佛自己是这场竞争中的唯一参与者，几乎完全忽略了其他竞争者也在制定各自的战略。人们往往会试图用更多的资源来弥补之前的错误，从而避免让过去的决策暴露出其缺陷。那些身处战略制定团队中的人之所以充满信心，是因为他们认为已经考虑到了所有显而易见的风险；然而他们却没有意识到，真正的危险往往隐藏在那些他们无法预见的风险之中。因此，往往好的业绩会被归功于卓越的管理能力，而糟糕的业绩则会被归咎于市场环境。
• We have personally experienced the early advantage kodak had in digital photography, after one of its researchers in the mid-1970s invented the sensor that is used in digital cameras and after the company was early to market with a consumer camera in the late 1990s. Yes, the camera looked like a brick, and the pictures were a bit grainy by today’s standards, but they were good enough for one of the authors of this book to take it as the only camera on his honeymoon trip to australia—see the original 1997 picture below (not bad, eh?).  我们亲身经历过柯达在数字摄影领域最初所拥有的优势：20世纪70年代中期，该公司的一名研究人员发明了用于数码相机的传感器；到了90年代末，柯达又率先推出了面向消费者的数码相机。虽然那些相机看起来笨重不堪，拍摄出的照片按照今天的标准来看也有些颗粒感，但对我们这本书的一位作者来说，它们已经足够用了——他在1997年去澳大利亚度蜜月时，就只带着这些相机——请看下面的照片（还不错吧？）。
• kodak clearly was in the game early on.22 but people who were involved in the strategy process at kodak back then say that the real problem was that management never got past their inside view. Film, chemicals, and paper had been around for so long that management could simply not imagine a world in which people didn’t light up at the prospect of collecting their prints in little yellow boxes. even more daunting was the fact that the traditional film business had been gen-erating gross margins of more than 60 percent for a long time. it was hard to cannibalize a business that had sustained those performance levels for decades—especially because the margins in any consumer electronics business were expected to be much lower. 柯达显然很早就进入了这个领域。但当时参与柯达战略制定的人士表示，真正的问题在于管理层始终无法跳出自己的固有思维模式。胶片、化学药品和相纸这些产品已经存在了太久，管理层根本无法想象人们会不再热衷于从那些黄色包装盒中取出现成的照片。更令他们难以接受的是，传统的胶片业务长期以来一直保持着超过60%的毛利率。对于这样一家几十年来都保持着如此高盈利水平的企业来说，想要颠覆其原有的商业模式确实非常困难——尤其是考虑到消费电子行业的利润率通常要低得多。
• The assumption that the traditional film business would always be around simply never got sufficiently challenged in the strategy room, even though ample evidence to the contrary was available—including at kodak, which had done a major study in the early 1980s. kodak management never seriously debated whether digital might turn out to be a superior technology. They spent half a billion dollars developing a camera, the advantix, that was fully digital but still used film and generated prints—the digital capabilities just let you scroll through images to decide which ones you wanted to print. The camera bombed. customers simply didn’t love prints as much as kodak’s strategists thought they did. 人们普遍认为传统胶片业务会永远存在，但在战略规划会议上，这一观点从未受到足够的质疑——尽管事实上有大量相反的证据，包括柯达在20世纪80年代初进行的一项重要研究。柯达的管理层从未认真思考过数字技术是否可能成为更先进的技术。他们耗资5亿美元研发了Advantix相机，这款相机完全是数字化的，但仍需要使用胶片来生成照片，只不过数字技术可以让用户先浏览图片再决定哪些需要打印。然而这款相机彻底失败了，因为顾客对打印照片的兴趣远没有柯达的战略专家们想象中的那么大。
• by now, business magazines and literature have assembled a rather impressive list of similar cases where once-great companies ran into difficulties when trends changed the game, or their business models ran out of steam: circuit city, Sears, grundig, and Wang, just to name a few. So, today’s strategists are more likely to try to find an outside per-spective and to bring it into the strategy room—but the inside game still makes it hard to act. For most businesses, the best predictor of next year’s budget is still this year’s budget, plus or minus a few per-cent, of course. Strategy processes often generate a high-level commitment to making a change, but, too often, as with a failing dieter or cigarette quitter, the processes don’t surface and deal with other prior commit-ments that immunize companies against change. as one ceo told us, “if you want a big idea done, you have to pursue it to the last detail. Just because the group said ‘yes’ doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.” bringing about change in the corporations of today reminds us of an attempt to move an octopus, when one leg of the octopus is totally committed to going to the next rock but the other seven remain com-pletely committed to holding on to the rock they’re already grasping.  到目前为止，各种商业杂志和文献已经列举出了许多类似的案例：那些曾经辉煌的企业，由于行业趋势的变化或自身商业模式的失效而陷入了困境，比如Circuit City、Sears、Grundig以及Wang等。因此，如今的策略师们更倾向于从外部视角来审视问题，并将这些观点引入战略决策过程之中——然而，企业内部的运作机制仍然使得采取有效行动变得十分困难。对大多数企业来说，预测明年预算的最佳依据，依然是今年的预算，当然会加上或减去几个百分点而已。战略制定过程往往能促使企业做出改变的坚定承诺，但正如那些无法坚持节食或戒烟计划的人一样，这些流程往往无法有效解决那些阻碍企业变革的既有承诺或因素。正如一位首席执行官告诉我们的：“如果你想让一个宏伟计划得以实现，就必须将其执行到每一个细节。仅仅因为团队表示同意，并不意味着这个计划就能成功实施。”在当今的企业中推动变革，就如同试图移动一只章鱼：当章鱼的一条触手已经决心移动到下一块岩石上时，其余七条触手却仍然紧紧抓住它们目前所处的岩石。
• Just changing mindsets won’t be enough, though. The social side of strategy won’t give up the fight that easily. a golf instructor won’t help much by telling you: “don’t slice.” he must give you something posi-tive that you can actually do to solve the problem. hence, we’ll now lay out the empirical research that will provide you with an outside view. We’ll begin by giving you a new way to map out your competitive situation, then show you where you need to go. it’s going to be a bit of a journey, so stick with us. 然而，仅仅改变思维模式是不够的。策略中的社会层面并不会如此轻易地放弃抗争。一位高尔夫教练如果只是告诉你“不要打出切球”，其实并不会起到多大帮助；他必须为你提供一些具体的、可行的方法来解决问题。因此，我们现在将介绍一些实证研究结果，这些研究能为你提供不同的视角。首先，我们会向你介绍一种新的方法，帮助你梳理自己的竞争处境，然后指出你接下来应该朝哪个方向努力。这段旅程可能会有些曲折，但请坚持与我们一起走下去吧。

 The right yardstick

• yuval Noah harari argues in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, that the blank spaces on the new maps didn’t just provide the right template for the Age of Exploration, they also ushered in the Scientific revolution.3 he believes that the doubts manifested in these “modern” maps guided an entire class of scientists to leave blank spaces for others to fill in, as knowledge increased in many scientific fields. The embrac-ing of ignorance had to come before the embracing of knowledge. Upon reflection, we thought that the current state of strategy at times reminds us a bit more of those early maps: Good insights from a close-up view, and surrounded by a detailed and compelling narrative with lots of analysis. It might feel as if the strategy room is jammed so full with slides and facts from the “inside view” that there is little lee-way for curiosity and wonder about what the external view would say. There is simply not enough room left for uncertainty and exploration. By no means do we want to imply that we discovered a new continent, but we thought it might be helpful to start with conceding that the map for navigating corporate performance is not perfectly understood, yet. With that, we set out to add some information to the map by bringing in an “outside view” to help you chart a new course for your own business toward better performance. Now we commence our own tour of discovery. 尤瓦尔·诺亚·哈拉里在《人类简史》中指出，新地图上的那些空白区域不仅为探索时代提供了必要的框架，同时也催生了科学革命。他认为，这些“现代”地图所体现出的不确定性，引导着众多科学家在各个科学领域留出空白空间，等待后来者去填补这些知识空白。事实上，在真正拥抱知识之前，人们首先必须接受无知这一事实。经过反思，我们认为当前的策略制定方式在某些方面确实让人联想到那些早期的地图：从微观角度出发得出的深刻见解，再加上详尽而富有说服力的分析叙述，确实构成了完整的战略框架。然而，战略会议室里充斥着大量的内部视角下的数据与事实，似乎留给人们去思考外部视角会带来什么启示的空间已经所剩无几，更不用说留出空间去容纳不确定性或进行探索了。我们绝不是想声称自己发现了什么新大陆，但我们认为，首先承认目前对于指导企业绩效发展的这套“地图”尚未被完全理解，或许是很有帮助的。基于这一认识，我们试图通过引入“外部视角”来为这套“地图”补充更多信息，从而帮助您为自己的企业规划一条通往更好绩效的发展道路。现在，我们就开始这段探索之旅吧。
• The right yardstick 正确的衡量标准Let’s start creating the new map by setting a clear yardstick for good strategy—a proper compass to guide the way.4 Some would look at gains in share price, but that struck us as too mercurial, too dependent on the starting and ending dates of the measurement, and maybe also a bit too influenced by factors outside the control of management. oth-ers would look at growth in revenue, yet others at earnings or cash flow. So, could one metric be the yardstick for business performance? probably not, but economic profit comes pretty close, we think. At its heart, business strategy is all about beating the market, or in other words defying the power of “perfect” markets to push economic surplus back to zero. Economic profit—the total profit after the cost of capital is subtracted—measures the success of that defiance by show-ing what is left on the table after the forces of competition have played out.5 of course, businesses also pursue other objectives, such as deliver-ing inventions, securing employment, or making social contributions and building communities. But if good strategy succeeds in taming market forces, residual economic profit will grow, making it also easier to accomplish the other objectives. 让我们通过确立一个明确的衡量标准来开始创建这张新的“地图”——这个标准应当是一把能够指引方向的正确“指南针”。有些人可能会选择股价涨幅作为衡量标准，但我们认为这种指标过于不稳定，且过于依赖于衡量期间的起始和结束时间，同时也可能受到管理层无法控制的因素的影响。还有人会关注营收增长，也有人会看重盈利或现金流。那么，是否存在一个能够全面反映企业绩效的指标呢？恐怕并不存在，但我们认为“经济利润”这个指标已经相当接近这一要求了。归根结底，商业战略的核心就在于战胜市场——换句话说，就是要抵制“完美”市场将经济剩余重新拉回零的水平。经济利润，即扣除资本成本后的总利润，正是通过反映竞争力量作用后的剩余收益，来衡量这种抵抗行为的成功程度。当然，企业也会追求其他目标，比如推动技术创新、创造就业机会、为社会做出贡献以及建设社区。但倘若良好的战略能够有效遏制市场力量，那么剩余经济利润就会增加，从而也更容易实现这些其他目标。
• oddly, you won’t find economic profit in many audited financial statements, and our surveys find it is rarely used in the world of strat-egy. Some executives even asked us, “didn’t we just throw EVA out the window?” Well, we’re bringing it back.6 We believe it is a good metric, as it shows both by how much a company has beaten the mar-ket and the scale of that success. Not only does economic profit mea-sure margin and scale, it also incorporates margin development, sales growth, and cash flow. If we have to choose one variable to measure an enterprise—or at least its purely economic contribution—economic profit could be it. Because we do lots of presentations on this work, we often get asked: “But what about returns to shareholders, or NpV?” Growth in economic profit drives shareholder returns but is much less noisy and more under control of management. We found that, over a period of 10 years, the top quintile of companies based on growth in economic profit delivered the strongest total shareholder returns (+17 percent per year) while the bot-tom quintile delivered the weakest (+7 percent per year). Economic profit captures the two parameters we know are driving share price performance over time: return on invested capital (roIC) and growth.7 Besides, there are many commercial enterprises that are not listed on public markets, so economic profit is a more universally applicable measure. Let’s get to know this yardstick a bit better (Exhibit 2). From 2010 to 2014, the average company in our database of the world’s largest companies reported $920 million in annual operating profit. To make this profit, they used about $9.3 billion of invested capital, including the goodwill spent on past acquisitions.8 dividing one by the other gives a return on invested capital of 9.9 percent. But investors and lenders in the average company required a return of 8.0 percent to compensate for use of their funds (measured by weighted average cost of capital), so the first $740 million of profit just made them whole. That left $180 million in economic profit: The spread over the average company’s cost of capital multiplied by the scale of its business.  奇怪的是，在许多经过审计的财务报表中，你都找不到“经济利润”这一指标，我们的调查也发现，在战略分析领域，这一概念很少被使用。有些高管甚至问我们：“我们不是把EVA这个指标抛到一边去了吗？”其实，我们正在重新引入它。我们认为，这是一个非常有效的衡量指标，因为它既能反映企业超越市场的程度，也能体现这种成功的规模。经济利润不仅衡量了企业的利润率和业务规模，还包含了利润率的变化趋势、销售增长情况以及现金流状况。如果非要选择一个指标来衡量一家企业——或者至少是它纯粹的经济贡献——那么经济利润无疑是一个合适的选择。由于我们经常就这项研究进行演讲，因此经常有人会问：“那么股东回报或净现值又该如何看待呢？”经济利润的增长确实能够提升股东回报，但其波动性要小得多，且更受企业管理层的影响。我们发现，在为期10年的时间里，那些在经济利润增长方面表现最好的公司，其股东总回报率最高（每年为17%），而表现最差的公司，其股东总回报率最低（每年为7%）。经济利润这一指标恰恰反映了我们所熟知的、能够长期影响股价表现的两个关键因素：投资资本回报率与企业成长速度。此外，还有许多未在公开市场上市的商业企业，因此经济利润这一指标具有更广泛的适用性。让我们进一步了解这一衡量标准（见图2）。2010年至2014年间，我们数据库中收录的全球最大规模企业的平均每年营业利润为9.2亿美元；为了获得这些利润，这些企业共投入了约93亿美元的资金，其中还包括用于过往收购活动的商誉。将后者除以前者，即可得出这些企业的投资资本回报率，为9.9%。但是，对于这些普通企业而言，投资者和贷款方要求的回报率为8.0%，这样才能弥补他们所提供的资金所带来的风险（这一回报率是通过加权平均资本成本来衡量的）。因此，前7.4亿美元的利润刚好能够满足他们的要求。这样一来，就还剩下1.8亿美元的经济利润——这一数字相当于普通企业所承担的平均资本成本与其实体规模相乘所得的结果。

 Your business lives on a Power Curve

• Your business lives on a Power Curve 你的业务发展状况取决于这条“增长曲线”。once you plot all the economic profits in an ordered line, you find they demonstrate a power law—the tails of the curve rise (and fall) at exponential rates, with long flatlands in the middle.9 you get this chart, pictured in Exhibit 3, called the power Curve.  To produce this chart depicting the power Curve, we took finan-cial performance data for 2,393 of the largest non-financial firms by revenue over the period 2010 to 2014 and estimated each company’s average economic profit.10 The power Curve shows each individual company’s average economic profit over those 5 years ranked from the lowest to the highest. Then we separated the power Curve into three regions: the bottom of the curve, represented by the bottom quintile of companies; the middle of the curve, represented by the second, third, and fourth quintiles; and the top of the curve, represented by the top 一旦你将所有这些经济利润以有序的方式绘制在图表上，就会发现它们遵循幂律分布规律——曲线的两端部分会以指数速度上升或下降，而中间部分则呈现出较为平坦的趋势。如图表3所示，这种曲线被称为“幂律曲线”。为了绘制出这条幂律曲线，我们收集了2010年至2014年间2,393家营收最高的非金融企业的财务数据，并估算出了每家企业的平均经济利润。幂律曲线显示了这5年间每家企业的平均经济利润水平，这些数据是按照从低到高的顺序排列的。然后，我们将这条权力曲线划分成了三个区域：曲线的底部，由处于最低五分位数的公司代表；曲线的中间部分，由处于第二、第三和第四五分位数的公司代表；以及曲线的顶部，由处于最高五分位数的公司代表。
• quintile of economic profit. There’s a big gap from the middle to the top—the average economic profit on the top is 30 times greater! So, if you’re not at the high end already, the aspiration of joining the top-tier players should probably be on your mind. There are many instances of power laws in large data sets from eco-nomics, demography, and nature. The distribution of earthquake mag-nitudes follows such power laws, and so does the distribution of income for pro footballers, or book sales, for that matter. Another example is Zipf’s Law, which notes that the most frequent word in English (“the”) occurs approximately twice as often as the second-most frequent (“of”), 经济利润的五分位数分布显示，中间层级与最高层级之间存在巨大差距——最高层级的平均经济利润是中间层级的30倍！因此，如果你尚未跻身最高层级，那么努力跻身顶尖行列应该成为你的目标。在经济学、人口统计学以及自然科学领域的大量数据集中，都存在许多遵循幂律分布的现象。地震震级的分布遵循幂律规律，职业足球运动员的收入分布以及书籍的销售量分布也同样符合这一规律。另一个例子就是齐普夫定律，该定律指出，在英语中，出现频率最高的单词“the”的出现次数大约是出现频率第二高的单词“of”的两倍。

 What we see on the map

• What we see on the map 我们在地图上所看到的这些现象……Back in the strategy room, the power Curve is not the map actually in use. our inside view gives us a detailed look at how we compare with last year, with our immediate competitors, and with our expec-tations for the next year. But when we zoom way out and look at the landscape of profitability—at all major companies in all indus-tries and geographies—we get an important new perspective. We see that the vast majority of profits are at one end of the curve and improve exponentially as you get closer to that end. So, good strat-egy shouldn’t focus narrowly on last year or on next year or on com-petitors. The goal of strategy needs to be to move to the right on the power Curve. For most businesses, all those in the middle three quintiles, the practical challenge is how to escape the broad, flat middle of the curve and move up into the region on the right, where most profits accrue.  在战略规划室里，实际上使用的并不是那张“力量曲线图”。通过内部数据，我们可以详细了解自己与去年的表现相比如何，与直接竞争对手相比如何，以及明年的发展预期如何。但当我们把视野拉远，观察整个行业的盈利状况——涵盖所有主要企业、所有行业和地区时，就会获得一个重要的新视角：绝大多数利润都集中在“力量曲线图”的某一端，而且越接近这一端，利润增长的速度就越快。因此，良好的战略规划不应仅仅关注去年、明年或竞争对手的情况，其真正目标应该是让自己在“力量曲线图”上向右移动。对于大多数企业而言，尤其是那些处于中间三个五分位数的企业来说，真正的挑战在于如何摆脱曲线中那片平坦、广阔的中间区域，从而向上移动到右侧区域——因为大部分利润都集中在那里。

 Market forces are pretty efficient

• We aren’t saying there isn’t any value in doing better than last year. 我们并不是说，比去年做得更好没有任何意义。of course there is. Nor are we saying that every company can make it to the top of the power Curve. Garrison keillor had his fictional Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Just as there is no Lake Wobegon in Minnesota, there is no performance panacea that can enable exceptional performance for all. But zooming way out and look-ing at the whole landscape of economic profit gives you a very different perspective relative to what you see when you just focus on last year and next year. It gives you a map to explore when charting your strategy. When we show the power Curve chart to CEos, it always leads to a good conversation, driven by curiosity about where they rank. Mostly, the initial reaction is that this is common sense, but not com-monly applied. It is not deeply appreciated just how long and flat the middle is, nor how very high the mountains are. There are several important insights we gain from the power Curve: Market forces are pretty efficient. Textbook theory says that economic profits should tend toward zero over time, because they get competed away. We’re happy to report that, in most industries, profits are possible because real markets aren’t perfect. The average company 当然存在这样的可能性。我们也不是说每家公司都能登上业绩曲线的顶端。加里森·凯勒在他的小说中描绘了那个名为“沃比根湖”的理想之地，在那里“所有的女性都坚强，所有的男性都英俊，所有的孩子都超常出众”。正如明尼苏达州并不存在这样的沃比根湖一样，也不存在某种万能的解决方案能够让所有企业都取得卓越的业绩。但是，如果我们将视野拉得更加宽广，整体审视整个经济利润的格局，就会获得与仅仅关注去年或明年的情况截然不同的视角。这种视角会为你制定战略提供重要的参考依据。当我们向首席执行官们展示这种“权力曲线”图表时，总会引发一场富有意义的讨论——这些讨论往往源于他们对于自己在该曲线中所处位置的好奇心。起初，他们的反应通常是认为这些原理其实很常识性，但现实中却并不常被人们加以应用。他们往往没有充分意识到：曲线的中间部分之所以如此漫长且平坦，是因为市场竞争非常激烈；而那些处于曲线两端的企业，其利润之所以如此之高，也是因为市场竞争的结果。从这种“权力曲线”中，我们可以得出几个重要的结论： 市场机制的运作效率其实相当高。按照教科书上的理论，随着时间的推移，企业的经济利润应该会趋于零，因为这些利润会通过市场竞争被逐渐侵蚀掉。但我们很高兴地看到，在大多数行业中，企业仍然能够获得利润——因为现实中的市场并不完美。对于大多数企业来说，这种市场环境反而为它们创造了盈利的机会。

 The curve is extremely steep at the bookends

• in our sample companies generates returns that exceed the cost of cap-ital by almost 2 percentage points. But the market is chipping away at individual companies’ profits all the time. That brutal competition is why it’s so hard just to stay in place and why hockey stick plans so seldom turn into reality. 在我们研究的这些样本企业中，它们的盈利能力实际上超过了资本成本的投入，其收益与资本成本的差额接近2个百分点。然而，市场总是在不断侵蚀这些企业的利润。正是这种激烈的竞争环境，才使得企业很难保持现有的发展势头，也正因为如此，“曲棍球杆效应”所描绘的那种快速发展模式才极少能够成为现实。
• how many times have you seen that $100 million improvement program fail to drop money to the bottom line because all it did was keep your relative cost in line with your competitor? rather than beat-ing the market, the program was just part of playing along. you were keeping up with the Joneses. For companies in the middle of the power Curve, the market is taking a heavy toll. In that flat part of the curve, all the hard work that people in the companies are doing often amounts to not much more than paying the rent. Companies in those three quintiles deliv-ered economic profits averaging just $47 million a year. The discussion about the flatness of the curve in the middle simply isn’t taking place in the strategy room now. The curve is extremely steep at the bookends. Companies in the top quintile capture nearly 90 percent of the economic profit cre-ated, averaging $1.4 billion annually. This is a hall of fame for business, with the top 40 companies including household names such as Apple, Microsoft, China Mobile, Samsung Electronics, Exxon, Johnson & Johnson, oracle, Vodafone, Intel, Cisco, Nestle, Merck, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Audi, Unilever, and Siemens.12 The full list of top-40 companies earned $283 billion combined annual economic profit, more than half of the combined value for all 2,393 companies in the database ($417 billion). 你见过多少次，那些耗资1亿美元的实施计划最终并没有真正提升企业的净利润，而只是让企业的相对成本与竞争对手保持一致而已？这类计划并没有超越市场平均水平，仅仅是为了不落后于竞争对手而已。对于那些处于“力量曲线”中段的公司来说，市场带来的冲击尤为严重。在曲线的平坦区域，企业所付出的所有努力往往仅仅够支付各项开支而已。处于这三个五分位数区间内的公司，其年均经济利润仅为4700万美元。如今，在战略规划会议上，人们已经不再讨论位于曲线中段的平坦区域了。曲线的两端极为陡峭：处于最高四分位的公司几乎占据了所有创造的经济利润的90%，这些公司的年均利润高达14亿美元。这份榜单堪称商业界的“名人堂”，其中前40家公司包括苹果、微软、中国移动、三星电子、埃克森美孚、强生、甲骨文、沃达丰、英特尔、思科、雀巢、默克、沃尔玛、可口可乐、奥迪、联合利华和西门子等知名企业。排名前40的这些公司每年创造的累计经济利润高达2830亿美元，这一数字超过了数据库中全部2393家公司的累计经济利润总额（4170亿美元）的一半。
• overall, the companies in the top quintile average some 30 times as much economic profit as those in the middle three quintiles, while the bottom 20 percent make for deep economic losses. That uneven-ness exists within the top quintile, too. The top 2 percent together earn about as much as the next 8 percent combined. In smartphones, the top two companies—Apple and Samsung at the time—earned vir-tually all the economic profit. yes, all the other mobile phone makers in aggregate destroyed value during that period. Apple earned more “re-selling” memory in its iphones and ipads than the entire memory industry making those very chips managed to capture. 总体而言，排名前五分之一的公司所创造的经济利润是中间三分之公司平均利润的约30倍，而排名最末的20%的公司则出现了巨大的经济损失。这种不平衡现象在排名前五分之一的公司中同样存在：其中排名前2%的公司所创造的经济利润，几乎相当于接下来8%公司的总和。在智能手机领域，当时的苹果和三星这两家巨头几乎垄断了所有的经济利润；而其他所有手机制造商在那个时期实际上都在创造负价值。苹果通过其iPhone和iPad产品所获得的利润，甚至超过了整个内存芯片行业的总利润。

 The curve is getting steeper over time

• At the other end of the curve, the undersea canyon of negative economic profit is deep—though, fortunately, not quite as deep as the mountain is high.  在曲线的另一端，那些导致负经济利润的海底“峡谷”其实非常深——不过幸运的是，它们的深度并没有那些“高山”那么惊人。[插图]The curve is getting steeper over time. Back in 2000–4, compa-nies in the top quintile earned a collective $186 billion in economic profit. Fast forward a decade to 2010–14, and the top quintile captured $684 billion in economic profit. The bottom quintile generated a col-lective loss of $61 billion in 2000–4. A decade later, the bottom quin-tile was losing $321 billion. Not surprisingly, investors seek companies that offer market-beating returns. As they do, more capital flows to the top. Managers may be able to fool their bosses, but they can’t fool investors. Capital doesn’t recognize or respect geographic and industry boundaries. Companies that started in the top quintile 10 years earlier soaked up 50 cents of every dollar of new capital in the decade up to 2014. This capital infusion enabled the top performers to grow their average economic profit by more than 130 percent in real terms over that decade, from $612 million to $1.4 billion, even though their aver-age returns on invested capital stayed relatively constant at around 16 percent. Even as the curve gets steeper, this is not a permanent inequality. As we will discover during the course of this book, companies and 这条曲线随着时间的推移而变得越来越陡峭。在2000年至2004年期间，排名前五的分位数中的企业们共创造了1860亿美元的经济利润；十年后的2010年至2014年，这些企业们又赚取了6840亿美元的经济利润。而在2000年至2004年期间，排名后五的分位数中的企业们共造成了610亿美元的损失；十年后，这些企业的亏损额增加到了3210亿美元。毫不奇怪，投资者总是会追逐那些能够带来超越市场平均水平回报的企业。因此，更多的资本会流向这些企业。管理者或许能够欺骗他们的上司，但他们无法欺骗投资者。资本是不会理会也不尊重任何地理或行业界限的。那些在10年前就属于表现最好的那五分之一企业，在截至2014年的这十年间，每投入1美元的新资本，就能获得50美分的收益。正是这些资金的支持，使得这些表现优异的企业在这段时间内，其平均经济利润实际增长了130%以上，从6.12亿美元增加到了14亿美元；尽管它们所投入资本的平均回报率基本保持在16%左右，没有发生明显变化。尽管这种收益差距在逐渐扩大，但这种不平等现象并不是永久性的。正如我们在本书中将会进一步发现的那样，企业和……

 Size isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing, either

• entire industries move up and down the curve. It is uneven but also very dynamic: A firm’s place on the curve changes all the time. Size isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing, either. In choosing a measure like economic profit, we know that size comes into play. That might create some feelings of discomfort.13 one might argue that a rela-tive measure—such as economic profit margin or return on invested capital—should be used. But incorporating size in the measure makes sense: We evaluate the strength of a strategy based not only on how powerful its economic formula is (measured by the spread of its returns over its cost of capital) but also on how scalable that formula is (mea-sured by how much invested capital it could deploy)—see Exhibit 4. Compare Walmart, with a moderate 12 percent return on capital but a 整个行业都会在这条曲线上上下移动。这种变化虽然不均衡，但却充满动态性：一家企业在曲线上的位置会不断发生变化。规模固然不是决定一切的因素，但也不是可以忽略的因素。当我们选择用经济利润这样的指标来衡量企业的表现时，我们就知道规模确实起着重要的作用。这一点可能会让人感到有些不适。有人可能会认为，应该使用相对指标，比如经济利润率或投资资本回报率，来来进行评估。但将企业规模纳入评估指标确实是合理的。我们在评价一项战略的效力时，不仅会考虑其经济模型的有效性（通过其收益与资本成本的差异来衡量），还会考虑该模型的可扩展性（即它能调动多少投资资本来实现目标）——详见图4。以沃尔玛为例，尽管其资本回报率仅为12%，……

 In the end, it’s you versus the world

• whopping $136 billion of invested capital, with Starbucks, which has a huge 50 percent return on capital but is limited by being in a much less scalable category, deploying only $2.6 billion of invested capital. Both are top-quintile companies, but which had the better strategy? Well, that’s a bit of a moot question as they both generated enormous value, but the difference in economic profit generation is substantial— $5.3 billion from Walmart versus $1.1 billion from Starbucks. Size has its limitations, too. Larger firms (above-average invested capital) make up 80 percent of all firms in the bottom quintile. If any-thing, we could say that larger companies are more likely to generate very high or very low economic profit: 28 percent are in the top quintile while just 41 percent of large firms are spread across the middle three quintiles. To say it simply: It is easier to make a big profit or a big loss if you are big. however, it is really the combination of scale and spread that matters.  In the end, it’s you versus the world. you’re used to comparing against your next-door neighbors and your own last 3 years, but it feels different looking at the whole world as it’s represented on the power Curve. your horizon gets broadened, and you may be either chastened or emboldened, depending on where you find yourself on the curve—you look at lots of relative data today, but you can now see the whole playing field. This is where companies compete for the eye of the inves-tor in terms of the performance they deliver—relative to all other com-panies, and not relative to their industries. This is where you see how effective strategy is over time in terms of moving companies up and down that curve. Some feel that it’s unfair to be compared against com-panies in other industries and other nations—but that’s the compari-son that capital makes. It flows to the best opportunities, no matter the industry or geography. your main competitor is the darwinian force of the market that squeezes your profitability; your main measure of whether you are winning is the extent to which you avoid that squeeze. 总共投入了1360亿美元的资金：其中星巴克虽然获得了50%的巨大投资回报，但由于其所处行业的规模扩张空间有限，实际投入的资金仅为26亿美元。这两家公司都属于排名前五的公司，但哪一家的战略更为成功呢？其实这个问题有点难以回答，因为它们都创造了巨大的价值；不过在创造经济利润方面，两者之间存在显著差异——沃尔玛创造了53亿美元的经济利润，而星巴克则只创造了11亿美元。规模过大也会带来一些限制：在排名后五的公司中，那些投入资金规模超过平均水平的较大企业占据了80%。如果说有什么不同的话，那就是大型企业更有可能获得极高的利润，或者遭受极高的损失：其中28%的大型企业属于收入最高的五分之一群体，而只有41%的大型企业分布在收入中间的三个五分之一区间内。简单来说，如果企业规模较大，那么它要么获得巨额利润，要么遭受巨大损失——这两种情况都更容易发生。然而，真正起决定作用的因素其实是规模与业务覆盖范围的结合。归根结底，这就是企业与整个市场的竞争。你习惯于与自己的竞争对手进行比较，也习惯于回顾自己过去三年的表现，但当把整个世界放在“收益曲线”上来看时，情况就会显得有所不同了。你的视野会因此变得更为开阔，而根据你所处的位置不同，你可能会受到鞭策，也可能会变得更加勇敢。如今，你可以看到大量的相对数据，也因此能够全面了解整个竞争格局。正是在这种环境下，企业会通过展示自身的表现来争夺投资者的关注——这种表现是相对于所有其他企业而言的，而不是相对于它们所处的行业而言的。通过这种对比，人们也可以清楚地看到某种策略在长期内究竟能将企业推向怎样的发展方向。有些人认为，将自己与其他行业或其他国家的企业进行比较是不公平的——但事实上，资本恰恰就是通过这种比较来运作的。它会流向那些最有利的机会，无论这些机会属于哪个行业、位于哪个地区。你的主要竞争对手，其实就是市场中那种会压缩你盈利空间的“达尔文式力量”；而判断你是否取得了成功，最重要的标准，就是你能在多大程度上避免受到这种压力的影响。
• Why you are where you are 你为什么会处于现在的这个境地Even CEos and CFos are often surprised to see where they are on the power Curve. It’s not that they suffered from delusions; it’s just that they’re accustomed to an inside view. They compare their performance to peer benchmarks within their immediate competitors, not against the global universe of companies. 即使是首席执行官和首席财务官，往往也会对自己在权力结构中的位置感到惊讶。这并不是因为他们产生了妄想，而只是因为他们习惯于从内部的角度来看待问题。他们会将自己的表现与直接竞争对手的指标进行比较，而不是与全球范围内的所有公司进行对比。
• Some CEos are surprised to find themselves in the middle; they feel they are on top of their game or their industry. Some CEos are surprised to find themselves at the very top of the curve and ponder whether it is their task to expand the curve or their fate to slide down. Wherever a company is, the question quickly becomes: Why are we there? That question, too, leads to a surprise. The tendency when tak-ing an inside view is that, when things are going well, we attribute results to our management’s unique recipe; when times are tough, it’s an industry problem or bad luck. however, our analysis shows that a good 50 percent of your positioning on the curve is driven by what’s happening in your industry—highlighting that “where to play” is really one of the most critical choices in strategy. Industry performance, we found, also follows a power Curve, with the same hanging tail and high leading peak, as shown in Exhibit 5. 一些首席执行官发现自己处于中间位置时感到十分惊讶；他们认为自己在本领域或自己的企业中表现非常出色。还有一些首席执行官发现自己处于这个梯形的顶端，他们会思考：是自己的职责去推动这个发展曲线继续向上延伸，还是注定会下滑呢？无论一家企业处于什么位置，这个问题很快就会浮现出来：我们为什么会处于这样的位置呢？而这个问题的答案往往也会让人感到意外。当我们从企业内部的角度来看问题时，往往会得出这样的结论：当事情进展顺利时，我们会将取得的成果归功于自己企业的独特管理方式；而当遇到困难时，我们则会认为这是整个行业存在的问题，或是自己运气不好。然而，我们的分析表明，在决定企业在该发展曲线上的位置时，有大约50%的因素是由企业所在行业的发展状况所决定的。这一事实凸显出：“应该选择在哪个领域发展”确实是战略决策中最为关键的因素之一。我们发现，各行业的发展表现同样遵循幂函数曲线，其分布特征也呈现出同样的“尾部缓慢延伸、前期增长迅速”的趋势，如图5所示。
• There are 12 tobacco companies in our research, and 9 are in the top quintile. yet there are 20 paper companies, and none is in the top quintile. Well-known high performers such as software, pharmaceu-ticals, and wireless telecommunications jostle for position in the top quintile, while utilities, transport, and construction materials lumber along in the bottom quintile.  The role of industry in a company’s position on the power Curve is so substantial that you’d rather be an average company in a great industry than a great company in an average industry—see Exhibit 6. The median pharmaceutical company (India-based Sun pharmaceuticals, with eco-nomic profit of $424 million), the median software company (Adobe Systems, $339 million), and the median semiconductor company (Mar-vell Technology Group, $277 million) all would be in the top quintile of chemicals companies and the top 10 percent of food products companies.  In some cases, you’d rather be in your supplier’s industry than in your own. For example, again in Exhibit 6—the average economic profit of airlines is a loss of $99 million, while suppliers in the aero-space and defense category average a profit of $453 million. In fact, the 20th percentile aerospace and defense supplier, Saab AB, earns more economic profit than the 80th  percentile airline, Air New Zealand. That is not to say that all airlines have poor economic performance (witness Japan Airlines), nor that all is rosy in aerospace and defense. But it is a fact of life that there are more and less attractive playing fields. Across the whole market, firms in the top quintile of the power Curve get a boost of $335 million of economic profit just from being in better industries, while those in the bottom quintile suffer a penalty of minus $253 million from being in worse industries, as shown in Exhibit 7. There are, of course, exceptions that don’t conform to the fates of their industries. For example, companies from integrated telecom-munications services (a top-quintile industry) are over-represented in both the top and bottom company quintiles. The same is true for inte-grated oil and gas (a bottom-quintile industry). But when it comes to explaining variance we find that industry explains somewhere between 40 and 60 percent, and, as industry definition gets more granular, the share of economic profit explained by the industry effect only increases.  Even though all strategy presentations we’ve seen start with an industry view, that view is rarely carried forward to explain past performance. 在我们的研究范围内，共有12家烟草企业，其中9家位于排名前五的行列；而相比之下，虽然有20家造纸企业，但没有一家能够进入排名前五的行列。那些在软件、制药以及无线通信等领域表现优异的企业都在争相跻身排名前五的行列，而那些从事公用事业、交通运输以及建筑材料生产的企业则普遍处于排名后五的行列。在一个企业所处的地位中，其所所属行业所起的作用至关重要——因此，你宁愿成为某个优秀行业中的普通企业，也不愿成为某个普通行业中的优秀企业。详见图6。那些处于中位水平的制药企业（例如总部位于印度的Sun制药公司，其净利润为4.24亿美元）、软件企业（Adobe Systems，净利润为3.39亿美元）以及半导体企业（Marvell Technology Group，净利润为2.77亿美元），在相应的行业中都会属于排名前五的企业；而在食品行业里，它们也会属于排名前10%的企业。在某些情况下，你甚至更愿意属于自己供应商所在的行业，而不是自己所在的行业。例如，再来看图表6：航空公司的平均经济效益为亏损9900万美元，而航空航天与国防领域的供应商平均能获得4.53亿美元的利润。事实上，排名处于第20百分位的航空航天与国防供应商萨博公司的经济效益，竟然比排名处于第80百分位的新西兰航空公司还要好。这并不是说所有航空公司的经营状况都不佳（日本航空公司的表现就是明证），也不是说航空航天与国防领域的一切都一片光明。但事实就是，不同行业的竞争环境确实存在差异，有些行业的竞争条件更为有利，而有些行业则相对不利。在整个市场中，位于权力曲线前五分位的公司仅仅因为身处优势行业，就能获得3.35亿美元的经济收益；而位于后五分位的公司则因为处于劣势行业，而遭受2.53亿美元的损失，这一现象如图7所示。当然，也有一些例外情况，这些公司的命运并不符合其所在行业的整体趋势。例如，提供综合电信服务的企业属于权力曲线前五分位的行业，因此这类企业既较多地出现在排名靠前的公司中，也较多地出现在排名靠后的公司中；同样，从事综合石油天然气业务的企业属于权力曲线后五分位的行业，因此它们也既较多地出现在排名靠前的公司中，也较多地出现在排名靠后的公司中。但当涉及到解释各种差异时，我们发现行业因素能够解释其中40%到60%的差异；而且，当对行业的划分更加细致时，行业因素所解释的经济利润占比还会进一步增加。尽管我们所看到的所有战略分析报告都是从行业角度入手展开的，但这种分析视角却很少被用来解释企业过去的业绩表现。

 A fresh perspective with the outside view

• The old wisdom in strategy is that you have to know the real answer to the question: “Why do I make money?” Industry is a much bigger reason than most people understand or want to accept, both on the upside (when tailwinds help us sail along) and on the downside (when the writing on the wall tells us tough times are coming, and we don’t like the news). Now that we have started drawing our new map and understand the crucial role of industry, let’s head back to the strategy room and see what’s different. 在战略领域，有句古老的智慧：你必须弄清楚这样一个问题的真正答案：“我为什么能够赚钱？”事实上，行业因素在决定我们能否盈利方面所起的作用，远远超出了大多数人的认知范围，也超出了他们愿意接受的事实。无论是在形势顺利的时候，还是在形势严峻、困难即将来临的时候，行业因素都起着至关重要的作用——而我们往往并不愿意接受这些事实。现在，既然我们已经开始绘制新的发展蓝图，并且认识到了行业因素的重要性，那么让我们回到战略规划室，看看在这些新的规划中，有哪些地方发生了变化吧。A fresh perspective with the outside view 从外部视角出发，带来全新的思考角度When you realize that success is very much defined by your company’s and your industry’s movements on the power Curve, your perspective changes. Some companies have a low probability of making it to the top quintile, perhaps because of the industry they’re in, but many at least have a shot. If you are aspiring to such a move, you are probably contemplating by now a few intriguing insights: 当你意识到，企业的成功在很大程度上取决于其在“权力曲线”上的发展状况以及所在行业的发展趋势时，你的视角就会发生变化。有些企业由于所处的行业原因，其跻身最高五分位的概率较低，但许多企业至少还是有机会的。如果你也有这样的目标，那么你此时很可能已经在思考一些值得深入探讨的问题了。
• • The Power Curve is a new reference point you might not have used before. you’re no longer comparing yourself with last year or your neighbor, but rather the full universe of companies competing for capital and economic profits.• Success for your strategy becomes moving up on the Power Curve. Small success is moving in the middle flatlands. Big success is mov-ing to the top quintile, and the reverse holds true for failure.• your aspirations need calibration. Incremental improvements aren’t enough to get you moving, because your competitors are also working hard—and thus all your work might yield just a standstill.• Moving up on the curve is not a 1-year exercise—it is a journey that needs good strategy and sustained execution. The mountain is just too steep at the tails to climb quickly. • “力量曲线”是一个新的参考标准，你可能之前从未使用过它。你现在不再将自己与去年或邻居进行比较，而是将自身置于所有那些都在争夺资本与经济利润的企业的竞争环境中来看待自己的表现。 • 你的策略能否取得成功，取决于你在“力量曲线”上的位置是否有所提升。微小的进步意味着你在曲线的中间平缓区域移动；而重大的成功则意味着你进入了曲线的最高部分；反之，失败也会导致你在曲线上的位置下降。 • 你的目标需要重新调整。仅仅进行渐进式的改进是远远不够的，因为你的竞争对手也在不懈努力——因此，你的所有努力可能只会使你的位置保持不变。• 在这条发展曲线上向上攀登并不是一年之内就能完成的任务，而是一段需要制定妥善策略并持续付诸行动的旅程。在曲线的末端，攀登的难度实在太大，因此无法快速达到目标。The billion-dollar question, of course, is: “What does it take to move on the power Curve?” Well, almost a billion dollars: As we’ll see later, companies that do jump up from the middle quintiles to the top experience an average lift of $640 million in annual economic profit. 当然，那个价值十亿美元的关键问题就是：“要实现在发展曲线上的上升，究竟需要什么条件呢？”答案是：几乎需要十亿美元的资金。正如我们后面会看到的，那些能够从中间五分位数跃居到最高梯队的企业，其年度经济效益平均会增加6.4亿美元。
• As we’ve said, success requires bigger moves than companies typi-cally make. one client CEo traditionally framed discussions around 4–6 percent growth and resourced his divisions accordingly. one year, he did a much more granular analysis (business/country) and realized that one geography—russia at the time—was growing at 30 percent. he swamped the russian operations with resources, created a much more favorable environment, and it ended up growing much faster. The head of the russian unit remarked, “I knew we could win; it’s just that until now, we never got the resources we needed—all because we used to just look at averages.”  Sometimes, big success requires even more drastic measures: Mov-ing into a more profitable industry or more favorable industry segments (tough to do) or, if that’s not in the cards, restructuring the economics of your industry to make it more attractive might be your only alternative. 正如我们所说，要取得成功，就需要采取那些超出企业常规做法的、更大规模的行动。有一位客户的首席执行官过去总是将讨论的重点放在4%到6%的增长率上，并据此为各个业务部门分配资源。然而有一年，他进行了更为细致的分析（按业务领域或地区进行划分），结果发现其中某个地区——当时是俄罗斯——的增长率实际上达到了30%。于是他向俄罗斯业务部门投入了大量资源，为他们的发展创造了更加有利的条件，结果该业务的发展速度确实大大加快了。俄罗斯业务部门的负责人评论道：“我知道我们一定能够取得成功，只是直到现在，我们才终于获得了所需的资源——而这一切，都是因为我们过去总是只关注平均数据罢了。”有时候，要取得巨大的成功，就需要采取更为激进的措施：要么转入利润更高的行业或更具发展前景的细分市场（这往往非常困难）；要么，如果这些选项都不可行，那么重新调整自己所在行业的运营模式，使其更具吸引力，或许就成了唯一的出路。
• In setting strategic goals, most companies see hockey stick plans that rarely deliver the results they aspire to. The curious thing is that all of them are actually looking in the right direction. The way to make a move on the power Curve is, in fact, a hockey stick. The challenge is telling a real one from a fake one. Shortly, we’ll get to how you identify real hockey stick plans, but first, let’s look at how fake ones are gener-ated, and the problems that result. 在设定战略目标时，大多数公司都会制定所谓的“曲棍球杆型增长计划”，但这些计划往往无法实现它们所期望的结果。有趣的是，其实这些计划的方向都是正确的。事实上，在“增长曲线”上实现快速发展，确实需要采取类似“曲棍球杆型”的发展策略。问题在于，如何区分真正的“曲棍球杆型增长计划”和虚假的计划。稍后我们会讨论如何识别真正的此类计划，但首先，让我们来看看这些虚假计划是如何产生的，以及它们会带来哪些问题。

 3 Hockey stick dreams, hairy back realities

• Chapter 3 Hockey stick dreams, hairy back realities Hockey sticks plans are a natural outcome of the strategy game, and are too often coupled only with timid moves. When successive hopeful forecasts pile up against reality, you get the ugliest chart in strategy: the hairy back. But, real hockey sticks do happen!  I n a recent survey, CEOs attributed only 50 percent of decisions on target-setting and strategy to facts and analytics—50 percent! The other half they attributed to the strategy process and the dynamics in the strategy room.1 So, tasks like setting the right ambition levels and priorities are not just difficult technically, they also take place right at the intersection of the biases and agency problems we’ve discussed. The tasks are deep in the territory of the social side of strategy, where collective aspirations collide with individual fear, ambitions, rivalry, and bias. Even when the environment is perfectly under-stood, target setting is noisy. Overconfidence, blind extrapolation, competition for resources, the treadmill of rising expectations, or the 57

 The rise of the hairy back

• typical desire for a goal setter to add “stretch” can cause targets to be set too high. “Sandbagging,” negotiations, and risk aversion will cause targets to come out too low. The consequence: hockey sticks and hairy backs. 那些总是希望目标设定得更具挑战性的人，往往会将目标定得过高；而“放水”、谈判技巧以及风险规避心理，则会导致目标定得过低。其结果就是：要么付出巨大的努力才能达成目标，要么最终根本无法实现这些目标。
• Social dynamics in businesses reward overconfidence: Who ever got promoted based on a growth forecast that didn’t sail upward? Some, raised on a diet of self-help books, may even believe that setting “stretch goals” will motivate people, no matter how unrealistic these 在企业中，社会环境往往会奖励那些过于自信的人：有谁是因为提交了一份预测增长前景并不乐观的报告而获得晋升的呢？有些人由于长期阅读自助类书籍，甚至会认为设定“具有挑战性的目标”就能激励人们努力工作，而不管这些目标有多不切实际。

 Getting to yes

• targets may be. So, quite a number of hockey sticks appear because people actually believe they can pull them off. 目标可能是这样的。因此，会有相当多的曲棍球杆被生产出来，因为人们确实认为自己能够使用它们。
• Getting to yes 达成一致意见Others appear because people are playing social games: While the plan-ning process is officially about strategy, the real goal is to get a “yes” for resources in that all-important budget for next year. Those resources are how managers maintain status and position themselves for the kinds of results that might get them promoted, even perhaps to the top job. managers don’t assume they’ll get everything they request; they come in with a big ask so that, even after the expected haircut, they’ll get “adequate” resources. besides, the punishment for not getting resources is generally greater than for not having a hockey stick pan out. 还有一些情况的出现，是因为人们在玩一些“社交游戏”：虽然规划过程表面上看是关于战略制定的，但实际上真正的目的，是为了在明年的预算分配中获得所需的资源。这些资源对于管理者来说至关重要——它们是他们维持自身地位、为获得能够让自己获得晋升甚至最高领导职位的成绩奠定基础的关键。管理者们并不会认为自己一定能得到所有请求的资源；他们会提出较高的要求，这样即使最终获得的资源数量有所减少，也能保证自己得到的资源是“足够的”。此外，如果无法获得所需的资源，所面临的惩罚通常也会比那些计划失败所带来的后果更为严重。
• you’ve seen the game—and probably even played it. When a requirement is set, such as a 15 percent internal rate of return on investments, plans magically morph to just clear that bar. nobody ever walked into a planning session intending to get a “no” to a plan. nobody ever wants to lose the competition for resources. Imagine a manager coming into the room with a realistic but flat target. you’d wonder: Is this person capable or ambitious enough? has he really thought through his strategy with any creativity or flair? doesn’t he trust his ability to execute? no, hockey stick it is. It’s so much easier to believe what we want to be true. The CEO won’t approve every hockey stick but needs a growth story somewhere. Executive teams make lots of decisions, and it’s hard to evaluate all the content all the time, so the hockey stick plan that gets backed generally comes from the person with the best track record. The CEO takes a version of that plan to the board, which may push back on some details but generally supports the plans of the CEO. That’s not the end of the story. 你肯定看过这个游戏，甚至可能还玩过它。当某个具体的要求被提出来时，比如要求投资项目的内部回报率为15%，各种计划就会自然而然地被调整，以便能够满足这一要求。没有人会带着被拒绝的预期去参加规划会议，也没有人愿意在争夺资源的竞争中落败。想象一下，如果有一位经理带着一个现实但较为保守的目标来到会议现场，你会不禁会想：这个人是否有足够的能力和雄心？他是否真的对自己的策略进行了深思熟虑，并且在其中融入了自己的创意和独到见解？还是说他对自己执行计划的能力缺乏信心？不，其实我们更愿意相信那些我们希望成为现实的事情。首席执行官并不会批准每一个提案，但他需要看到这些提案中蕴含着某种发展潜力。执行团队会做出许多决策，而要持续评估所有这些决策的内容确实非常困难，因此那些最终获得通过的提案，通常都是由那些业绩表现最好的人提出的。首席执行官会将这些提案提交给董事会，董事会可能会对其中的一些细节提出异议，但总体上还是会支持首席执行官制定的计划。不过，故事到这里还没有结束。
• regardless of whether a hockey stick was overly optimistic, the result of social gaming, or a real opportunity, this is usually the point when it becomes all but certain that the promised success won’t mate-rialize. The investment that was supposed to lay the foundation for growth has taken a haircut—but, for some reason, all too often the ambition level for growth remains largely unchanged. 无论这种乐观情绪是源于对社交游戏的期待，还是基于某种真正的机会，通常在这个时候，人们就会意识到：那些被承诺的成功根本不可能实现。那些本应为企业的成长奠定基础的投资已经遭受了损失，然而，出于某种原因，人们对于企业发展的雄心壮志却往往依然没有发生变化。at the end of the first year, sure enough, performance isn’t living up to the hockey stick promise. attribution bias kicks in. The problem can’t be the fault of those cutting the investment. after all, manag-ers signed off on their budgets. The missed target is then blamed on the most convenient cause available, which is usually some one-off event—unseasonable weather, an IT outage, etc.—even though such one-off occurrences seem to happen every year. With failure dismissed as an externality, the management team closes ranks and decides to double down and re-establish the goal. “We lost a year, but we’re going to get back on track.” The next hair sprouts.
• 第一年结束时，果然，实际表现并没有达到当初所承诺的目标。归因偏差开始发挥作用——人们认为这个问题肯定不是那些削减投资的人造成的，毕竟这些预算都是管理者们亲自批准的。于是，未达成的目标就被归咎于那些最容易找到的原因，通常是某些一次性事件，比如反常的天气、IT系统故障等等，尽管这类事件似乎每年都会发生。由于将失败归结为外部因素，管理团队反而会更加团结一致，决定加倍努力、重新设定目标。“我们浪费了一年的时间，但一定会重新回到正轨上。”接下来，他们又会开始制定新的计划。

 Bold forecasts

• as daniel kahneman and dan Lovallo explained in their work on the human tendency toward bold forecasts and timid plans, we’re inclined to see exceptional growth in sales, earnings, and other met-rics but won’t make the big moves that could generate those results.4 They published their paper 25 years ago, but we keep making the same errors. In essence, we are saying: “We’re going to do a ton better next year by doing the same things we did this year, or maybe just a little more.” 正如丹尼尔·卡内曼和丹·洛瓦洛在他们的研究中指出的那样——人类往往倾向于做出大胆的预测，却制定出谨慎的计划；我们总是期望销售额、收益以及其他各项指标能够出现显著增长，但却不愿意采取那些真正能够带来这些成果的重大行动。他们早在25年前就发表了这篇论文，但我们至今仍在重复同样的错误。本质上，我们就是在说：“明年，只要继续做今年做的事情，或者稍微多做一点，我们的成绩就会大幅提升。”

 The lack of a proper baseline

• The lack of a proper baseline. Our forecasts are built on things we believe we know. during the first Internet boom, one of our clients was considering investing $1 billion in a new fiber-optic cable network across the US, based on the estimates of explosive growth in com-munication. It was clear that the advent of the Internet would fuel demand for fiber capacity, and many rushed in to stake a claim. The more the Internet revolutionized business and how people transacted, the more fiber capacity would be required—everybody “knew” that. but that explosive, seemingly unlimited demand wasn’t the whole pic-ture. There was already a lot of fiber in use, and its capacity would increase at the rapid pace at which the routers that dispatched signals through the fiber improved. Then there was “dark fiber” to consider (installed capacity that was yet to be used), plus the announced plans of competitors for installing additional capacity. add it all up, and the expected capacity would exceed even the most outrageous demand projections for the following 5 years. because the company took the time to do a proper baseline and saw that what everybody “knew” just 缺乏一个合理的基准。我们的预测是基于那些我们认为自己已经了解的信息做出的。在第一次互联网热潮期间，我们的一位客户曾考虑投资10亿美元，在美国境内建设一个新的光纤电缆网络，其依据就是人们对通信行业会迎来爆炸性增长的预期。显然，互联网的出现将会大幅增加对光纤容量的需求，因此许多人都争相参与这一投资计划。随着互联网彻底改变商业运作方式以及人们的交流方式，对光纤容量的需求也会进一步增加——这一点大家都“心知肚明”。然而，那种看似无限的需求其实并不能反映整个实际情况。当时已经有很多光纤被投入使用，而且随着用于通过光纤传输信号的路由器的性能不断得到提升，这些光纤的容量也会以惊人的速度继续增加。此外，还存在着“未使用的光纤容量”，再加上竞争对手们宣布的新增容量建设计划，把这些因素全部加在一起，预计未来的光纤容量将会远远超过未来5年内任何最乐观的需求预测值。因为这家公司花时间进行了彻底的调查和分析，才得出了这样的结论。其实，大家原本“都以为”……

 Errors in performance attribution

• did not translate into a need for additional capacity, the company decided to stop the project and saved itself the $1 billion allocated to that hockey stick. The fact that barely a year later the Internet bubble imploded was merely icing on the cake for their decision. many others had invested without a proper baseline, simply acting on what they thought they knew—and paid dearly for it. 这并没有转化为对额外产能的需求，因此该公司决定终止这个项目，从而节省下了原本为这个项目拨出的10亿美元资金。而仅仅一年后互联网泡沫的破裂，只不过为他们这个决定增添了更多的“佐料”而已。许多其他企业也在没有进行充分评估的情况下进行了投资，仅仅依据他们自认为了解的信息来做出决策，最终为此付出了沉重的代价。
• another evergreen problem with baselines is planning for market-share gains. In the early days of the personal computer, every elec-tronics company worth its silicon decided it could capture 20 percent of the rapidly expanding US market, ignoring how many others were staking that same claim. Eight companies tried for 20 percent—the industry hopelessly overbuilt, and the shakeout was painful.5 基线分析所面临的另一个长期存在的问题，就是如何规划市场份额的增长策略。在个人电脑发展的早期，每一家拥有足够实力的电子企业都认为自己能够占据美国这个快速扩张的市场中20%的份额，却完全忽略了还有许多其他企业也在争夺同样的市场空间。最终有八家企试图夺取这一目标，导致整个行业产能严重过剩，随之而来的市场洗牌带来了巨大的冲击。
• bold forecasts are hard to avoid. It’s too easy to pull cells across the screen in Excel without paying heed to how hard it might have been to just get to the current point. you, like us, might have friends who plan to hit great times in a marathon but fail to meet their expectations because they undertrained, firmly believing that they were already much fitter than they actually were. businesses make the same sorts of mistakes. Errors in performance attribution. Errors in assessing business momentum are also easy to make. Often, performance is mistaken for capability: “We’ve done well, so we must be better than our compe-tition and will continue to prosper no matter what”—even though external conditions may have contributed to the success. These types of momentum mistakes are harder to spot when you’re doing well, because the need to understand the underlying dynamics feels less urgent. If a company is prospering in an environment where it can raise prices rapidly, for instance, it may convince itself that it is becoming ever more efficient in its sales operations—simply because the costs of sales are outpaced by revenue growth. When the pricing environment stiffens, however, the company may discover all kinds of inefficiencies that crept into the system. 人们很难避免做出过于大胆的预测。在Excel中，人们很容易随意调整数据，却忽视了要达到当前这个成绩其实需要付出多大的努力。就像我们身边那些认为自己在马拉松中会取得优异成绩，却因训练不足而未能如愿的朋友们一样，他们坚信自己已经比实际更健康、更具备竞争力。企业也会犯类似的错误——在归因分析或评估自身发展势头时犯错，这种情况同样很容易发生。通常，人们会将业绩与能力混为一谈：“我们表现不错，所以肯定比竞争对手更优秀，未来也会继续蓬勃发展”——尽管实际上外部环境也可能对这种成功起到了重要作用。当企业发展顺利时，这类错误就更难被察觉，因为人们会觉得没有必要去深入分析背后的原因。例如，如果一家企业在能够快速提价的环境中取得成功，它可能会认为自己销售效率正在不断提高——仅仅是因为销售成本的增长速度赶不上收入的增长速度而已。然而，当定价环境变得紧张时，该公司可能会发现那些潜藏在体系中的各种低效率问题。
• during the dot-com boom, several north american consumer electronics contract manufacturing companies expanded rapidly by acquiring factories of their customers left and right. Their share prices rose exponentially around stories of unmatched efficiency and logistics capabilities. When the growth story ended with the bust of the Internet bubble, it came to light that, during the rapid growth, even the most 在互联网泡沫繁荣时期，几家北美消费电子产品的合同制造企业通过收购客户的工厂而实现了快速扩张。由于它们被宣传为拥有无与伦比的效率及物流能力，这些企业的股价呈指数级上涨。然而，当互联网泡沫破裂，这种快速增长势头戛然而止，人们才发现，在那段快速发展的过程中，即便是这些企业中最优秀的那些，也存在着种种问题。

 How we deal with uncertainty

• Of course, in running a business, there are many elements that you just can’t control—the fate of the economy, political events, and your competitors’ actions. In most strategy rooms, the question on how to deal with uncertainty looms large. It’s the 600-pound gorilla in the room. actually, it’s sitting in the middle of the table, it has long teeth, and it’s drooling. nobody wants to talk about it—it’s a complex topic that can easily get in the way of getting a “yes” to the plan. but it’s sitting there. So, managers presenting strategies have sophisticated approaches on how to deal with the gorilla. They have to get to a “yes,” not a “maybe.” That means they have to inspire confidence in the out-comes they are promising—providing at least an illusion of certainty. 当然，在经营企业过程中，有许多因素是你根本无法控制的——经济的走势、政治事件以及竞争对手的举动等等。在大多数战略会议中，如何应对这些不确定性始终是一个至关重要的问题。这就像房间里那只重达600磅的大猩猩：它就坐在桌子中间，长着锋利的牙齿，还在流口水。没人愿意谈论这个话题，因为这是个极其复杂的问题，很容易妨碍计划获得通过。但事实就是，这个问题始终存在。因此，那些负责制定战略的管理者们会想出各种精妙的办法来应对这一难题。他们必须确保自己的计划能够获得“通过”，而不是“可能通过”。这意味着他们必须让人们对这些计划的结果充满信心——至少要营造出一种确定性的假象。
• here are some of our all-time favorites among the ways that people deal with uncertainty in the strategy room. First, ignoring uncertainty. many strategy presentations we see start with an analyst-based projection of the market. not scenarios, not a range of outcomes: They start with a “most likely version of the future.” and that’s the last thing you heard about uncertainty in the presentation. From then on, you get single-point estimates for the plan, too, and it’s a straight shot for the “yes.” What about treating uncertainty as an afterthought? The strat-egy room is a harsh place for most, and, quite frankly, failure on that stage is not an option for most managers. Execution problems? Okay. a strategy that has gaps? We can fix that. but a strategy conversa-tion about probabilities? you must be kidding! The result is a slide about risks on page 149 of a 150-page strategy deck. The presenter hopes to win a “yes” on funding before getting anywhere close to that far into the deck. That slide on page 149, titled something like “Potential risks and how to mitigate Them,” is there just so the presenter can say the issue is covered if the odd question about risks should pop up. Finally, pretending to deal with uncertainty. In some cases, uncer-tainty is actually discussed in the strategy room. Say, geopolitical risks are threatening sales growth in an emerging market, or a competi-tor could make an industry-consolidating move. There will be a few scenarios, plus a discussion on which of them would be more likely or less likely to emerge. Then, one scenario is picked as “base case,” and that’s probably the last thing you hear about uncertainty. Strategy clear, job done. There are, of course, businesses that could not survive without dealing with uncertainty. For example, in asset management and other financial businesses, risk-weighted metrics are normal. The difference is that they are moving money around. In more tangible businesses, you move people and money around—and also the careers and repu-tations of business leaders. While the calculator loses reputation by wrongly calculating risk, the manager loses reputation by giving up resources. 以下是我们认为人们在战略规划会议中应对不确定性时最常用的几种方法。首先，就是选择忽略不确定性。我们看到的许多战略汇报都是从分析师对市场的预测开始的——这些预测并非基于多种可能性，而只是“最有可能发生的未来情景”。从那之后，汇报中就再也不会提到不确定性了，方案也会被给出一个确定的数值，从而直接获得通过。另一种方法则是将不确定性视为事后才需要考虑的因素。对大多数人来说，战略会议室是一个充满压力的场所。坦率地说，对于大多数管理者而言，在这个舞台上失败是不可接受的。执行过程中出现问题？还可以补救；战略方案存在漏洞？我们也能解决。但若在战略讨论中涉及概率因素？那简直是不可想象的！最终，战略文件中往往只有第149页才会出现关于风险的章节——文件总共有150页。演讲者往往希望在讨论进行到那一步之前就获得资金支持。而第149页那张标题为“潜在风险及应对措施”的幻灯片，存在的意义仅仅是为了让演讲者在遇到有关风险的意外提问时，能够声称相关问题已经得到处理罢了。最后，还有假装在应对不确定性。在某些情况下，战略会议中确实会讨论不确定性问题。比如，地缘政治风险可能威胁到新兴市场的销售增长，或者某个竞争对手可能会采取行业整合的行动。人们会分析几种可能的情况，并讨论其中哪些更有可能发生、哪些可能性较小。然后，会选定一种情况作为“基准情景”，而之后人们很可能就再也不会提及那些不确定性因素了。战略明确了，任务也就完成了。当然，也有一些企业是离不开对不确定性进行应对的。例如，在资产管理及其他金融领域，基于风险加权的评估指标是常见的做法。不同之处在于，这些业务涉及资金的调动。而在那些更为实体的行业中，人们需要调动人力、资金，同时也会影响企业领导者的职业生涯与声誉。如果计算工具因错误计算风险而损害声誉，那么管理者因浪费资源同样会失去信誉。

 Timid plans

• but when that individual risk aversion gets projected onto cor-porate strategy, we hit problems. a large, diversified corporation with many investors, themselves diversified, will have a far greater risk tolerance than the middle manager who is the gatekeeper to the plans. The avoidance of downside at almost all costs happens all too often in the strategy room. big moves are rarely proposed, and even less fre-quently accepted. The CEO of one of the largest hong kong property companies complained to us that none of his managers ever comes up with big ideas. When we asked him why, he responded: “Well, when-ever they speak up, they cannot really articulate themselves, so I shut them down after half a minute.” guess what those who spoke up will do in the next meeting? Think about it: how often have you seen a business unit manager come into the annual planning cycle with a strong m&a strategy? how often have you seen moves proposed that would truly change the game in an industry? That just does not happen that often. most discussions in the strategy room are about intensifying efforts to gain a few percent more market share or to squeeze out a few more per-centage points of margin. That will show progress. nobody will get fired. 但是，当这种个体的风险规避倾向被应用到企业战略的制定过程中时，问题就会出现了。一家规模庞大、业务多元化的企业，其投资者群体本身也具有多样性，因此这种企业的风险承受能力必然要比那些负责执行这些战略计划的中层管理者要强得多。在战略决策过程中，人们往往不惜任何代价地试图避免潜在的风险，因此大型变革性举措很少被提出，更少会被真正采纳。香港一家大型房地产公司的首席执行官曾向我们抱怨说，他的手下从来没有人提出过任何具有创新性的想法。当我们问他为什么这样做时，他回答说：“嗯，每当他们开始发言时，其实都说不清楚自己的观点，所以我在他们讲话半分钟后就让他们停止了。”那么，你们猜想，在下一次会议上，那些曾经主动发言的人会怎么做呢？仔细想想吧：你们见过有多少次，某个业务部门的经理在年度规划会议上提出一套有力的并购策略？又有多少次，有人提出过那些真正能够改变整个行业格局的方案呢？这种事情其实并不常见。在战略会议中，大多数讨论内容都只是关于如何加大力度来提升市场份额，或者如何进一步增加利润率。这样的讨论确实能够体现出进展，而且也不会有人因此被解雇。
• as we’ve said, we will show that this belief in incremental prog-ress is a fallacy: bigger moves not only increase your odds of success but reduce the risk of sliding down. Still, the fear of downside risk pervades the planning environment. nearly 8 out of 10 executives surveyed by our firm tell us that their companies are more geared toward confirming existing hypotheses in their strategy processes than testing new ones. going for incremental moves is the norm, not the exception. 正如我们所说，我们将证明这种对渐进式发展的信念其实是一种谬误：采取更大的行动不仅会提高成功的机会，还能降低出现倒退的风险。然而，对负面风险的恐惧仍然普遍存在于人们的规划过程中。我们公司调查的受访者中，有近八成的高管表示，他们的公司在战略制定过程中更倾向于验证现有的假设，而不是尝试验证新的假设。采取渐进式的行动才是常态，而非例外。

 Corporate peanut butter

• avoiding conflicts in the team, being “practical” about the business, giving every team member a “fair chance,” keeping the motivation up—all these arguments contribute to resource stickiness. Corporate planning becomes more like your breakfast strategy: Spreading resources thinly, like peanut butter on bread, across all parts of the business, making sure everyone is covered. 避免团队内部出现冲突，在业务运作中采取“务实”的态度，为每位团队成员提供“公平的机会”，并保持他们的积极性——所有这些措施都有助于提高资源的利用效率。企业规划也就因此变得更类似于制定早餐计划：将资源像花生酱涂在面包上一样，均匀地分配到业务的各个领域，确保每个人都能得到应有的支持。almost by default, peanut buttering ensures that, even if a hockey stick were possible, it would be hard for a business unit leader to get all the resources needed to pull it off. One of our high-tech clients with a core computing business with $26 billion in revenue wanted to build another pillar for growth. The company even went so far as to free up some resources from r&d and the capital budget. but then it decided to pursue 17 growth opportunities in parallel. When an m&a opportunity came along in an attractive services business, which would likely have provided that growth pillar, the resources to execute the deal were not available because 16 other managers were drawing on them for their respective initiatives. The deal didn’t happen. Corporate peanut butter almost guarantees that you won’t make a big enough move to get to the top of the Power Curve. 几乎可以说，这种做法本身就会导致这样一个结果：即使某个业务发展计划确实可行，企业的高层管理者也很难获得实施该计划所需的所有资源。我们有一位从事核心计算业务的高科技客户，其年收入高达260亿美元，该公司原本希望为自身的发展开辟新的途径。为了实现这一目标，它甚至从研发部门和资本预算中拨出了部分资源，但最终却决定同时推进17项不同的发展计划。当出现一个在某个具有发展潜力的服务行业进行并购的机会时，这个机会本可以成为企业实现发展的关键因素，但由于另有16位经理也在使用这些资源来推进他们各自的项目，因此没有足够的资源来完成这笔交易，最终这笔并购未能成行。这种企业内部的资源分配状况几乎肯定会阻碍企业做出足够大的努力，从而无法登上“权力曲线”的顶端。
• Shooting for the known 朝着已知的目标前进at the other end of the business calendar, when it gets to incentives, bonuses, and promotions, there lies another cause for timid plans. We all want to succeed—of course. but that means that most of us will vastly prefer a P90 plan (one that we will hit with a 90 percent chance) over a P50 plan (which we would hit only 50 percent of the times we try). In fact, a lot of people we work with would quietly admit they only agree to budget targets that they feel confident they can hit almost for sure (P100), save any completely unexpected disruptions. yet, when we ask CEOs what would be fair, in terms of misses, many of them say that every 3–4 years a leader should miss a plan if the plan has been stretched enough; i.e., P60 to P75 plans. What a difference in perspective!  在商业日程表的另一端，当涉及到激励措施、奖金和晋升机会时，又会出现另一个导致人们制定保守计划的原因。我们当然都希望取得成功，但这意味着，大多数人都会更倾向于选择那些有90%的成功几率的计划，而不是那些只有50%成功几率的计划。事实上，与我们共事的很多人都会悄悄承认：除非遇到完全意外的干扰，否则他们只会同意那些自己有把握能够几乎肯定能够完成的预算目标。然而，当我们询问首席执行官们，在计划失败的情况下，什么样的安排才算公平时，许多人表示：如果某个计划已经被过度扩展了——也就是说，那些属于P60到P75级别的计划——那么领导者应该每隔3到4年让这个计划失败一次。这种观点之间的差异真是太大了！[插图]The head of operations for a large high-tech industrial company (actually, the same one we just mentioned) told us recently: “We were beaten up badly earlier this year for missing a target. I’m not going to risk that again—I understand we might get to gold stan-dard performance by the end of the year, but let’s first get to the performance level written in the annual plan and then see where we go from there.” The problem being that, by that time, any chance of reaching the more ambitious target by the end of the year had passed. With all the timidity baked into us and into the process, even bold plans can’t shake the lethargy. 一家大型高科技工业公司的运营负责人（实际上就是我们刚才提到的那家公司的负责人）最近告诉我们：“今年早些时候，因为我们没有达到既定目标，所以遭到了严厉的批评。我不会再冒这样的风险了——虽然我知道到年底我们有可能达到‘金牌标准’的业绩水平，但首先我们必须先实现年度计划中规定的目标，然后再看看之后能取得什么样的成绩。”问题在于，到了那个时候，要想在年底前实现那些更为雄心勃勃的目标，就已经没有任何机会了。由于这种怯懦的心态已经深入我们的内心，也渗透到了我们的工作流程中，因此即便是那些大胆的计划，也无法改变这种消极怠惰的状态。
• here’s the really confounding thing, though: While hockey sticks routinely produce the dreaded hairy backs, real hockey sticks do exist. and those real hockey sticks are how companies typically make major moves upward on the Power Curve. Look at the Power Curve: Companies in the top quintile earn 30 times as much as the average company in the middle quintiles. moving to that top quintile is almost by definition a hockey stick plan that creates enormous value for stakeholders. They do happen, but how?  然而，真正令人困惑的是：虽然曲棍球杆确实经常会带来那些令人头疼的问题，但真正的曲棍球杆确实是存在的。而正是这些真正的曲棍球杆，帮助企业们在“价值增长曲线”上实现大幅上升。看看这条“价值增长曲线”吧：处于最高五分位数的企业所获得的利润，是处于中间五分位数的企业的30倍。要想进入那个最高五分位数，企业通常需要采取一些能够为所有利益相关者创造巨大价值的策略。这样的策略确实存在，但具体是如何实现的呢？

 Real hockey sticks

• Real hockey sticks 真正的曲棍球杆Take a look at Exhibit 9. The gray line is the typical company—one that starts in the middle quintiles and is still there a decade later. The black line started in the same exact place but was one of the compa-nies to make it to the top quintile over the 10-year period. That black line sure looks like a hockey stick—a dip for the first 4 years followed by rapid progress.  Satya nadella is CEO of microsoft because he produced a real hockey stick. When he was promoted in 2011 to run a business at microsoft that included its cloud services, the cloud was a small part of his business, which in turn was a modest-sized part of the whole company. but nadella saw so much potential that he devoted almost all his personal time to the cloud business, along with an outsized pro-portion of his total resources. The business grew rapidly from revenue 请看一下图表9。灰线代表那些始终处于中等水平的公司——这些公司在10年后依然处于同一位置。黑线则代表另一类公司：它们同样起始于中等水平，但在10年的时间里成功跻身到了顶尖行列。这条黑线的走势确实很像曲棍球杆的形状：前4年呈下降趋势，随后便实现了快速发展。萨提亚·纳德拉能够成为微软的首席执行官，正是因为他带领自己的团队创造了这样的发展奇迹。2011年，当他被任命负责管理包括微软云服务在内的业务部门时，云服务在那时仅占他所在业务板块的一小部分，而这一业务板块在整个微软公司中也只处于次要地位。但纳德拉看到了这一业务所蕴含的巨大潜力，因此他将自己几乎所有的个人时间都投入到了云计算事业中，同时还投入了大量的资源。在纳德拉的推动下，这一业务发展迅速，其收入也不断增长。
• in the hundreds of millions to several billions, and nadella was named CEO in early 2014. When nXP, the former semiconductor division of Philips, was spun out to private equity in 2006, the top team aggressively re-allocated investments, given the winner-takes-all nature of the industry. nXP dives ted large and prestigious areas, such as chips for mobile and digital that consumed huge resources, and made big bets on chips for identifica-tion and automotive uses. The hockey stick growth of the chosen mar-kets led to a five-fold increase in market value over the following decade. 其规模从数亿增加到数十亿，而纳德拉在2014年初被任命为首席执行官。2006年，当飞利浦旗下的半导体业务部门NXP被分拆出来并交由私人资本机构运营时，鉴于该行业的“胜者通吃”特性，NXP的高层管理团队果断地重新分配了投资方向。NXP重点投入了移动设备与数字产品所需的芯片开发领域，这些项目需要耗费大量资源；同时，该公司也在身份识别芯片及汽车电子芯片领域进行了大规模投资。由于这些选定市场的发展速度极为迅速，NXP在接下来的十年里，其市场价值增长了五倍。
• real hockey sticks do exist. The issue is separating the few real ones from the many fakes. The conundrum we are facing is that we should doubt every hockey stick—yet we often need one, if we’re to move up the Power Curve. So, what does it take to actually move on the curve? 真正的曲棍球杆确实是存在的。问题在于如何将那些真正的曲棍球杆与众多假冒品区分开来。我们面临的这个难题是：我们应该对每一根曲棍球杆都持怀疑态度——然而，如果我们想要在“力量曲线”上取得进步，往往还是需要用到曲棍球杆的。那么，究竟需要什么条件才能真正在这条曲线上取得进展呢？

 4 What are the odds?

• What are the odds? 这个概率有多大呢？Strategy plays out in a world of probabilities, not certainties. But the odds are knowable: Eight percent of middle-tier companies manage to jump up into the top quintile of the Power Curve over a decade. But which ones? O 战略是在充满概率而非确定性的环境中得以实施的。不过，这些概率是可以被预测的：有8%的中层企业能够在十年内跻身“力量曲线”中最高的五分之一区间。但究竟是哪些企业呢？
• nce you’ve recognized the perils of the social side of strategy, you need a new paradigm. Consider poker and golf. In general, the more that skill is involved in a game, like golf, the less you need to think about probabilities. If we played a world-class golfer, say the likes of Bernhard Langer or Rory McIlroy, we could be quite sure that we’d never win in a match against them, probably not even on a single hole. The more that luck (uncertainty) is involved in a game, like poker, the more you need to ponder the odds. In poker, we’d not only have a chance to win a hand against a world-class player, like 一旦你认识到了战略中涉及社交层面的那些风险，你就需要一种新的思维模式。以扑克和高尔夫为例：一般来说，像高尔夫这样的游戏，其中技能所占的比例越高，你就越不需要去考虑概率的问题。如果我们与像伯恩哈德·兰格或罗里·麦克罗伊这样的世界级高尔夫选手进行比赛，我们完全可以肯定自己绝对不可能赢得比赛，甚至很可能连一个洞都赢不了。而像扑克这样的游戏，运气（也就是不确定性）所占的比例越高，你就越需要仔细分析各种胜算。在扑克游戏中，我们不仅有机会战胜世界级的高手……
• don’t get us wrong. Business is obviously a matter of skill, of great skill. you don’t just have cards dealt to you. you work hard for the assets and talent that you get to deploy. But there is uncertainty, and strategy is about how to deal with it. In any game, as in business, your goal needs to be to give yourself the best possible odds, and to think in those terms. People shouldn’t just get credit for winning and demerits for losing. If five compa-nies each have an 80 percent chance of succeeding, that still means that one will usually fail. If five companies each have a 20 percent chance of success, one of the five is still likely to win. If all we see from these 10 companies together is five wins and five fails, it would be wrong to look at all of them the same way. Clearly the superior strategy is the one with an 80 percent chance of success, and this is the one that should be given the credit, no matter whether you win or lose. Risk, of course, needs to be part of the probability discussion, too. If you have just a slim chance of winning, but a bet costs you little and the potential win is huge, that still may be an investment worth making. The converse is true, too. an expensive investment that generates a high probability of a small success may be a bad idea. Poker players refer to the calculations as “pot odds.” If a $100 bet gives you a 20 percent chance of winning a $200 pot, you fold. essentially, you’re paying $100 for $40—that 20 percent of the $200. But a $100 bet that gives you a 20 percent chance of winning a $2,000 pot is one you make every time, because you’re paying $100 to get $400—20 percent of $2,000. So, an assessment of your odds—competitive, market, regulatory, etc.—needs to be part of your calculation.  别误会我们的意思。显然，经商确实需要技能，而且是需要高超的技能。你不会被动地获得各种资源或人才；你必须通过自己的努力去获得这些可以用来发展的资源。然而，商业环境中总是存在不确定性，而战略的意义就在于如何应对这些不确定性。在任何游戏中，同样在商业活动中，你的目标都应该是为自己创造尽可能有利的条件，并且要以这种思维方式来思考问题。人们不应该仅仅因为胜利而受到赞扬，因为失败而受到指责。如果五家公司每家都有80%的成功几率，那么仍然会有一家公司最终失败；而如果这五家公司每家只有20%的成功几率，那么其中一家公司仍然很有可能会取得胜利。如果我们仅仅看到这10家公司中各有5次成功和5次失败，那么就错误地应该用同样的方式来评价它们。显然，那些成功概率为80%的战略才是真正值得推崇的策略，无论最终结果是赢还是输，都应该给予这样的策略应有的认可。当然，风险因素也必须被纳入概率分析的范畴之中。如果你获胜的概率虽然很低，但投入的成本很小，而潜在的收益却非常巨大，那么这样的投资仍然可能是值得进行的。反之亦然：那些投入成本高昂、但成功概率很高却只能带来微小收益的投资，很可能是个糟糕的选择。扑克玩家将这种计算方法称为“赢利概率”。如果下100美元的赌注能使你有20%的机会赢得200美元的奖金，那么你最好放弃这次投注。因为实际上，你花费100美元却只能获得40美元的收益——这只不过是200美元总额的20%而已。然而，如果下100美元的赌注能使你有20%的机会赢得2000美元的奖金，那么你每次都会选择下这个赌注，因为这样你花费100美元就能获得400美元的收益，也就是2000美元总额的20%。因此，在进行任何决策时，你都需要仔细评估自己所处的竞争环境、市场状况以及相关监管规定等因素，这些因素都应该被纳入你的计算范围之中。

 The knowable probability of success

• your odds of going from the middle quintiles of the curve to the top quintile over a 10-year period are 8 percent. 8 percent! Let that sink in for a moment. Fewer than 1-in-10 companies make such a gain over a 10-year period. In the strategy room 10 years ago, you can imagine how many companies actually planned for such a performance improvement. Some might even have been convinced that they could pull it off. Probably most had their plans approved. 在10年的时间里，从曲线的中等区间跃居到最高区间，这种可能性仅为8%。8%而已！请仔细想想这个数字：在10年的时间里，能够取得这样的成绩的公司，其比例还不到十分之一。10年前，在那些制定战略规划的会议上，你可以想象有多少公司真正制定了这样的发展计划；其中有些公司甚至坚信自己一定能够实现这些目标。不过，很可能大多数公司的计划最终都只是得到了批准而已，并没有真正付诸实践。
• not even 1 in 10 made it. Wow. Those are tough odds. another way to show this is in exhibit 11. The matrix tells you, based on where you started, what the odds are for where you’ll end up. you should start getting familiar with that number 8 on the diagram—it’s on the end of the middle row, which tells you the odds of ending in the top if you started in the middle. 甚至不到十分之一的人能够成功达到目标。哇，这个概率实在低得惊人。另一个可以说明这一点的例子就是展览11中的内容。那个矩阵清楚地显示了：根据你的起始位置，你最终达到目标位置的概率是多少。你应该开始仔细观察图表中那个数字8了——它位于中间那一行的末端，这个数字告诉你：如果你从中间位置开始，最终到达顶部的概率是多少。
• now look at the top row: those firms that started at the top. They have a 59 percent chance of still being in that quintile 10 years later. nice. But that means you have a 41 percent chance of moving down the Power Curve, including a 15 percent chance of ending up in the bottom quintile.2 现在来看最上面那一行：那些最初就处于排名前位的公司，10年后仍然属于那个最高排名五分之一的概率为59%。这个数字确实不错。但这也意味着，它们有41%的概率会在排名中下降，其中15%的概率会落入排名最低的五分之一。now, plenty of firms are just going to move within the middle tier. The efforts to continuously sustain and upgrade performance are very 现在，许多企业都会选择停留在中等水平上。那些致力于持续提升自身业绩的企业，其实付出了巨大的努力。

 Flight paths of the upwardly mobile

• important, and companies can deliver great results for shareholders by steadily improving their position on the curve. It’s just that—given the extreme non-linearity of the curve—the giant leaps matter exponen-tially more. The odds of individual business units moving up and down the curve are roughly the same as for companies. and, when companies make a big move up the curve, it is mostly because one, or at most two, of their businesses make a hockey stick improvement. When we looked at 101 companies that moved up at least one quintile and for which we had business unit–level data, in two-thirds of the cases it was just one of the units that moved up. Think about that for a moment. If you have a portfolio of 10 busi-nesses, chances are that only one will make a hockey stick move over a 10-year period—and correctly identifying that one and feeding it all the resources it needs will most likely determine whether the company as a whole can make a significant move up the Power Curve. This insight about the need to find the “1 in 10” has huge implications for how you run a multi-business company. 这些因素非常重要，企业通过不断改善自己在这条曲线上的位置，确实可以为股东创造出色的业绩。只不过，由于这条曲线的非线性特征极为明显，因此那些能够实现巨大进步的企业所取得的收益会呈指数级增长。对于各个业务部门而言，它们在这条曲线上上下移动的概率与整个企业而言大致相同；而当一个企业能够在曲线上实现大幅进步时，通常是因为它的某一个或至多两个业务部门取得了突飞猛进的发展。在我们研究的101家至少上升了一个五分位数的企业中，那些拥有业务部门层面数据的企业中，有三分之二的案例都是因为其中某个业务部门取得了显著进步才使得整个企业得以提升。仔细想一想吧。如果你拥有一家由10家子公司组成的企业集团，那么在10年的时间里，很可能只有一家子公司会取得显著的发展成就。而能否准确识别出那家子公司，并为它提供所需的一切资源，很可能会决定整个企业集团是否能够在发展曲线上取得显著的进步。这种关于“在10家子公司中找出那一家关键企业”的见解，对于如何管理一家拥有多家子公司的企业来说，具有极其重要的意义。
• Just as companies deliver economic profit in very different combinations—remember the discussion we had about Starbucks and Wal-mart?—movements on the Power Curve also result from different “flight paths,” i.e., combinations of ROIC and growth performance over time. When there are big movements up and down the Power Curve, these flight paths are spectacular. Starting from sea level (an aver-age starting economic profit of $11 million a year in 2000–4 for the mid-tier companies), a move to the top generates an extra eco-nomic profit of $628 million annually on average, and a whopping 8.9 percentage points in ROIC. That’s a gain of almost one point a year. 正如企业可以通过多种不同的组合方式来实现经济效益——还记得我们曾经讨论过星巴克和沃尔玛的例子吗？——在“力量曲线”上所呈现的各种变化同样源于不同的“发展路径”，也就是说，这些变化反映了企业在不同时期所取得的ROI与增长业绩之间的不同组合。当企业在“力量曲线”上出现大幅上升或下降时，这些发展路径就会显得尤为显著。以那些处于中等水平的企业为例：如果它们从起点开始发展，那么在2000年至2004年期间，每年平均能获得1100万美元的经济效益；而如果它们能够达到曲线的顶端，那么每年平均可以额外获得6.28亿美元的经济效益，同时ROI也会提高8.9个百分点，这相当于每年收益增加近一个百分点。
• • If you underperform on both growth and ROIC improvement, you have virtually no chance of getting off the ground. In fact, you have a 27 percent chance of falling from the middle to the bottom quintile.• high growth with below-median ROIC improvement gives you a small chance of an upside, but doesn’t do much to reduce the downside risk.• a performance-only strategy that focuses on improving ROIC but does not deliver above-median growth is certainly “playing it safe.” you have almost zero chance of going down, but that strategy just gives you sample-average odds of going up to the top quintile, at 8 percent. • 如果你在增长速度和ROIC提升两方面都表现不佳，那么你几乎没有任何机会取得成功；事实上，你有27%的概率会从中等水平跌落到最低等级。 • 如果企业能够实现高速增长，但ROIC提升幅度低于平均水平，那么你虽然有一定机会取得成功，但这并不能有效降低面临的风险。 • 如果采取只注重提升ROIC而忽视实现高速增长的战略，那么这种策略确实属于“保守型”选择——你几乎没有任何可能性会跌落至较低水平，但这种策略也只能让你有8%的概率上升到最高等级。
• • The magic happens when both growth and ROIC improvements work in concert. Outperforming on both these levers is rewarded by a much higher chance of upward mobility: 19 percent. It is this increasing returns to scale dynamic that seems to matter, where each increment of growth makes the business not only bigger but also better. assets built around common, sharable intellectual property, those with network or platform effects, and those with higher fixed costs enabling massive economics of scale tend to have increasing returns to scale. • 当企业的增长速度与投资回报率都能同步提升时，真正的奇迹才会发生。如果在这两个方面都表现出色，企业获得进一步发展的机会就会大大增加——这种机会的概率高达19%。正是这种规模收益递增的现象才是关键所在：每一次增长都会使企业变得规模更大，同时也使其运营效率更高。那些依托共同的、可共享的知识产权建立起来的企业，那些具有网络效应或平台效应的企业，以及那些固定成本较高但因此能够实现大规模规模经济的企业，往往都具备规模收益递增的特点。What do those data mean for you? Well, if your hockey stick plan does not commit t

 Where are the odds in the strategy room?

• a straightforward bit of research made the company reconsider. Publicly available information showed that among industry peers within the same revenue range as our client, only 10 percent gen-erated sustained double-digit growth over 10 years.3 The question became: Is our strategy actually better than 90 percent of our peers? Really? What makes us stand out, even though we’d performed like an average company over the prior 5 years, growing in the mid-single digits? To tell you the truth, bringing the actual odds into the strategy room did not make us very popular with the management team, but they did recalibrate the conversation in important ways. an executive told us: “We had no idea that our value-creation plans were so concen-trated on so few areas.” 经过一番简单的调查，这家公司不得不重新考虑自己的战略。公开可获取的信息显示，在那些收入水平与我们的客户相近的同行企业中，只有10%的企业能够在10年的时间里持续保持两位数的增长速度。于是问题出现了：我们的战略真的比90%的同行都要优秀吗？真的吗？尽管在过去的5年里，我们的发展表现仅处于中等水平，增长速度也仅为个位数，但究竟是什么让我们脱颖而出呢？说实话，将这些实际数据纳入战略制定的过程中，确实没有让管理层感到满意，但这种做法确实让我们的讨论方向发生了重要的变化。有一位高管告诉我们：“我们之前根本不知道，我们的价值创造计划其实主要集中在那么几个有限的领域里。”

 The push for certainty

• after all, they worked hard to get there and have developed impressive advantages over the competition. Why wouldn’t they stay at the top of the heap? Likewise, companies in the middle quintiles tend to believe that they can move up. a chance that they’ll drop to the bottom quintile—why bother to even consider that possibility? We collectively have seen hundreds of strategic plans and can observe that the frequency of a plan for a company at the top of the curve to show a slide down is much lower than the real statistics we assembled for this book. Some plans do suggest a slide down, but not nearly the ~40 percent we observe in the real life of companies. With odds comes the explicit realization of risks, and loss aversion kicks in. directly confronting risks can make people gun-shy, even when we’re actually interested in having them take more risks. That can be a problem. 毕竟，它们付出了巨大的努力才取得今天的成就，并且在竞争中积累了令人瞩目的优势。那么，为什么它们不会继续保持在顶尖位置呢？同样，处于中间梯队的企业也往往认为自己有上升的空间；而那些处于最低梯队的企业，则几乎不会考虑自己会跌落下去的可能性。我们共同见证了数百份战略规划，发现那些处于行业领先地位的企业制定下降计划的比例，远低于我们为这本书收集到的实际数据所显示的水平。确实有些规划中提到了下降趋势，但其比例也远低于我们在企业实际运营中观察到的约40%这一数字。伴随着风险的出现，人们也会清楚地意识到其中可能带来的损失，而这种对损失的厌恶情绪便会随之产生。直接面对风险往往会让人变得畏缩不前，即使我们实际上希望他们能够承担更多的风险。这种情况确实会带来一些问题。

 You are your numbers

• a prominent example of where a board got it right was when they appointed Wendell Weeks to be the CeO of Corning glass in 2005. The board did so, even though Weeks led the company’s optical fiber business, which in the dot-com crash of 2001 had taken Corning almost to the brink. That problem was accurately attributed to the worsening market conditions, not management performance. In subse-quent years, Weeks became one of the most highly regarded corporate leaders in america, leading Corning to be number one globally in LCd 一个典型的例子是：2005年，董事会任命温德尔·威克斯担任康宁玻璃公司的首席执行官。尽管当时威克斯负责领导公司的光纤业务，而2001年的互联网泡沫破裂确实使康宁几乎陷入困境，但董事会仍然做出了这一决定。后来人们认识到，导致康宁陷入困境的原因其实是市场环境的恶化，而非管理层的失误。在之后的几年里，威克斯成为了美国最受推崇的企业领导者之一，他也带领康宁在全球液晶显示领域取得了领先地位。glass and—with the help of “gorilla technology”—number one in smartphone cover glass, as well. Judge from your own experience, but it strikes us that the clear judgment of Corning’s board might be more the exception than the rule in terms of boards and CeOs accurately attributing performance. 在智能手机保护玻璃领域，康宁同样凭借“先进技术”位居行业首位。你可以根据自己的经验来评判，但在我们看来，对于那些能够准确评估企业业绩的董事会和首席执行官来说，康宁董事会的这种明断判断其实更应被视为例外，而非普遍现象。
• So, where are we now? We have now given you, for the first time, a glimpse at the proba-bilities of strategy—the odds that a company will move up or down on the Power Curve—and the notion that the probabilities for individual companies vastly diverge. We’ve also seen that dealing with probabili-ties is a challenge for business leaders, but that not properly dealing with them is one of the reason that social games are being played. 那么，我们现在处于什么阶段呢？我们现在已经首次向你们展示了各种战略选择所对应的概率——也就是企业会在“力量曲线”上向上或向下移动的概率——同时也说明了不同企业的这些概率存在巨大差异。我们还看到，处理这些概率问题对企业领导者来说确实是一项挑战；而如果不能妥善应对这些挑战，就会导致一些企业陷入所谓的“社会性博弈”之中。now that the “average” probabilities of moving on the Power Curve have entered the room, the obvious next questions are: What is your own company’s probability of success, and what actions can you take to improve that probability? how do you change your odds of beating the market? We tell clients that a plan that has a realistic chance of producing a real hockey stick that will carry a company from the middle to the top of the Power Curve should have an element of magic to it, some-thing that stands out. Jokingly, we say: “you should be able to smell the specialness through a video conference” if you want to have some confidence that a hockey stick plan is the real deal. In the next chap-ter, we’ll start to go into detail about how to find one. 既然那些与在“力量曲线”上取得进展相关的“平均概率”已经被大家所了解，那么接下来自然会产生的问题是：你们自己公司的成功概率是多少？可以采取哪些措施来提高这一概率？又该如何增加自己战胜市场的机会呢？我们告诉客户，一个真正具有实现可能性、能够帮助一家企业从力量曲线的中间位置跃居到顶端的计划，必然包含某些独特的元素——一些能够使其脱颖而出、与众不同的因素。我们开玩笑地说：“如果你想确信某个‘曲棍球杆计划’确实是可靠的，那么通过视频会议就应该能够感受到其中的‘特殊性’。”在下一章中，我们将详细探讨如何找到这样的计划。

 What’s different this time?

• if you look at the three books that sit on more managers’ book-shelves than any others—In Search of Excellence (1982), Built to Last (1994), and Good to Great (2001)—they use a common method for learning lessons about strategy. they collect companies that are “great,” “excellent,” or “enduring” and attempt to infer the formula behind that greatness, excellence, and endurance. the assumption is that, by mimicking the companies’ practices, you will be able to mimic their performance.3 these are certainly good books—more than 10 million readers can’t be wrong—and all the companies highlighted in them were truly incredible. However, look at how the 50 companies mentioned performed over the following decades. if you constructed a portfolio of the stocks on the dates of publication and held them, you would have outperformed the market index by 1.7 percent. not bad at all. Good to Great is in the lead at 2.6 percent, followed by Built to Last at 1.6 percent, and In Search of Excellence at 1.5 percent. but the odds that one of these 50 exemplars outperformed the market were just 52 percent, hardly better than a coin toss, and the chances of a major underperformance were much greater than for a major outperfor-mance—just eight companies beat the index by more than 5 percent, while a total of 16 trailed the index by more than 5 percent. 如果你看看那些被更多管理者放在书架上的三本书——《追求卓越》（1982年）、《基业长青》（1994年）以及《从优秀到卓越》（2001年），你会发现它们都采用了一种相同的方法来总结关于战略的启示。这些作者会选择那些“卓越”、“优秀”或“具有持久发展能力”的企业作为研究对象，试图找出这些企业取得成功背后的关键因素。他们的假设是：只要模仿这些企业的做法，就一定能够复制它们的业绩。当然，这些书确实非常优秀——超过1000万读者的评价无疑证明了这一点——而且书中提到的所有企业也都确实令人赞叹不已。然而，看看这50家公司在随后几十年的表现吧。如果你在这些公司的相关信息发布的当天就买入了它们的股票并一直持有下去，那么你的投资业绩将会比市场指数高出1.7%——这个成绩相当不错了。《从优秀到卓越》这个投资组合的收益率为2.6%，位居首位；其次是“持久耐用”投资组合，收益率为1.6%；“追求卓越”投资组合的收益率为1.5%，排名第三。但是，在这50家公司中，有哪家公司的表现会优于市场整体的概率仅为52%，这一概率几乎与抛硬币的结果相当；而那些表现远低于市场预期的公司的数量，则远远多于那些表现优异的公司——仅有8家公司的业绩超出了指数5%以上，而共有16家公司的业绩落后于指数5%以上。
• the prescriptions in these books made sense, but they were some-what vague—or too specific to an individual company—and it’s hard to sort out the winning ideas from the less important ones. Good to Great, for instance, says it’s crucial for the ceO to be a Level 5 leader. One of the criteria for being a Level 5 leader is that the leader pick a successor who is also a Level 5 leader. Jack Welch, long regarded as one of the best, made an excellent choice when he named Jeff immelt to succeed him as ceO at ge in 2000. Unfortunately, ge had essentially become a finance company under Welch, which left it highly vulnerable in the global financial crisis of 2008. although immelt restructured ge and divested risk-prone parts of the business, ge shares underperformed 这些书中所提出的建议确实有一定道理，但它们要么表述得较为模糊，要么针对特定公司而言过于具体，因此很难区分哪些建议真正重要，哪些则不太关键。例如，《从优秀到卓越》这本书指出，首席执行官必须具备“第五级领导者”的素质；而成为“第五级领导者”的其中一个标准就是，这位领导者必须挑选一位同样具备“第五级领导者”素质的接班人。长期以来，杰克·韦尔奇一直被视为最优秀的首席执行官之一，他在2000年任命杰夫·伊梅尔特接任通用电气的首席执行官，这个选择非常明智。然而不幸的是，在韦尔奇的领导下，通用电气实际上已经变成了一家主要从事金融业务的公司，这使得该公司在2008年的全球金融危机中陷入了极大的困境。尽管伊梅尔特后来对通用电气的业务结构进行了调整，并剥离了那些风险较高的业务部门，但通用电气的股价依然表现不佳。

 Check the facts

• that’s why we emphasize the use of deep, testable data. We have examined many hypotheses based on publicly available data about thousands of companies around the globe. this helped identify those corporate performance levers that really matter. We back-tested the data and were able to verify that our model generates surprisingly accurate predictions about the chances of a strategy leading to success. We have deployed the analysis in our work over the past 4 years with clients across the globe and found that it does, indeed, lead to better strategy conversations. Unlike the data that go into the standard inside view, our research provides reference data on broad characteristics, draws from large 正因为如此，我们才特别强调使用深入、可被验证的数据。我们基于全球数千家公司的公开数据，检验了许多假设，这些研究帮助我们确定了那些真正对企业绩效产生影响的因素。我们对这些数据进行了反复验证，结果发现，我们的模型能够非常准确地预测某种策略是否能够取得成功。在过去的四年里，我们已将这一分析方法应用到与全球各地客户的合作中，结果发现，这种方法确实有助于促进更深入的战略讨论。与那些被用于常规内部分析的数据不同，我们的研究提供了关于各种宏观特征的参考数据，并且这些数据来源于大规模的样本集。

 The odds that matter: Yours

• the highly entertaining article “How to make a hit film” in The Economist5 beautifully illustrates how it’s not only possible to know the odds of success, but how it’s possible to know what levers to pull to improve those odds (See exhibit 15): 《经济学人》上那篇极具趣味性的文章《如何打造一部成功的电影》生动地说明了：我们不仅能够了解成功的概率，还能知道该采取哪些措施来提高这些概率（见图15）。In 1983 William Goldman, a screenwriter, coined the famous saying that in Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything” when it comes to predicting which films will succeed at the box office. 1983年，编剧威廉·高德曼提出了这样一句著名的话：在好莱坞，对于哪些电影会在票房上取得成功，其实“没有人能真正预料到”。
• To find out how true that remains, we have analyzed the performance of more than 2,000 films with a budget of more than $10 million, released in America and Canada since 1995, to see which factors help make a movie a hit . . . Our analysis suggests a formula that maximizes the chances of packing them in. First, create a child-friendly superhero film with plenty of action and scope for turning it into a franchise. Set your budget at an impressive but not reckless $85 million. Convince a major studio to distribute it on wide release in the summer (when releases earn an average of $15 million 为了验证这一说法至今是否仍然成立，我们分析了自1995年以来在美国和加拿大上映的、预算超过1000万美元的2000多部电影的票房表现，试图找出哪些因素能够帮助一部电影取得成功……我们的分析得出了一个能够最大化这些电影成功几率的方案：首先，制作一部适合儿童观看的超级英雄电影，其中要包含大量的动作场面，并且要具备发展成系列电影的潜力；将预算定在8500万美元这一较为可观但又不至于过于奢侈的数字；然后说服一家大型电影公司在该电影的夏季档期进行大规模发行——因为这个档期的电影平均票房收入为1500万美元。

 Trends

• Trends 趋势the two key variables that fall under trends are industry trend and exposure to growth geographies. if your industry is moving up the industry Power curve, you’re likely to move along with that tailwind. if you’re operating in growth geographies, you’ll benefit, too, though being in the right countries doesn’t matter quite as much as being in an industry that trends upward. 属于趋势范畴的两个关键变量是行业趋势以及企业所处的增长区域。如果你的所在行业正处于发展上升期，那么你很可能会随之受益；而如果你在那些处于发展中的地区开展业务，同样会获得好处。不过，身处正确的地区并不如身处一个处于上升趋势的行业更为重要。1. Industry trend. the trend in your industry is the single most important of all 10 attributes. For your industry to be your friend, it needs to be moving up the industry Power curve by at least 1 quintile over a 10-year period. the metric we used is average growth in economic profit across all companies in the industry. this is like the tide going in—or out—and lifting or lowering the average level of boats in the harbor. 2. Geographic trend. the key here is to be in markets that are among the top 40 percent for nominal gdP growth. For companies operating in more than one geographic market—most companies among the 2,393 in the database do—you calculate your corporate-wide gdP growth figure based on the percentage of revenue you received from each geographic market. it’s intuitively clear that 1. 行业趋势。你所在行业的趋势是这10个因素中最为重要的一个。要想让行业成为你的助力，该行业在10年时间内必须在行业发展曲线中向上移动至少1个五分位区间。我们使用的衡量标准是该行业内所有企业的平均经济利润增长率。这就好比潮水的涨落会抬高或降低港口中船只的平均水位。2. 地理位置趋势。关键在于选择那些名义GDP增长率排名前40%的市场进行发展。对于那些在多个地理市场开展业务的公司而言——数据库中的2,393家公司大多都属于这类企业——您应该根据从每个地理市场获得的收入所占比例来计算整个公司的GDP增长率。这一点其实是很直观的。

 Moves

• being exposed to faster-growing markets yields benefits (but equally interesting how overall macroeconomic conditions are a footnote in many long-term strategy discussions). 接触那些发展速度更快的市场确实能够带来诸多好处；但同样值得注意的是，在许多关于长期发展战略的讨论中，整体宏观经济形势往往被忽视，被视为无关紧要的因素。
• Moves 举措Many plans, based on hockey sticks, call for revenue growth equal to gdP and for, say, an increase in margin of two percentage points. that sort of approach could, in fact, let you jump from the middle quin-tiles of the Power curve to the top in 10 years. but, remember, only a small percentage of hockey stick projections actually happen. Other companies pursue similar strategies, and the market competes away the improvements through lower prices or more service. customers benefit—but you just wind up with a hairy back. Our research found five moves that, pursued persistently, can get you to where you want to go—they work best in combination, but we’ll get into that later. For now, here are the five moves we found that matter: 许多基于“曲棍球杆模型”的战略都要求收入增长速度与GDP增速保持一致，或者要求利润率提高两个百分点。事实上，这种策略确实可以帮助企业在10年内从市场的中游位置跃居到前列。但请记住，只有极少数基于这种模型的预测能够真正实现。其他企业也会采取类似的策略，而市场竞争会通过降低价格或提供更多服务来抵消这些策略带来的积极效果。虽然消费者会因此受益，但企业本身却会面临巨大的压力。 我们的研究发现，有五种策略如果能够持续实施，确实可以帮助企业达到预期的目标。这些策略结合起来使用效果最佳，不过具体内容我们稍后会详细讨论。目前，我们先介绍这五种被认为非常重要的策略吧。1. Programmatic M&A. this one surprises people because they have the idea that studies show that most M&a deals fail (factually wrong) and resist (rightly) the idea of a bet-the-company deal. a key indicator of success is “programmatic M&a,” a steady stream of deals, each costing no more than 30 percent of your market cap but adding up over 10 years to at least 30 percent of your market cap. 1. 有计划的并购。这一策略常常令人感到意外，因为人们普遍认为大多数并购交易都会失败（这一观点其实并不正确），同时也理所当然地反对那种将整个企业作为赌注的并购行为。然而，判断并购是否成功的一个关键指标就是“有计划的并购”——即通过一系列规模适中、每笔交易成本不超过企业市值30%的并购行动，在10年内使企业市值累计增加至少30%。

 It all matters

• 2. Dynamic allocation of resources. Our research found that companies are more likely to succeed when they re-allocate capital expenditures at a healthy clip—feeding the units that could break out and produce a major move up the Power curve, while starving those that are unlikely to surge. the threshold here is re-allocating at least 50 percent of capital expenditure among business units over a decade. 3. Strong capital expenditure. You meet the bar on this lever if you are in the top 20 percent in your industry in your ratio of capital spending to sales. that typically means spending 1.7 times the industry median. that is a big number. 4. Strength of productivity program. everybody is trying to reduce their costs—cutting overhead and improving labor productivity. the question is whether you are improving productivity consistently faster than your competitors. Our research found that the bar is at an improvement rate that’s at least in the top 30 percent of your industry. 5. Improvements in differentiation. to make business model innovation and pricing advantages improve your chances of moving up the Power curve, you need to make it into the top 30 percent in your industry in terms of gross margin. this measure captures whether a company has been able to either develop a sustainable cost advantage or charge premium prices because of product differentiation and innovation. 2. 资源的动态配置。我们的研究发现，当企业以适当的幅度重新分配资本支出时，它们更有可能取得成功——那些有望取得突破并在发展曲线中实现显著进步的业务单元会因此获得更多资源支持，而那些不太可能取得进展的业务单元则会被削减资金投入。这里的“适当幅度”指的是在十年时间内，至少有50%的资本支出在各个业务单元之间进行重新分配。 3. 较高的资本支出水平。如果你所在行业的资本支出与销售额之比处于前20%，那么你就符合这一标准。通常来说，这意味着你的资本支出金额是该行业平均水平的1.7倍。这个数字相当可观。 4. 生产力提升计划的成效。如今，所有企业都在努力降低成本，削减管理开支并提高劳动生产率。关键在于：你的生产力提升速度是否始终快于竞争对手。我们的研究指出，要达到这一标准，你的生产力提升幅度至少应处于所在行业的前三十%。 5. 差异化竞争力的提升。要想通过商业模式创新和定价优势在“力量曲线”上取得进步，你的毛利率必须跻身所在行业的前三十%。这一指标能够反映一家企业是否能够建立起可持续的成本优势，或者通过产品差异化与创新来收取更高的价格。

 The mobility dashboard

• revenue and debt levels were in the middle of the pack, and the company had not invested heavily in r&d. in terms of trends, the geographic exposure was unimpressive. However, the aerospace indus-try experienced enormous tailwinds over those 10 years, which helped a lot. Most important, though, Pcc made big moves that collectively shifted its odds of reaching the top quintile to 76 percent. the company did so by surpassing the high-performance thresholds on four of the five moves. For mergers, acquisitions, and divestments, Pcc combined a high value and volume of deals over the decade through a deliberate and regular program of transactions in the aerospace and power mar-kets. this was a steady diet of transactions, not one-off binges. the last 如您所见，2004年时，这家成立于60年前的企业——一家为航空航天、电力及工业领域生产复杂金属零部件及产品的公司——其各项指标表现平平，且在研发方面的投入也并不充足。从地域布局来看，该公司的业务覆盖范围也并不显著。然而，在那10年间，航空航天行业迎来了巨大的发展机遇，这些因素对Pcc而言起到了极大的推动作用。最重要的是，Pcc采取了一系列关键举措，这些措施使其跻身行业前五的概率提高到了76%。在具体行动上，该公司在五项关键举措中的四项上都达到了预期的高性能标准。在并购方面，Pcc在十年间通过一系列有计划、有节奏的交易活动，在航空航天及电力领域进行了大量高价值、大规模的并购活动——这些交易是持续进行的，而非偶尔发生的。2 years of our study were typical of Pcc’s actions through the decade. in 2013, Pcc acquired Permaswage SaS—a manufacturer of aero-space fluid fittings—for $600 million and divested its Primus com-posites business. this was followed by the acquisition of aerospace dynamics—an operator of high-speed machining centers—for $625 million in 2014, or roughly 2 percent of Pcc’s market capitalization. 我们研究的两年时间，恰恰体现了Pcc在整个十年间的行事风格。2013年，Pcc以6亿美元收购了生产航空航天流体配件的Permaswage SaS公司，同时出售了旗下的Primus复合材料业务。2014年，该公司又以6.25亿美元收购了从事高速加工设备运营的Aerospace Dynamics公司，这一笔交易相当于Pcc当时市值的约2%。in other moves, Pcc re-allocated 61 percent of its capital spending among its three major divisions, while managing the rare double feat of both productivity and margin moves, the only aerospace and defense company in our sample to do so. While nearly doubling its labor pro-ductivity, Pcc managed to reduce its overhead ratio by three percent-age points. it lifted its gross profit-to-sales ratio from 27 to 35 percent. 在其他举措方面，Pcc将其61%的资本支出重新分配给了旗下的三个主要业务部门，同时还实现了生产力和利润率的双重提升——在我们所研究的样本企业中，它是唯一一家做到这一点的航空航天与国防企业。在劳动生产率几乎翻了一番的同时，Pcc还将管理费用比率降低了3个百分点，其毛利润率也从27%提高到了35%。the combination of a positive industry trend and successful execu-tion of multiple moves makes Pcc a showcase of a “high odds” strat-egy and perhaps highlights why berkshire Hathaway agreed in 2015 to buy Pcc for $37.2 billion. and, as exhibit 18 shows, the rewards for shareholders were obvious. 由于行业趋势良好，加之多项举措得以成功实施，Pcc成为了这种“高成功率”战略的典范。这也或许能够解释为什么伯克希尔·哈撒韦会在2015年同意以372亿美元的价格收购Pcc。正如图表18所示，这种战略为股东们带来了显著的回报。
• by contrast, if you remember the other two companies we dis-cussed, dai nippon Printing and United natural Foods (Unfi), both faced industry and geographic headwinds and were not able to do enough to overcome them (exhibit 19). dnP began with a reason-able endowment but only successfully made two of the five possible moves, so our model predicted a 69 percent likelihood of it sliding to the bottom quintile. and so it did. Unfi only cleared the threshold on one attribute but improved productivity enough in an industry where productivity matters a great deal that our model gave it high odds of staying in the middle ranks. that’s also exactly what happened. 相比之下，如果你还记得我们之前讨论过的另外两家公司——大日本印刷和联合天然食品，它们都面临着行业和地域方面的不利因素，且未能采取足够的措施来克服这些困难（见图表19）。大日本印刷虽然起初拥有相当可观的资源，但在五种可行的应对措施中只成功实施了两项，因此我们的模型预测它有69%的可能性会跌入排名垫底的那五分之一区间，而事实也确实如此。联合天然食品虽然只在一个指标上达到了标准，但其在生产率至关重要的行业中显著提升了自身的生产率，因此我们的模型认为它有很大可能性能保持在中等排名区间，而实际情况也确实如此。

 Know the odds

• to be clear, Pcc has been a great performer over that 10-year period, but we are not touting Pcc as a great case example. there is no predictive power in this analysis for Pcc’s performance looking forward beyond 2015. We are simply explaining its success over the previous 10 years and use the example to demonstrate that this success would have been predictable, had we known their strategy and the aerospace industry trend in 2001–4. 需要明确的是，在那10年时间里，Pcc确实表现非常出色，但我们并不是将Pcc作为一个典范来加以推崇。这项分析并不能用来预测Pcc在2015年之后的发展表现。我们只是在解释它在过去10年中所取得的成功，并用这个例子来说明：如果我们早在2001年至2004年就了解了它们的发展战略以及航空航天行业的整体发展趋势，那么这种成功其实是可以预见的。
• Know the odds 了解各种可能性in analyzing the odds of moving on the Power curve across 2,393 of the largest companies in the world, we found that endowment deter-mines about 30 percent, trends determine about 25 percent, and your moves determine about 45 percent of the probability of moving on the curve. While the industry trend is the single most important lever among the 10, it is strategic moves that, in aggregate, explain almost half of the mobility of companies on the Power curve. 在分析了全球2,393家最大企业的发展轨迹后，我们发现：企业所拥有的资金资源决定了其发展轨迹变化概率的约30%，行业趋势影响了约25%，而企业自身采取的战略决策则决定了剩余的约45%。虽然行业趋势是这些因素中最重要的一个，但各种战略决策加起来，实际上解释了企业在发展轨迹上变化情况的近一半。
• electrical equipment maker abb and chemicals giant baSF are examples of companies with strong endowments that lever-aged those advantages to move from the middle quintile on the Power curve to the top quintile over the decade that our research covered. in terms of trends, Japanese automaker isuzu was helped by strong industry and geographic tailwinds to move all the way from the bottom quintile of the Power curve to the top. in terms of moves, we’ve seen how Pcc pulled four of the five levers and moved to the top. While we’ve treated each lever separately, in reality these attri-butes work in concert. the odds aren’t calculated by simple addition, but by careful accounting of combined influences that have been iden-tified in our research analyses. the actions on the 10 levers typically have to be much bigger than you’d think, and what matters is whether they clear certain thresholds, usually in comparison with the competi-tion. this is very important. a big move is not big because it’s hard, or because the team feels stretched; it’s big when it’s big relative to your competition. 电气设备制造商ABB与化工巨头巴斯夫，都是那些凭借自身优势，在我们研究的这十年间从权力曲线的中间五分位数跃居到顶部的企业典范。就行业趋势而言，日本汽车制造商五十铃也得益于强劲的行业背景与地域优势，从而从权力曲线的最低五分位数一路攀升至顶端。至于企业自身的主动作为，我们看到浦项制铁正是通过运用这五种因素中的四种，才成功跻身前列。虽然我们在分析中分别探讨了这些因素，但实际上它们是共同发挥作用、共同推动企业发展的。这些成功几率并非通过简单的相加来计算，而是需要仔细分析我们在研究中发现的各种综合影响因素。在运用这10个关键因素时，所采取的行动通常需要比你想象中更为有力，而且关键在于这些行动是否达到了某些特定的门槛——这些门槛通常是相对于竞争对手而言的。这一点非常重要。一项行动之所以被称为“重大行动”，并不是因为它实施起来困难重重，也不是因为执行团队感到力不从心，而是因为与竞争对手相比，这项行动确实具有显著的效果。

 6 The writing is on the wall

• Seeing the writing on the wall is easy, but acting on it can be tough. To friend the trend, you must overcome myopia, pain-avoidance, and inertia. I 显而易见，问题已经摆在眼前，但采取行动却可能十分困难。要想顺应这一趋势，就必须克服短视、逃避痛苦以及惰性。我
• f you want to understand how important it is to get trends right, ask Cor Boonstra, former CEO of Royal Philips. He spotted a crucial one at his PolyGram unit in the late 1990s and had the courage to act on it. PolyGram was one of the world’s top record labels, with a roster boasting Bob Marley, U2, and top classical artists. But Boonstra flew to New York in 1998 to meet with Goldman Sachs and sell Poly-Gram to Seagram for $10.6 billion. Why? Because Boonstra had seen proprietary research conducted by Philips’ own optical storage busi-ness, showing that consumers were largely using the new recordable CD-ROM technology, which Philips co-invented, for one purpose: to copy music. The MP3 format had barely been invented, Napster was a mere gleam in Sean Parker’s eye, and PolyGram was at the top of 如果你想了解把握行业趋势的重要性，不妨问问皇家飞利浦的前首席执行官科·布恩斯特拉。20世纪90年代末，他在旗下的宝丽金公司发现了一个至关重要的趋势，并勇敢地采取了行动。宝丽金曾是全球顶尖的唱片公司，旗下拥有鲍勃·马利、U2等知名艺人以及众多古典音乐大师。然而，布恩斯特拉却在1998年飞往纽约，与高盛会面，最终以106亿美元的价格将宝丽金卖给了西格玛公司。为什么呢？因为博恩斯特拉看到了飞利浦自身在光存储领域开展的研究结果，这些研究显示：消费者使用这种由飞利浦共同发明的新型可刻录CD-ROM技术，主要是为了复制音乐文件。当时MP3格式才刚刚被发明，Napster也还只是肖恩·帕克心中一个模糊的构想，而飞利浦当时正处于行业巅峰。
• its game. But Boonstra saw the first signs of transformation and acted decisively. Within a decade, compact disc and DVD sales in the US dropped by more than 80 percent.1 这本来只是个游戏而已。但布恩斯特拉及时察觉到了这种变化的趋势，并采取了果断的行动。在短短十年时间里，美国市场上CD和DVD的销量下降了80%以上。How well did Boonstra time the sale? He nailed it. Just look at Exhibit 20, which shows that CD/DVD revenue was at its absolute peak when the PolyGram sale went through. 布恩斯特拉对这次促销活动的时机把握得有多精准呢？他简直做得天衣无缝。只要看看图表20就知道了——在宝丽金公司开展促销活动时，CD/DVD的收入确实达到了绝对的巅峰。

 A very different conversation about strategy

• again, we’re not promising a crystal ball. Even if you were PCC and had a 76 percent chance of making it to the top quintile, that doesn’t mean you’d have a guarantee to get there. We naturally saw some companies that moved in ways that the model didn’t suggest. a peer of PCC in the aerospace and defense industry provides a cautionary tale. It was in a growth industry, had an enviable endowment, and made apparently strong moves. The com-pany had a 72 percent probability of lifting from the middle to the top quintile of the Power Curve over the decade we studied. Instead, it went from a $70 million economic profit to a $780 million loss, and it slid to the tail of the Power Curve. While the company made moves, it made ones with a lower prob-ability of success (and executed some poorly) and copped the wrong roll of the dice. a large-scale M&a strategy dramatically increased its debt without delivering returns. low operating discipline in key aerospace and defense programs was marked by time and cost over-runs. Some externalities also played a role, like lower-than-anticipated order volumes for a major product. although a turnaround effort has improved profitability and reduced debt, the company provides a timely reminder that industry tailwinds and a strong endowment are not always enough. On the other hand, during the decade in question the US-based hotel chain Starwood Hotels & Resorts rose to the top of the Power Curve against the odds. In an industry with a strong headwind and while holding significant debt, Starwood went from generating –$306 million in economic profit in 2000–4 to generating $332 million a decade later, outperforming the industry average of $182 million in 2010–14. Its success was driven by a counter-intuitive approach 我们再次强调，并没有承诺能提供预知未来的能力。即使你属于PCC群体，且有76%的概率进入排名前五的行列，这也并不意味着你一定能成功达到目标。事实上，我们确实观察到一些企业的行为并不符合该模型的预测。航空航天与国防行业的某家与PCC同属一个领域的企业就是一个警示案例：这家企业所处的行业处于快速发展阶段，也拥有令人羡慕的资本实力，而且确实采取了一些积极的行动。然而在我们研究的这十年间，它从排名中游提升到前五的概率仅为72%。相反，该公司的经济效益从7000万美元转为7.8亿美元的亏损，其在“力量曲线”上的位置也跌到了末尾。尽管该公司确实采取了一些行动，但这些行动的成功概率较低（其中一些甚至执行得相当糟糕），再加上运气也不佳，最终导致了这样的结果。大规模的并购活动使它的债务大幅增加，却未能带来任何回报。在关键的航空航天与国防项目中，由于缺乏严格的运营管理，项目经常出现时间延误和成本超支的情况。此外，一些外部因素也起到了影响作用，比如某主要产品的订单量低于预期。尽管公司采取了一系列措施来扭转经营状况，从而提升了盈利能力并减少了债务，但这一案例仍然提醒我们：行业内的有利因素以及雄厚的资金基础并不总能确保成功。另一方面，在同一时期，总部位于美国的喜达屋酒店集团却逆势崛起，成功跻身“力量曲线”的顶端。在面临严峻行业挑战且背负巨额债务的情况下，喜达屋在2000年至2004年间仍实现了3.06亿美元的经济利润，而十年后这一数字上升到了3.32亿美元，其业绩明显优于2010年至2014年间1.82亿美元的行业平均水平。它的成功源于一种反常规的经营策略。

 Tennis or badminton?

• to a big move: portfolio rationalization. In this decade, Starwood made 1 acquisition (le Méridien) and an astonishing 51 divestitures, including the sale of specific Sheraton and W luxury properties. This programmatic approach to M&a (and divestitures) supported a fun-damental change in Starwood’s operating model, shifting toward a brand-driven and capital-light hotel marketer and operator as opposed to a property owner. Management capitalized on Starwood’s strengths, recognized the imminent headwinds and heavy debt obligations, and made a big move to beat the odds. Despite the experience of these “despite the odds” examples, and others, our model’s ability to explain 80–90 percent of the probability of movement along the Power Curve proves its merit. The exceptions often just serve to reinforce the rules. and while as humans we love heroic underdogs (and perhaps equally but less virtuously love it when big shots fail), as an investor or manager it’s always smarter to go with the odds. 星木集团采取了重大举措：对旗下酒店资产进行整合与优化。在过去的十年中，星木集团仅进行了一次收购交易（收购了Le Méridien酒店），但却进行了多达51次资产剥离，其中包括出售一些喜来登及W酒店品牌的豪华酒店资产。这种有针对性的并购及资产处置策略，促使星木集团的运营模式发生了根本性变化——它不再仅仅作为酒店资产的所有者，而是转型成为一家以品牌为核心、资金投入较少的酒店运营商。管理层充分发挥了星木集团的自身优势，同时也清醒地认识到了未来可能面临的种种挑战以及沉重的债务负担，因此才果断采取了这些措施来战胜这些困难。尽管有这些“逆势而上”的例子，但我们的模型仍能够解释80%到90%的这类发展概率，这一事实证明了该模型的有效性。那些例外情况往往反而更能印证这些规律。作为人类，我们确实喜欢那些逆势成功的英雄式人物（或许同样喜欢，但方式可能不那么高尚）；但作为投资者或管理者，顺应大势行事才是更明智的选择。
• Tennis or badminton? 网球还是羽毛球？If you’re going to play a racquet sport, you’d be wise to emulate tennis’s Roger Federer, not badminton champion lin Dan. Both are remarkably successful, perhaps the best ever in their games. Both are extremely marketable, with competitive instincts and personal charm. Yet no one asks, “Why doesn’t Roger play badminton?” (They may instead ask, “Who is lin Dan?”) One of the reasons: a top-10 tennis player makes 10 to 20 times more than a top-10 player in any other racquet sport. No matter how great a badminton player lin Dan is, he won’t win against his “industry” disadvantage. You, too, need to give yourself the biggest trend advantages that you can. as we’ve explained, the two that we’ve identified as most important, i.e., which way your industry and your geographies are moving, account for 25 percent of your odds of moving up or down on the Power Curve. Trends are the ground moving beneath your feet. They will move you up (or down) even before you make any other strategic moves yourself. Getting ahead of trends is easily the single most important strategic choice you have to make. 如果你要参加一项球拍运动，那么模仿网球选手罗杰·费德勒而不是羽毛球冠军林丹才是明智之举。这两位运动员都取得了惊人的成就，或许堪称他们所从事项目的史上最佳选手；他们都具有极高的商业价值，既具备强烈的竞争意识，也拥有个人魅力。然而，却没有人会问“为什么罗杰不参加羽毛球比赛呢？”（相反，人们更可能会问“林丹是谁？”）原因之一在于：排名前十的网球选手所获得的收入，是其他任何球拍运动中排名前十选手的10到20倍。无论林丹的羽毛球技术有多高超，他也无法改变这种行业层面的劣势。因此，你也应该尽可能地利用这些有利条件来提升自己的竞争力。正如我们所解释的，我们认为最重要的两个因素——即你的行业以及你所处地区的发展趋势——决定了你在“力量曲线”上上升或下降的概率，这些因素占据了总因素的25%。趋势就如同你脚下的地面，它们会在你采取任何其他战略行动之前，就决定着你是会上升还是下降。抢先把握趋势，无疑是你必须做出的最重要的战略选择。

 Industries are escalators

• Driven by the intensity of most businesses, many tend to focus on the immediate competition but don’t think much about the broader reasons for why they are moving. Maybe your gains result from your industry, not from anything particular you’re doing. You might be an express courier while e-commerce is booming. Or you operate aged care facilities while the population is getting older. Maybe you’re not so fortunate. Maybe you’re a television broadcaster, and your audience is moving to streamed video. 由于大多数企业的经营压力都很大，因此它们往往会专注于眼前的竞争，而很少去思考自己之所以会采取某种行动，背后究竟存在着哪些更根本的原因。也许你的成功只是因为你所处行业的蓬勃发展，而并非因为你自身采取了什么特别的措施。比如，在电子商务迅速发展的背景下，你可能只是从事快递业务；又或者，在人口老龄化趋势日益明显的今天，你只是经营着养老机构而已。当然，也有可能你没有那么幸运。比如，如果你是一家电视广播公司，那么你的观众可能正在逐渐转向流媒体视频服务。
• Industries are escalators 各个行业就如同自动扶梯一般，不断向前发展。Some of you may remember as children trying to beat your parents up the escalator by running up the one going down. You had to run so fast just to keep up with them floating up. Well, industries are like that—either heading up and accelerating your progress, stuck on stop-mode so it’s only your effort that counts, or on a downward track, meaning you have to work hard just to stay where you are, let alone get ahead. Of the 117 companies that jumped from the middle quintiles to the top, 85 moved with their industry (which rose at least one quintile). Only 32 moved up against a downward industry trend—a drop of at least one quintile—proving that it is possible. Of the 201 that fell from the 在你们当中，有些人可能还记得小时候曾试图通过逆着下行扶梯奔跑来“超越”父母。那时你必须跑得非常快，才能跟上他们向上移动的步伐。其实，各行各业也是如此：要么在不断进步、快速发展；要么处于停滞状态，此时只有自身的努力才能决定成败；再不然就是处于下滑趋势中，这时你必须加倍努力才能维持现状，更别想取得进步了。在那些从中等排名跃居到前位的117家公司中，有85家是随着所在行业的整体发展而上升的；只有32家是在整个行业处于下滑趋势的情况下依然实现了进步，这一事实证明了只要努力，目标还是可以实现的。而在那些排名下降的201家公司中……middle quintiles to the bottom, 157 were pulled down by their industry. a firm in a top-quintile industry is five times more likely to be in the top quintile for all individual companies than one from a bottom-quintile industry (Exhibit 21). So, it’s crucial to both identify all the relevant trends and to act on them in the right timeframe. You have to make the trend your friend. 在那些从中间五分位数跌落到最低五分位数的117家公司中，有157家是受其所在行业的影响而下滑的。处于最高五分位数行业的公司，其整体排名处于最高五分位数的可能性，是那些来自最低五分位数行业的公司的五倍（见图表21）。因此，识别所有相关的行业趋势，并在适当的时机采取行动，至关重要——你必须让这些趋势成为你的助力。
• emerge and older ones die, as industry structures change and new ecosystems are formed, profit pools shrink and grow and also move between industries. The results can sometimes be dra-matic, requiring major action (Exhibit 22). For instance, the wireless telecom industry jumped from near the bottom of the curve 10 years ago to nearly to the top. The oil and gas industry, with the recent drop in commodity prices, went the other way in our ranking of 127 indus-tries. Overall, the result resembles the movement among companies: Of 127 industries, 9 percent moved from the three middle quintiles up the industry Power Curve to the top over a decade. 随着全球经济的周期性波动，新技术和商业模式的不断涌现，旧模式的逐渐淘汰，产业结构的调整以及新生态系统的形成，各行业的利润格局会发生变化，利润池的大小也会随之增减，甚至会在不同行业之间转移。这些变化有时会带来剧烈的影响，从而需要采取重大的应对措施（见图22）。例如，无线通信行业在10年的时间里，其排名从接近行业底部跃升至接近顶部；而由于近期大宗商品价格下跌，石油和天然气行业的排名则出现了相反的变化。总体而言，这种变化趋势与企业之间的发展情况类似：在127个行业中，有9%的行业在10年的时间里从处于中间位置上升到了行业排名的高端。
• If you find yourself with a favorable industry trend—which, as we’ve said, is the single most important contributor to favorable 如果你所处的行业正处于有利的发展趋势中——正如我们所说，这正是决定企业能否获得有利发展结果的最重要因素。

 Change your industry or change industries

• odds—then you should ride that trend as hard as you can. If, however, you find yourself with an unfavorable industry trend, you might need to seriously consider changing your industry or changing industries. 如果形势有利，那么你就应该尽全力抓住这一趋势。然而，如果你所处的行业正处于不利的发展趋势中，那你或许真的需要认真考虑更换行业或转行了。Change your industry or change industries 更换行业或尝试多个行业。If you find yourself facing a disruption of the scale that kodak did with digital photography, you have only two options: Either transform your industry, e.g., through consolidation to change its fundamental performance prospects, or decide to leave your industry to establish a new foothold in a less threatened space. Unfortunately, neither is easy. 如果你发现自己正面临类似柯达在数码摄影领域所遭遇的那种颠覆性挑战，那么你只有两个选择：要么通过整合等方式改变自己所处的行业，从而从根本上改变该行业的发展前景；要么选择离开当前行业，去一个受威胁较小的领域开辟新的发展空间。不幸的是，这两个选择都没有那么容易实现。
• after we presented our data at a European utility conference, three executives came up to us and said they were shocked about where their industry was located on the Power Curve. The data made it painfully clear to them that the Power Curve is highly relevant even for per-sonal career choices, requiring people to be conscious about the posi-tion of an industry on the Power Curve and the trends that industry could expect to see. Now, changing one’s industry doesn’t happen overnight, and the social side makes adapting even harder. Rarely is a business free to move from industry to industry just as the occasion demands—private equity players and venture capitalists are a notable exception. For any-body operating a company, industry-changing moves are hard—but for some of you they might be necessary. If you’re going to stay in the same industry, you might need to try finding ways to alter the dynamics of your industry to sustainably boost performance. For instance, in the beer industry in australia, which was just a so-so performer decades ago, lion and Foster consolidated it so thoroughly in the 1980s and 1990s that the industry became a lot more attractive for both. laN airways drove a new business model for airlines in South america and did extremely well. Buurtzorg Ned-erland has changed the home health care industry in the Netherlands and created an economic and social success story with a profoundly new and humane delivery model. What all of these have in common is that they made big, innovative moves and committed their entire companies to changing the game. They all executed strategies that 在我们在一个欧洲行业会议上展示了这些数据后，有三位高管找到我们，表示他们对自己所在行业在“力量曲线”上的位置感到十分震惊。这些数据清楚地表明，“力量曲线”对于个人的职业选择同样具有重要的参考价值，人们必须关注自己所在行业在曲线上的位置，以及该行业可能面临的发展趋势。然而，改变自己的行业并非一朝一夕就能实现，而社会因素更会加大适应的难度。很少有企业能够根据需要随时更换所处的行业——私募股权投资者和风险投资家则是显著的例外。对于任何经营企业的人来说，转换行业都是一件困难的事；但对某些人来说，这可能是必要的选择。如果你决定继续留在同一个行业，或许需要设法改变该行业的竞争格局，从而实现业绩的持续提升。例如，在澳大利亚的啤酒行业，几十年前这个行业的表现平平，但到了20世纪80年代和90年代，Lion和Foster两大企业对该行业进行了深度整合，使得这个行业对它们来说变得更具吸引力。拉纳航空公司为南美洲的航空业开创了一种全新的商业模式，并取得了巨大的成功。荷兰的Buurtzorg公司则彻底改变了该国的家庭护理行业，通过一种全新且人性化的服务模式，创造了经济与社会层面的双重成功。这些案例的共同点在于：它们都采取了大胆的创新举措，并全身心地致力于改变行业现状；它们所实施的策略也都取得了显著的成效。

 Consider changing locations, too

• dramatically altered the bases of competition in their industries and positioned themselves to capitalize on those changes. If you can’t rewrite the rules of your industry, you might have to re-position your portfolio toward new growth businesses. Strong re-allocators move more than 50 percent of their capital base to new industries over a 10-year period. Building the confidence to do so, hir-ing the right talent, and acquiring the necessary capabilities are tough mountains to climb.3 For many, in the face of overwhelmingly small odds to succeed in their current industries, finding those new oppor-tunities might be the only way to improve the odds of having a bright future. Nearly 25 percent of the companies in our database managed to shift more than half of their capital investment over the course of a decade. another 30 percent of companies shifted more than one-fifth. How did they do it? as we’ve said, one crucial piece is to shake free of the notion that the status quo is the baseline. Just keeping up is hard these days. The Power Curve is steep—and is getting steeper over time. Competitors are not sleeping. So, you have to throw out the notion that your industry is benign, and open the windows of the strategy room to a clear-eyed, cold-hearted outside view. 这些变化极大地改变了它们所在行业的竞争格局，使这些企业能够利用这些变化来获得发展机会。如果你无法改变自己所在行业的规则，那么你可能就需要调整自己的投资组合，转向那些具有发展潜力的新领域。那些能够成功重新配置资本资源的企业，会在10年的时间里将超过50%的资本投入到新的行业中去。然而，要建立起这样的信心、招聘到合适的人才，并获得必要的能力，确实是一道极其艰巨的挑战。对许多人来说，在当前所处的行业中，成功的机会微乎其微，因此寻找新的发展机遇可能是提高未来成功几率的唯一途径。我们数据库中，近25%的企业在十年时间里将超过一半的资本投资转向了新的领域，另有30%的企业将五分之一的资本进行了重新配置。它们是如何做到的呢？正如我们所说，关键在于摆脱“现状就是基准线”这种观念。如今，仅仅维持现状就已经非常困难了，竞争的态势日益激烈。竞争对手们可不会坐视不理。因此，你必须摒弃“自己所处的行业属于良性领域”这种观念，让战略规划室能够接纳那些客观、冷静的外部观点。
• Consider changing locations, too 也可以考虑更换经营地点。although geography doesn’t matter quite as much as industry, it still matters. You should assess the geographies where you operate and mar-ket your products or services for their growth potential and trends. as you can easily imagine, having exposure to high-growth geographies can also be an important factor in generating profitable growth. In general, having a granular perspective on where growth occurs is very important. a major computer manufacturer, for example, took granu-larity to an extraordinary degree in China. They looked at 680 major cities, grouped in 21 clusters, and prioritized cities, malls, and store locations within these malls for optimizing the return on their growth investments. Just by re-allocating sales and marketing spending, the company accelerated growth by 50 percent. 虽然地理位置的重要性不如行业因素那么显著，但它仍然很重要。你应该评估自己开展业务以及销售产品或服务的地区的增长潜力及发展趋势。可以想象，位于发展迅速的地区无疑也是实现盈利增长的重要因素。总体而言，深入了解哪些地区具有发展潜力是非常重要的。例如，某家大型电脑制造商在中国就采取了极为细致的分析方法：他们将全国680座主要城市划分为21个区域组，然后优先选择这些区域内的城市、购物中心及其中的店铺位置，以此优化自身的发展投资回报。仅仅通过重新分配销售和营销资源，这家公司的增长速度就提高了50%。

 Go micro

• Go micro 从微观角度入手吧。The crucial insight isn’t always about mega trends or major disrup-tion, either. One of the biggest challenges to acting on trends is the daily grind of serving your customers and responding to their needs in a timely manner. Success over the long term might simply be the accumulation of accurately understanding trends within your indus-try, making sure you have the flexibility to adapt and channel your resources to the best opportunities accordingly, and doing so faster than your competition. 关键的洞察力并不总是与那些宏观趋势或重大的颠覆性变化有关。在根据趋势采取行动的过程中，最大的挑战往往在于每天都要为顾客提供服务，并及时响应他们的需求。从长远来看，成功或许仅仅意味着能够准确把握自己所在行业中的各种趋势，确保自己具备足够的灵活性来适应变化，并将资源投入到最具前景的机会中——而且要比竞争对手行动得更快。
• It’s picking the right geographies, the right customer segments, the right micro segments—and re-allocating resources within your current business to capitalize on differentiated growth prospects and trends. One of our authors, Sven Smit, who co-authored Granularity of Growth a decade ago, showed that 80 percent of the variance in growth performance of companies is explained by the choices of the markets they operate in, and M&a.4 The PC company operating in China mentioned previously did exactly that—and executed an extremely granular approach to allocating resources ahead of growth trends. Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of marketing conglomerate WPP, describes how important it is to chase the opportunities within your industry:5 关键在于选择正确的地区、目标客户群体以及细分市场，然后重新配置现有业务资源，从而抓住那些具有差异化发展前景的趋势。我们的作者之一斯文·斯密特在十年前合著的《增长的精细化》一书中指出，企业成长绩效中80%的差异都可以用它们所选择的市场领域以及所进行的并购活动来解释。前面提到那家在中国开展业务的电脑公司正是这样做的——他们在预测到增长趋势之前，就极其细致地分配了资源。营销巨头WPP的首席执行官马丁·索雷尔也强调了在自身行业中抓住机遇的重要性。A major reason why we’ve grown [. . .] is that we’ve tried to focus on where the growth areas are. At the moment, if your business is located in Asia and the Pacific you’re going to grow faster than if it’s located in Western Europe. We try to identify growth trends in our industry and our continued growth rate will be dependent on that. It will also obviously be dependent on finding the best acquisitions, but primarily it will be pushing on open doors [. . .] It doesn’t matter how clever you are, if you’re pushing on a closed door it’s much more difficult. 我们能够取得发展，其中一个重要原因就是我们始终致力于寻找那些具有发展潜力的领域。目前而言，如果一家企业的业务位于亚太地区，那么它的发展速度必然会比那些位于西欧的企业更快。我们会努力把握所在行业中的发展趋势，而我们的持续发展速度在很大程度上取决于这些趋势；当然，找到合适的收购机会也同样重要，但归根结底，关键还是要抓住那些已经敞开的机会……无论你有多聪明，如果去敲一扇紧闭的门，成功的几率都会大大降低。Given the importance of industry position and trends, companies that best catch the waves build these perspectives into the day-to-day arsenal of how their management teams look at performance. Rather 鉴于行业地位与趋势的重要性，那些能够敏锐把握市场机遇的公司，会将这些考量融入到管理团队日常评估绩效的方式之中。事实上……

 The need for privileged insights

• than using sporadic deep dives, often based on internal accounting data and standard market reports, you can use comprehensive analytics suites to deliver within days what was impossible to do in months just a few years ago. You can have industry-level performance comparisons and dis-aggregations, portfolio benchmarks, growth MRIs, etc., all the way to investor analytics. 与那些仅依靠零星的深入分析来获取信息的方法相比——这些分析往往基于内部会计数据或标准的市场报告——如今，你完全可以利用全面的分析工具，在短短几天内获得几年前还需要花费数月时间才能得到的信息。你可以进行行业层面的绩效对比分析、投资组合的评估、增长趋势的监测，甚至还能为投资者提供各种有用的分析数据。

 Acting on the writing on the wall

• Acting on the writing on the wall 顺其自然，顺应形势发展。Having established just how important it is to get ahead of trends, we now hit the biggest snag of them all. It is often the very same things that make companies successful that also make it hard for them to act on trends. Incumbency can make it difficult to deal with disrup-tions. Industry leadership can make it hard to act on the writing on the wall—but not impossible. 既然我们已经认识到抢先把握趋势的重要性，现在却遇到了所有障碍中最棘手的一个。往往正是那些使企业取得成功的因素，也会使它们难以顺应趋势采取行动。固有地位会让人难以应对颠覆性变化；行业领先地位同样会阻碍企业根据那些显而易见的趋势信号采取行动——但并非完全不可能。

 The four stages of a disruptive trend

• catch your attention. Ray kurzweil, the inventor, futurist, and investor, says it is difficult to recognize the early stages of exponential growth curves in the first place, as most processes in our lives evolve in a more linear manner.7 While most companies have shown they are very good at dealing with obvious emergencies, by rapidly corralling resources and acting decisively, they struggle to deal with the slow, quiet rise of an uncertain threat that does not announce itself noisily. The second challenge is that the same factors that help compa-nies operate strongly at the top of an S-curve often hinder them at the bottom of a new one. Different modes of operation are required, but it’s sometimes hard to do the right thing—even when you think 首先，人们往往很难察觉到这种新的S型增长曲线。这种曲线起初的增长率较低，盈利能力也不明显，因此很难引起人们的注意。发明家、未来学家兼投资者雷·库兹韦尔指出，由于我们生活中大多数进程的发展方式都更为线性，因此人们最初很难识别出指数级增长曲线的早期阶段。虽然大多数企业在应对明显的紧急情况时表现得非常出色——它们能够迅速调动资源并果断采取行动——但当面临那些发展缓慢、悄无声息的潜在威胁时，它们却往往束手无策。第二个挑战在于：那些在S型曲线的上升阶段帮助企业取得成功的因素，往往会在其下降阶段成为企业发展的障碍。在这种情况下，企业需要采取不同的运作模式，但有时候，即使你已经意识到了这些问题，也仍然很难找到正确的应对之道。

 Stage one: Signals amid the noise

• you know what the right thing might be. New S-curves rather often also require different skill sets to succeed. The value of experience is demoted. The simplified idea of a new S-curve crashing slow motion into an old one gives us a way to look at the problem from the incumbent’s perspective and to appreciate the actual challenges each moment pres-ents. In the first stage, the new S-curve is not yet a curve at all. In the second, the new business model gets validated, but its impact is not forceful enough to fundamentally bend the performance trajectory of the incumbent. In the third stage, the new model gains critical mass, and its impact is clearly felt. In the fourth, the new model becomes the new normal as it reaches its own maturity. 你知道什么是正确的做法吧。新的发展路径往往也需要不同的技能组合才能取得成功，因此经验的价值会被削弱。将新的发展路径比喻成以慢动作逐渐融入旧的发展模式，这种简化的视角有助于我们从现有企业的角度来理解这个问题，并认识到每个阶段所面临的真正挑战。在第一个阶段，新的发展路径还根本算不上是一条真正的“曲线”；在第二个阶段，新的商业模式得到了验证，但其影响力还不够强，不足以从根本上改变现有企业的发展轨迹；在第三个阶段，新的商业模式积累了足够的规模，其影响力开始显现出来；在第四个阶段，当新的商业模式成熟之后，它就会成为新的“常态”。
• Stage one: Signals amid the noise 第一阶段：在嘈杂中寻找信号We already talked about how disruption hit the music business. Simi-larly, Spark New Zealand foresaw the deteriorating economics of its Yellow Pages business and sold its directories business in 2007 for $2.2 billion (a nine-time revenue multiple) while numerous other telecom companies held on until the businesses were nearly worthless. The newspaper industry had no shortage of similar signals. as early as 1964, media theorist Marshall Mcluhan observed that the indus-try’s reliance on classified ads and stock-market quotes made it vulner-able: “Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.”8 The rise of the Internet created just such a source, and start-ups like eBay opened a new way for people to list goods for sale without the use of newspaper ads. Yet Schibsted’s big move to adapt in 1999 was one of the few early actions by a media company. It’s not surprising that most other publishers didn’t react. at this early stage of disruption, incumbents feel barely any impact on their core businesses except in the distant periphery. They don’t “need” to act. It takes rare acuity to make a pre-emptive move, likely in the face of conflicting demands from stakeholders. What’s more, it can be difficult to work out which trends to ignore and which to react to. 我们已经讨论过颠覆性技术是如何影响音乐产业的。同样，新西兰的Spark公司也预见了自身黄页业务日益恶化的经营状况，于是于2007年以22亿美元的价格出售了该业务——这一售价相当于其当时营收的9倍——而许多其他电信企业却坚持经营下去，直到这些业务几乎变得一文不值。报纸行业也出现了许多类似的迹象。早在1964年，媒体理论家马歇尔·麦克卢汉就指出，报纸行业对分类广告和股市行情的依赖使其变得脆弱：“一旦出现其他能够便捷获取这些多样化日常信息的途径，报纸行业就会走向衰落。”互联网的兴起正是创造了这样的途径，像eBay这样的初创企业为人们提供了一种新的方式，让人们无需通过报纸广告就能发布待售商品信息。然而，施比斯特在1999年采取的这一重大调整措施，却是为数不多的媒体企业早期采取的行动之一。因此，其他大多数出版商没有做出反应也就不足为奇了。在颠覆性变革的初期阶段，传统媒体企业几乎感觉不到这些变化对其核心业务产生了任何影响，这些变化仅仅发生在一些边缘领域而已。他们“没有必要”采取行动。要在各种利益相关者的不同诉求面前果断采取先发制人的措施，确实需要非凡的远见卓识。此外，往往很难判断哪些趋势应该被忽视，哪些趋势需要加以应对。
• Denial can open doors for new entrants. aldi’s successful entry into the australian grocery market against an incumbent duopoly was, in part, enabled by the incumbents’ unwillingness to acknowledge just how attractive the aldi proposition would be to the australian consumer. In the early days, the impact was so small—too small to push competitors into a defensive position that would sacrifice margin. You would hear lan-guage about “managing threats,” but the actions suggested denial. Sixteen years later, aldi commands market share of approximately 13 percent in australia, which it continues to grow as it expands its store footprint. Gaining sharper insight, and escaping the myopia of this first stage, requires incumbents to challenge their own “story” and to disrupt long-standing (and sometimes implicit) beliefs about how to make money in a given industry. as our colleagues put it in a recent article, “These gov-erning beliefs reflect widely shared notions about customer preferences, the role of technology, regulation, cost drivers, and the basis of compe-tition and differentiation. They are often considered inviolable—until someone comes along to violate them.”9 事实上，忽视某些趋势或对某些趋势作出反应往往是一件相当困难的事情。阿尔迪能够成功进入澳大利亚食品杂货市场，并在现有双头垄断格局中取得一席之地，部分原因就在于那些现有企业不愿承认阿尔迪的产品对澳大利亚消费者而言具有多大的吸引力。在初期，这种影响还非常微小，小到不足以迫使竞争对手采取防御性措施，从而牺牲自己的利润空间。人们常常会谈到“应对威胁”，但实际采取的行动却往往体现了对这种威胁的忽视。十六年之后，阿尔迪在澳大利亚的市场份额已经达到了约13%，而且随着其门店规模的不断扩大，这一份额还在持续增长。要获得更深刻的洞察力，摆脱这一初期的短视思维，现有企业就必须挑战自己原有的“认知框架”，打破那些关于如何在特定行业盈利的根深蒂固的（有时甚至是潜意识中的）观念。正如我们的同事在最近一篇文章中所说的：“这些主导性的观念反映了人们普遍认同的有关消费者偏好、技术的作用、监管机制、成本驱动因素以及竞争与差异化本质的看法。它们往往被视为不可动摇的——直到有人出现并打破这些观念。”
• The process of reframing these governing beliefs involves identify-ing an industry’s foremost notion about value creation and then turn-ing it on its head to find new forms and mechanisms for creating value. The social side of strategy will, as usual, complicate the refram-ing. People have become accustomed to the old way of thinking, and changing mindsets is hard. Many also have businesses that are making a lot of money based on the old S-curve and, in the battle for resources, might—at least quietly—stem attempts to shift toward a new one. 重新构建这些主导性信念的过程，首先需要识别一个行业在价值创造方面所持有的核心观念，然后彻底颠覆这些观念，从而寻找新的价值创造方式与机制。与以往一样，战略制定的社会层面因素会使得这一过程变得更为复杂：人们早已习惯了原有的思维方式，改变观念难度很大；此外，许多企业目前仍依靠传统的增长模式赚取丰厚的利润，在资源争夺中，它们很可能会暗中抵制任何向新模式转型的尝试。

 Stage two: Change takes hold

• as personal-computer pioneer alan kay used to say, “Everybody likes change, except for the change part.” 正如个人电脑领域的先驱艾伦·凯曾经说的那样：“除了面对变化本身之外，每个人都喜欢变化。”
• Stage two: Change takes hold 第二阶段：变革开始真正发挥作用。The trend is now clear. The core technological and economic drivers have been validated. at this point, it’s essential for established compa-nies to commit to nurturing new initiatives so that they can establish footholds in the new sphere. More important, they need to ensure that new ventures have autonomy from the core business, even if the goals of the two operations conflict. The idea is to act before one has to. But with disruption’s impact still not big enough to dampen earnings momentum, motivation is often missing. Even as online classifieds for cars and real estate began to take off and Craigslist gained momentum, most newspaper publishers lacked a sense of urgency because their own market shares remained largely unaffected. and it’s not like the new players were making millions (yet). There was no performance envy. But Schibsted did find the necessary motivation. “When the dot-com bubble burst, we continued to invest, in spite of the fact that we didn’t know how we were going to make money online,” recalls CEO kjell aamot. “We also allowed the new products to compete with the old products.” Offering free online classifieds directly cannibalized its newspaper business, but Schibsted was willing to take the risk. The company didn’t just act; it acted radically. Microsoft made a similarly radical shift after then-CEO Bill Gates took one of his “think weeks” in 1995 and realized that the company was greatly underestimating the importance of the Inter-net. He returned with his famous “Internet memo” and fundamen-tally reoriented the company, killing some projects, re-allocating resources to others, and launching still more. Now, let’s openly acknowledge how hard it is for a company’s lead-ers to commit to supporting experimental ventures when the business is climbing the S-curve. Not many companies have a Bill Gates lying around. When Netflix disrupted itself in 2011 by shifting focus from DVDs to streaming, its share price dropped by 80 percent. Few boards and investors can handle that kind of pain when the near-term need is debatable. The vague longer-term threat just doesn’t seem as dan-gerous as the immediate hardship. after all, incumbents have exist-ing revenue streams to protect—start-ups only have upside to capture. additionally, management teams are more comfortable developing strategies for businesses they know how to operate, and are naturally reluctant to enter a new game with rules they don’t understand. In other words, the social side of strategy rules again. The upshot: Most incumbents dabble, making small investments that won’t flatten their current S-curve and that guard against canni-balization. Usually, incumbents focus too heavily on finding synergies (always looking for efficiency) rather than fostering radical experimen-tation. The illusion that this dabbling is getting you into the game is all too tempting to believe. Many newspapers built online add-ons to their classified businesses, but few were willing to risk cannibalizing the traditional revenue streams, which at this point were still far bigger and more profitable. and remember, at this time, Schibsted had not yet been rewarded for its early action: Its results looked pretty similar to its peers. In time, of course, bolder action becomes necessary, and executives must commit to nurturing potentially dilutive and small next-horizon businesses in a pipeline of initiatives. Managing such a portfolio requires high tolerance for ambiguity, and it requires executives to adapt to shifting conditions, both inside and outside the company, even as the aspiration to deliver favorable outcomes for shareholders remains constant. The difficulty is the tendency to protect the core because of short-term financial incentives and emotional ties that inhibit a shift to the periphery. 这一趋势现已变得十分明显，那些推动技术进步与经济发展的核心因素也得到了验证。在此阶段，对于那些已经建立起来的企业而言，致力于培育新的发展计划至关重要，这样它们才能在新的领域站稳脚跟。更重要的是，这些企业必须确保新业务部门能够拥有足够的自主权，即便这两项业务的目标存在冲突。其本质就是要在问题真正出现之前就采取行动。然而，由于颠覆性技术的影响尚未大到足以削弱企业的盈利势头，因此许多企业往往缺乏采取行动的动力。尽管汽车和房地产领域的在线分类广告开始蓬勃发展，Craigslist也取得了显著进展，但大多数报纸出版商并未感到紧迫，因为他们的市场份额几乎没有受到影响，而且这些新进入者也尚未获得巨额利润。因此，他们并没有产生竞争的欲望。然而，Schibsted却找到了必要的动力。“当互联网泡沫破裂时，我们仍然继续投资，尽管当时我们还不清楚如何通过在线业务盈利，”首席执行官Kjell Aamot回忆道，“我们也允许新产品与旧产品进行竞争。”提供免费的在线分类广告直接冲击了其报纸业务，但Schibsted愿意承担这一风险。该公司不仅采取了行动，而且采取了极其激进的措施。1995年，时任微软首席执行官的比尔·盖茨在进行了为期数周的深思熟虑后意识到，公司严重低估了互联网的重要性。他带着那份著名的“互联网备忘录”返回公司，彻底调整了公司的发展方向：终止了一些项目，重新分配资源，同时启动了更多新计划。现在，让我们坦率地承认：当企业正处于快速发展阶段时，其领导者要决心支持那些具有实验性的项目确实非常困难。毕竟，没有多少企业能拥有像比尔·盖茨这样的领导者。2011年，当Netflix将业务重点从DVD转向流媒体服务时，其股价下跌了80%。在短期内收益前景尚存争议的情况下，很少有董事会或投资者愿意承受这样的损失。毕竟，那些现有企业拥有可维护的收入来源，而初创企业所能获得的只有潜在的收益机会而已。此外，管理团队更愿意为那些他们熟悉运营模式的业务制定发展战略，而对于那些规则他们不甚了解的新领域，他们自然会犹豫不前。换句话说，战略规则中的社会性因素再次发挥了作用。其结果是：大多数现有企业只会进行一些浅尝辄止的投资，这些投资既不会改变它们当前的成长轨迹，也能有效防止被竞争对手蚕食市场份额。通常，这些企业过于注重寻找协同效应（总是追求效率），而忽视了推动根本性的创新尝试。人们很容易误以为这种浅尝辄止的做法就能让自己真正参与进这个竞争领域之中。许多报纸在其分类广告业务基础上开发了在线附加服务，但很少有企业愿意冒险破坏那些依然规模庞大、利润丰厚的传统收入来源。需要记住的是，在当时，Schibsted因其早期采取的行动并未获得任何回报，其经营成果与同行相比也并无显著差异。当然，随着时间的推移，更加大胆的行动变得必不可少，企业高管们也必须致力于培育那些可能对现有业务产生稀释效应、但前景广阔的新业务项目。管理这样一个业务组合，需要具备较高的容忍模糊性的能力，同时要求高管们能够适应公司内部及外部环境的变化——尽管为股东创造良好业绩的目标始终不变。然而，难点在于，由于短期财务利益及情感因素的束缚，人们往往会倾向于保护核心业务，从而阻碍对边缘业务的投入与发展。

 Stage three: The inevitable transformation

• Stage three: The inevitable transformation 第三阶段：不可避免的变革By now, the future is pounding on the door. The new model has proved superior to the old, at least for some critical mass of adopters, and the industry is in motion. at this stage of disruption, to accelerate its own transformation, the incumbent’s challenge lies in aggressively shifting resources to the new, self-competing ventures it nurtured in stage two. Think of the change as treating new businesses like venture-capital investments that only pay off if they scale rapidly, while the old ones are subject to a private-equity-style workout. Making this tough shift requires overcoming the inertia that can afflict companies even in the best of times. as we’ve seen, the social side of strategy almost guarantees a peanut-butter approach to allocat-ing resources, making a sharp reorientation hard to pull off. 如今，未来已经叩响了大门。新模型已被证明优于旧模型，至少对那些大量采用新模型的用户而言如此，整个行业也因此开始发生变革。在这个颠覆性发展的阶段，为了加速自身的转型，现有企业面临的挑战在于：必须将资源大力投入到那些在第二阶段培育起来的新业务中。可以将这种转变视为将新业务视为风险投资项目——只有当这些新业务实现快速扩张时，投资才能获得回报；而旧业务则应采用类似私募股权投资的重组方式来进行调整。要完成这种艰难的转变，企业必须克服即使在最佳发展时期也可能出现的惯性。正如我们所看到的，战略中的社会因素几乎会迫使企业采取保守的资源配置方式，这使得进行彻底的转型变得极为困难。
• Even when the course is reasonably clear, getting the team moving in a new direction can be hard. When an asian high-tech manufac-turer diversified into green energy, not a single member of the top team wanted to lead the business. The company brought in an outsider, but he was never able to marshal enough resources from the core business. 即使方向已经相当明确，要让团队朝着新方向前进仍然可能面临困难。当一家亚洲高科技制造商开始涉足绿色能源领域时，高层团队中没有一个人愿意负责这项业务。该公司最终聘请了一位外部人士来领导这项工作，但他始终无法从核心业务中调集到足够的资源来推进这项新事业的发展。The strategy was right, but the lack of a strong leader led to failure and a $10 million write-off just a few years later. Similarly, an australian bank wanted to expand into Indonesia to catch the trend of consumer growth and digital there. Not a single member of the top team raised his or her hand when asked for volunteers to build this growth pillar. The company abandoned the plans right then and there. To generate the acceleration needed at this stage of the game, incumbents must embark on a courageous and unremitting re-alloca-tion of resources from the old to the new model and show a willingness to run new businesses differently (and often separately) from the old ones. Perhaps nothing underlines this point more than axel Spring-er’s 2013 divestment of some of its strongest legacy print media prod-ucts, which accounted for about 15 percent of its sales, to Germany’s number three print media player, Funke Mediengruppe. These prod-ucts, such as The Berliner Morgenpost, owned by axel Springer since 1959, were previously a core part of the corporate DNa and emblems of its journalistic culture. But no more. axel Springer realized that the future value of the business was not just about continuation of today’s earnings but rather relied on the creation of a new economic engine. The German media company was “a mere Internet midget,” according to Financial Times Deutschland, until it leapt into action in 2005.10 It went on a shopping spree, acquiring 67 digital properties and launching 90 initiatives of its own by 2013. Most important was choosing a new area to expand into—online classifieds, which were both high-margin and high-growth—and doubling down on it. The lesson from axel Springer, like Schibsted, is that incumbents can win even with a late start, provided that they throw themselves in wholly. Today, over 80 percent of axel Springer’s EBITDa is derived from digital. When incumbents lack the in-house capability to build new busi-nesses, they must look to acquire them instead. Here the challenge is to time acquisitions somewhere between where the business model is proved and where valuations become too high—all while making sure the incumbent is a “natural best owner” of the businesses it acquires. Examples of this approach in the financial sector include BBVa’s acquisition of Simple and Capital One’s acquisition of the design firm adaptive Path. 这个战略本身是正确的，但由于缺乏强有力的领导者，最终导致了失败，几年后公司不得不注销1000万美元的资产。同样，一家澳大利亚银行试图进入印度尼西亚市场，以抓住当地消费市场增长和数字化发展的机遇，但在征求自愿参与这一发展计划的人员时，高层团队中没有人愿意站出来。于是这家公司当即放弃了这一计划。在当前这个发展阶段，要想实现快速发展，现有企业必须勇于将资源从旧的业务模式中重新调配到新的业务模式中，并愿意以不同于以往的方式（甚至往往是独立的方式）来开展新业务。或许没有什么比阿克塞尔·施普林格在2013年将旗下一些最核心的印刷媒体业务出售给德国第三大印刷媒体企业Funke Mediengruppe这一举动更能说明这一点了。这些业务，比如自1959年起就由阿克塞尔·施普林格拥有的《柏林晨报》，曾经是该企业的核心业务，也是其新闻文化的象征。但如今情况已截然不同——阿克塞尔·施普林格意识到，这些业务的未来价值并不在于维持现有的盈利水平，而在于能否催生新的盈利引擎。据《金融时报德国版》报道，在2005年之前，这家德国媒体公司只不过是“一个微不足道的互联网小企业”。然而从那以后，它迅速采取了行动：到2013年，它收购了67家数字媒体企业，并推出了90项自有项目。其中最重要的是，它选择了在线分类广告这一利润空间大且发展迅速的领域作为扩张方向，并全力投入其中。与Schibsted的经历类似，Axel Springer的经验表明：即使起步较晚，只要企业全身心投入，依然有可能取得成功。如今，Axel Springer超过80%的EBITDA都来自数字业务。当现有企业缺乏内部能力来开发新业务时，就必须通过收购来获得这些能力。此时面临的挑战在于：要在业务模式已被验证但估值尚未过高之间把握好收购时机——同时还要确保自身确实是这些被收购业务的“最佳所有者”。在金融行业，这种收购策略的典型案例包括BBVA对Simple的收购，以及Capital One对设计公司adaptive Path的收购。

 Stage four: Adapting to the new normal

• of film or CDs would not have solved the core problem that the digital replacement is fundamentally less profitable. The social side of strategy can, again, complicate the shift. Unlike axel Springer, most find it hard to part with a business that is so identi-fied with their history. When a very senior, proud, and successful execu-tive has run a business for so long, it’s hard for the CEO to pull resources away from them, even when the business is threatened. Boards and management teams find it hard to let go of old ideas, including assump-tions about profitability. In many companies, there is nothing more sacred than the business they originally were built around. The challenge is to adapt and structurally realign cost bases to the new reality of profit pools and accept that the “new normal” likely includes far fewer “rivers of gold.” 当一家企业建立在与新兴标准截然不同的传统技术基础上时，即便能预先预见这种技术的衰落，也无法解决根本性问题——因为数字化替代方案在本质上带来的利润空间要小得多。战略层面的社会因素同样会加剧这种转型的复杂性。与阿克塞尔·施普林格不同，大多数人很难舍弃那些与自己历史紧密相连的业务。当一位资历深厚、充满自豪感且事业成功的高管长期掌管着一家企业时，即使该企业面临生存威胁，CEO也很难抽调资源去支持其他业务。董事会和管理团队同样难以摒弃那些陈旧的观念，包括那些关于企业盈利能力的固有假设。在许多公司中，那些最初支撑企业发展的核心业务，无疑是最为神圣的存在。挑战在于如何调整成本结构，以适应利润来源的新形势，并接受这样一个事实：在“新常态”下，那些能够带来丰厚利润的机遇将会大幅减少。

 Big moves are essential

• communications technology company harris made four of the five big moves over the decade: programmatic mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures (M&A&d), dynamic resource re-allocation, productiv-ity improvement in terms of labor and overhead, and differentiation with gross margin expansion. check out their mobility dashboard in Exhibit 26. harris also benefited from an industry megatrend, low debt, and high r&d spending in the past. that’s seven boxes ticked out of the 10 mobility attributes, which is why harris had an 80 percent probability of moving from the middle to the top of the Power curve. the move produced a 13 percent cAgr in total shareholder return over the decade. 通信技术企业哈里斯在过去的十年中实现了五项重大变革：通过程序化的并购重组进行资产整合、动态调整资源配置、提升劳动力和管理成本的使用效率，以及通过扩大毛利率来实现产品差异化。具体内容可见图26中的移动性发展指标。此外，该企业还受益于行业发展的整体趋势、较低的负债水平，以及较高的研发投入。在移动性发展相关的十个指标中，哈里斯已经满足了七项要求，因此其从行业中等水平跃居顶尖的概率高达80%。这一系列变革使得哈里斯在过去十年中为全体股东带来了13%的总回报增幅。

 Corning’s story

• Programmatic M&A and divestitures 有计划的并购与资产剥离the myth that 75 percent of all mergers fail has long been dispelled. It was based on a statistic related to “announcement day effect” that failed to capture the reality of corporate value creation (not to men-tion the many smaller deals that don’t get announced but cumulatively matter a lot). M&A does work as a growth lever. but success depends very much on the type of M&A program a company is running.1 所谓“75%的并购交易都会以失败告终”这一说法早已被证伪。这一观点源于与“公告日效应”相关的统计数据，但这些数据并未真正反映企业价值创造的实际情况（更不用说那些未公开宣布但总体上具有重要影响的中小规模并购交易了）。并购确实可以成为企业实现增长的工具，但其成败在很大程度上取决于企业所实施的并购类型。the path that holds the most promise is programmatic M&A. Our research found that the most successful style of M&A executes on aver-age at least one deal per year in a program that cumulatively amounts to more than 30 percent of market capitalization over 10 years, with no single deal being more than 30 percent of market cap. companies that meet this standard on M&A have cleared the threshold and made a big move. 最具前景的发展路径是系统性并购。我们的研究发现，最成功的并购模式通常是：企业在十年时间内平均每年至少完成一项并购交易，这些交易累计带来的市值增长占比要超过30%，且没有任何一项交易的市值占比超过30%。那些能够达到这一标准的企业，已经成功迈出了关键一步，取得了显著进展。the findings make sense, considering that M&A requires mastery of capabilities through repeated deals. M&A requires a set of capabilities that are built over time, as a result of practice. companies that execute programmatic M&A over years, often decades, become true masters of the art of identifying, negotiating, and integrating acquisitions. 这些研究结果确实合乎逻辑，因为并购活动需要通过多次交易来逐步掌握相关能力。并购所需要的一系列能力，都是通过长期实践逐渐积累起来的。那些多年来持续开展系统性并购活动的公司，往往能够真正掌握识别目标企业、进行谈判以及整合被收购资产的艺术。companies that do very few deals struggle to execute well the few they do. Practice makes perfect—the adage holds. Our research has shown that infrequent, large deals tend to hurt value creation. 那些进行很少并购交易的公司，往往难以将其为数不多的交易做好。事实证明，熟能生巧——这句格言确实正确。我们的研究表明，那些偶尔进行但规模较大的并购交易，往往会损害企业创造价值的能力。
• corning shows the value of this move. At all times, they seek to maintain a strong M&A pipeline that is about 5 to 10 times their annual target for increasing revenue through acquisitions. corn-ing understands that doing three deals a year means it has to do due diligence on 20 companies and submit five bids. Axel Springer and WPP also show the value of programmatic M&A, as we described in a bit of detail in the section on the impor-tance of recognizing and acting on trends. Axel Springer, the giant german publisher, made a decisive move from print to digital by making 67 mostly small acquisitions between 2006 and 2012, while launching 90 publications organically and divesting itself of eight. the company’s disciplined approach to M&A repositioned it solidly for the digital age and led to a 10 percent cAgr in total shareholder return over the decade. While the company had lost some momentum as of the writing of this book, global marketing powerhouse WPP is a strong example of program-matic M&A. In the early days, following WPP’s pivot from industrial man-ufacturing to marketing services, major acquisitions were the fastest way to achieve scale in its new industry. WPP acquired JWt for $566 million in 1987 and Ogilvy for $864 million in 1989. those acquisitions were big enough that WPP admits stretching their balance sheet and risking dis-tress. however, since then, WPP has practiced programmatic M&A and made it one of the company’s strongest muscles. Over the 10-year sample 康宁公司充分证明了这一策略的价值。他们始终致力于维持一个规模庞大的并购计划，这些并购活动的规模通常是其年度收入增长目标的5到10倍。康宁明白，如果每年只进行3笔并购交易，那就意味着他们需要对20家公司进行尽职调查，并提交5份投标书。正如我们在讨论“识别并把握趋势的重要性”这一章节中所详细阐述的，Axel Springer和WPP也证明了程序化并购策略的巨大价值。德国巨头Axel Springer在2006年至2012年间进行了67次主要是小型收购，同时自然推出了90种新出版物，并出售了8种业务。这种有条不紊的并购策略使该公司成功适应了数字时代的发展，使得其全体股东的回报率在十年间增长了10%。虽然截至本书撰写时，该公司的发展势头有所放缓，但全球营销巨头WPP依然是程序化并购策略的典范。在早期，当WPP从工业制造领域转向营销服务领域时，大规模的收购是其在新行业实现快速扩张的最有效途径。1987年，WPP以5.66亿美元收购了JWt；1989年又以8.64亿美元收购了Ogilvy。这些收购的规模之大，以至于WPP承认这些交易使自身的资产负债表承受了巨大压力，甚至存在陷入经营困境的风险。然而从那以后，WPP开始采用程序化收购的方式，并将其发展成了公司的核心竞争力之一。在所研究的这10年时间里……

 Active resource re-allocation

• period, WPP made 271 acquisitions (that’s more than 1 per fortnight), which was 60 percent more transactions than the next busiest acquirer, Alphabet Inc. WPP began the period in the middle of the Power curve, with average economic profit of $8 million, but ended with a top-quintile-worthy $677 million. the company saw an 11 percent cAgr in total shareholder return over the decade. 在这段时间里，WPP共进行了271次收购行动（平均每两周就有一次收购），其收购次数是排名第二的收购方Alphabet Inc.的60%。WPP在这一时期的初期处于“表现中等”区间，其平均经济利润为800万美元；但到期末时，其业绩已跻身最佳行列，平均经济利润达到了6.77亿美元。在过去的十年里，该公司的总股东回报率增长了11%。the repetition of M&A will help you get past the curse of intro-spection. It also will help strengthen the capabilities of your business. M&A and post-merger integration programs are not innate talents; they are mastery acquired by doing them over and over again. 频繁进行并购有助于你摆脱自我审视带来的负面影响，同时也能提升企业的综合实力。并购以及并购后的整合工作并非与生俱来的能力，而是通过反复实践才能掌握的技能。
• Active resource re-allocation 主动调整资源配置Peanut butter can taste great on a sandwich, but this is not about taste, and spreading peanut butter doesn’t work for allocating resources—capital, operating expenses, and talent—to the most important growth opportunities across the company. Spreading resources evenly provides too much to those units that aren’t going to make a big move—or can’t—while depriving those one or two that could turn into huge opportunities. the social side of strategy creates peanut butter tendencies and causes inertia about those allo-cation decisions. 花生酱放在三明治上确实味道很好，但这里讨论的并非味道问题。将花生酱涂抹在食物上，其实并不能帮助公司将资本、运营费用及人才这些资源分配到公司最重要的发展领域。如果平均分配这些资源，那些不会取得重大进展或根本无法取得进展的业务部门就会获得过多资源，而那些有可能成为巨大发展机遇的业务部门则会因此被忽视。战略制定过程中所涉及的社会因素往往会使人产生这种平均分配资源的倾向，从而导致资源分配决策陷入僵局。[插图]the needed re-allocation isn’t just movement between industries, geographies, operating segments, business units, projects, products, or customer groups; it’s all of the above. breaking inertia, freeing up resources from under-performing units, and shifting them to over- performing units creates value at all levels irrespective of how you define those units. the problem, of course, is that in a world of finite resources, re-allocating resources to one inevitably requires deallocating resources from another—and this is where the friction and inertia set in. 所需的资源重新分配并不仅仅是指在不同行业、地区、业务部门、子公司、项目、产品或客户群体之间进行资源调配，而是涵盖所有这些方面。打破惯性，将资源从表现不佳的部门转移到表现优异的部门，无论如何定义这些部门，都能在各个层面上创造价值。当然，问题在于，在资源有限的世界里，将资源重新分配给某个部门，就必然意味着要从其他部门抽调资源——而这正是摩擦和惯性产生的根源所在。here’s a fact that will be near and dear to every cEO’s heart: At a time when average cEO tenures are rapidly dropping, cEOs who aggres-sively move in their first few years to re-allocate resources to new growth spaces tend to keep their jobs longer than their more reluctant peers.2 有一个事实，每一位首席执行官都会深有体会：在首席执行官的平均任期迅速缩短的当下，那些在上任初期就积极调整资源配置，将资金投向新的增长领域的首席执行官，往往比那些犹豫不决的同行能更长久地保住自己的职位。dynamic re-allocation creates value. the analytics are unambiguous. 动态的资源重新配置能够创造价值，相关数据分析结果再清楚不过了。
• companies that shift more than 50 percent of their capital expendi-ture across business units over 10 years create 50 percent more value over that period than companies that move resources at a slower clip. Again, just shifting some isn’t enough. You have to clear that 50 percent threshold to get the big boost in your odds of reaching the top quintile. 那些在10年间将50%以上的资本支出在不同业务部门之间进行重新分配的公司，在这段时期内创造的价值，要比那些以较慢速度调配资源的公司多出50%。同样，仅仅进行部分调整是不够的；你必须达到那50%的临界值，才能显著提升自己跻身最佳五分之一的概率。

 To re-allocate, you have to de-allocate

• Strong capital programs 强有力的资本规划the third big move is to expand faster than the industry. Pulling the capex lever turns into a big move when your capex/sales ratio exceeds 1.7 times the industry median for at least 10 years. Successful capital programs manage a pipeline: making sure you aren’t just investing in options that you know are “in the money”; making sure you’re investing in some riskier, medium-term options for the company and some longer-term, even-higher-risk options; making sure your pipeline of investments is full. 第三项重要的举措就是以快于行业平均水平的速度实现扩张。当企业的资本支出与销售额之比连续10年都超过行业平均水平的1.7倍时，这种资本支出策略就会产生显著的效果。成功的资本管理计划应当包含多种投资方案：不仅要投资那些肯定能带来收益的项目，还要为企业的中长期发展考虑一些风险较高的投资机会，甚至要涉足一些风险更高的长期投资项目；同时，要确保企业的投资计划始终处于活跃状态，有足够的投资项目可供选择。taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer tSMc succeeded by going anti-cyclical when the Internet bubble burst and demand for semiconductors dropped sharply. tSMc bought mission-critical equipment at the trough of the crisis and was ready for the demand as soon as it came back. tSMc had been in a head- to-head race before the crisis but pulled clear of the competition after it ended because of its through-cycle investment strategy. that laid the foundation for establishing technology leadership in subsequent years, making tSMc one of the largest and most suc-cessful semiconductor manufacturing pure plays in the world. the company’s total shareholder return grew at a 15 percent cAgr over the decade. 台湾半导体制造商台积电在互联网泡沫破裂、半导体需求急剧下降时采取了逆周期投资策略，从而取得了成功。它在危机最严重的时期购买了至关重要的生产设备，因此当需求重新回升时，已经做好了应对准备。在危机发生之前，台积电就已经与竞争对手展开了激烈的竞争，但正是由于其这种贯穿整个周期的投资策略，它在危机结束后成功拉开了与竞争对手的差距。这一策略为其在后续几年确立技术领先地位奠定了基础，也使台积电成为了全球规模最大、最成功的半导体制造企业之一。在过去的十年里，该公司的股东总回报率年均增长了15%。

 Caution on capex

• Distinctive productivity improvement 显著的生产力提升Productivity programs are a management favorite. they are mostly under management control, a lever that can be pulled with rela-tive certainty. companies like toyota made their fortunes based on productivity-led advantages. however, everybody does these programs, so do they really move the needle, or do they help to just keep up with the industry? 提高生产力的各项计划深受管理层的青睐。这些计划大多处于管理层的控制之下，因此可以相对有把握地加以实施。丰田等企业正是依靠这些以提升生产力为目标的措施取得了成功。然而，既然所有企业都在推行这类计划，那么它们究竟真的能带来实质性的成效，还是仅仅有助于企业跟上行业发展的步伐而已呢？

 Running fast and getting nowhere

• Productivity programs only make a real difference once you clear a high threshold. You have to deliver 25 percent more productiv-ity improvement than your industry median over a 10-year period. If your industry improves productivity at 2 percent per year, your pro-gram would need to consistently deliver above 2.5 percent per year. Sounds like not too much, but very few companies manage to do 25  percent better than the rest of the industry, every year, over a 10-year period. Pulling this lever hard normally requires extraordinary means and efforts. In our experience, Six Sigma, Lean, and other methodologies have contributed enormously over the last few decades to extraordi-nary productivity improvements.4 however, even more important than the methodology is the productivity program itself. being able to force the entire organization into consistently driving productivity over time, and capturing the bottom-line impact, are real differentia-tors. toyota succeeded in such a big way primarily by establishing a company-wide culture of continuous productivity improvement that is deeply embedded and constantly reinforced. 只有当你的生产率提升幅度超过一定的门槛时，这些提升措施才会真正产生效果。在10年的时间里，你的生产率提升幅度必须比所在行业的平均水平高出25%才行。如果所在行业的生产率每年仅提升2%，那么你的计划就必须能够持续实现每年2.5%以上的提升幅度。这个要求听起来似乎并不高，但实际上，很少有企业能够在10年的时间里每年都比整个行业取得25%以上的进步。要想实现这一目标，通常需要付出非凡的努力和采取特殊的措施。根据我们的经验，在过去几十年里，六西格玛、精益生产等管理方法为生产力的大幅提升做出了巨大贡献。然而，比这些方法本身更为重要的是生产力提升计划本身——只有当一个企业能够促使整个组织长期持续地致力于提升生产力，并切实将这种提升转化为实际的业绩成果时，才能真正取得显著成效。丰田之所以能够取得如此巨大的成功，主要是因为它在企业内部建立了一种持续改进生产力的文化，并使这种文化深入人心、得到不断强化。
• Running fast and getting nowhere 跑得飞快，却毫无进展。What struck us, though, is that many companies do feel like they’re running rather fast but getting nowhere—relative to competition. All too often, the hard work on productivity is given away in pricing or, worse, lost when other parts of the organization absorb the gains—the dreaded “german sausage effect”: You squeeze on one end, and the fat sloshes to the other end. 然而，让我们感到惊讶的是，许多公司确实觉得自己发展得很快，但在与竞争对手相比时却毫无进展。很多时候，那些为提高生产效率而付出的努力，要么因为定价问题而被白白浪费掉，要么更糟糕的是，被组织内的其他部门占为己有——这就是人们常说的“香肠效应”：你从一端挤压，脂肪就会流到另一端。
• car companies invested heavily to shorten the product lifecycle of models, from 12 years, to 7 years, to 5, and to even faster “refresh” rates—but everyone did so, so no one gained a sustainable advantage. Intel and AMd got into a chip productivity battle in the 1990s and spent billions but stayed basically even with each other. the phenom-enon recalls the arms race between the US and the former Soviet Union, where both improved at a furious pace but neither could win—until the mid-1980s, when reagan started seriously outspending the Soviets and pulled a big move on them. 汽车企业投入了大量资金来缩短产品生命周期——从12年缩短到7年，再到5年，甚至更快地更新产品线——但由于所有企业都在这么做，因此没有哪家企业能获得可持续的优势。20世纪90年代，英特尔和AMD在芯片生产效率上展开了竞争，双方投入了数十亿美元，但最终仍难分高下。这一现象让人联想到美国与前苏联之间的军备竞赛：双方都在以惊人的速度发展，却始终无法取得决定性优势——直到20世纪80年代中期，里根开始大幅增加军费开支，最终取得了压倒性优势。
• global toy and entertainment company hasbro successfully achieved the top quintile of the Power curve with a big move in pro-ductivity. hasbro faced challenges managing a complex portfolio of businesses utilizing a large network of global outsourced vendors. Inef-ficiencies emerged through labor-intensive processes and communi-cation lags across time zones, which became untenable when trends moved against the company—hasbro’s financial performance hit rock bottom with an operating loss of $104 million due to a big drop in toy revenue. hasbro embarked on a turnaround, which aimed for it to be a smaller but more profitable version of itself with a focus on its core brands (for example, transformers, tonka, Play-doh, and Monopoly).5 全球玩具及娱乐企业孩之宝通过大幅提升生产效率，成功跻身效率曲线的前五分之一。然而，在管理由众多全球外包供应商构成的复杂业务体系时，孩之宝也面临诸多挑战。劳动密集型生产流程以及不同时区之间的沟通障碍导致了效率低下，而当市场形势对公司不利时，这些问题更是变得难以忍受——由于玩具销售收入大幅下降，孩之宝出现了1.04亿美元的营业亏损，其财务状况跌至谷底。为此，孩之宝开始着手转型，致力于将自己打造成一家规模更小但盈利能力更强的企业，重点发展其核心品牌，如“变形金刚”、“通卡”、“彩泥”以及“大富翁”。the following decade saw hasbro consolidate business units and sites, invest in automated processing, invest in customer self-service, reduce headcount, and exit loss-making business units. hasbro’s Sg&A expenses as a proportion of sales fell from an average of 42 percent at the beginning of the research period to 29 percent 10 years later. Sales productivity lifted, too—by a lot, in fact. Over the 10-year period, hasbro shed more than a quarter of its workforce yet still grew total revenue by 33 percent (assisted by the successful launch of the Transformers movie franchise, an initiative led by current cEO brian goldner, who joined hasbro in 2000 to take over the suffering US toys segment). hasbro’s total shareholder return grew at a cAgr of 15 percent over the decade. 在接下来的十年里，孩之宝整合了旗下的业务部门和生产基地，投资于自动化生产流程以及客户自助服务项目，同时削减了员工人数，并逐步退出了那些亏损严重的业务领域。孩之宝的销售和管理费用占销售额的比例从研究期初的平均42%下降到了十年后的29%。其销售效率也得到了显著提升。在这段时间里，孩之宝虽然裁减了超过四分之一的员工，但其总营收仍增长了33%——这一成果在很大程度上要归功于《变形金刚》电影系列的成功推出。这一项目是由现任首席执行官布莱恩·戈德纳主导推进的，他于2000年加入孩之宝，当时该公司在美国玩具市场正处于困境之中。在整个十年期间，孩之宝为股东创造的总回报年均增长率达到了15%。
• how did bASF do it? the story has two main elements: merci-less performance management with a focus on return on capital, and participation in the global trends of demand growth and industry consolidation. 巴斯夫是如何做到这一点的呢？其成功秘诀主要有两点：一是注重资本回报的无情绩效管理，二是顺应全球需求增长及行业整合的大趋势积极行动。bASF believes that its verbund principle is instrumental in deliv-ering world-class productivity. verbund—literally “composite”—originates from bASF’s flagship plants, which can manufacture a diverse range of finished products, thereby creating flexible capacity utilization and pooled use of inputs. bASF today has six such plants: two in Europe, two in North America, and two in Asia. but today, the verbund concept permeates all of bASF, not just its production processes, which creates a culture of cooperation, knowledge-sharing, innovation, and operating efficiency throughout the organization. verbund drives efficiency in the consumption of resources: capital, opex, and headcount. Productivity matters, and it matters even more relative to other big moves when your business already is in the top quintile of companies 巴斯夫认为，其“联合生产”模式在提升世界级生产效率方面发挥了关键作用。“联合生产”这一概念源自巴斯夫的核心生产基地——这些基地能够生产多种最终产品，从而实现产能的灵活调配以及各类生产要素的协同使用。目前，巴斯夫在全球拥有六家这样的生产基地：其中两家位于欧洲，两家在北美，另外两家在亚洲。如今，“联合生产”模式已渗透到巴斯夫的各个业务领域，而不仅仅局限于生产流程之中，这种模式在整个企业中营造了一种合作、知识共享、创新与高效运营的文化氛围。这种模式有效降低了资本、运营成本以及人力资源的消耗，从而显著提升了生产效率。生产力至关重要，尤其是当你的企业已经跻身行业顶尖行列时，这一优势就显得更为突出。

 Are you playing to your advantage?

• differentiation requires long-term thinking—which is hard while you’re on the quarterly earnings treadmill. have we not cut the r&d budget when we needed to make this year’s budget? A fascinating analysis on the impact of private ownership shows that private firms invest approximately double the rate that similar matched public firms do. Engaging in the quarterly earnings game really does drive short-termism.9 did we not launch a product prematurely, sacrificing some margin, to make sure we had good news for the market? there is hardly an area in the repertoire of strategic moves that is more easily sacrificed for short-term gain than the differentiation lever. 差异化战略需要具备长远的思维能力——而在追逐季度盈利目标的压力之下，这种思维方式确实很难被坚持下去。今年在制定预算时，我们不就是削减了研发预算吗？有一项关于私有企业运营模式的分析指出，私营企业的投资力度大约是同类公立企业的两倍。参与这种追逐季度业绩的游戏，确实会促使企业陷入短视的决策模式。我们不也曾为了向市场传递积极的消息，而过早地推出产品，从而牺牲了一些利润空间吗？在各种战略手段中，几乎没有哪种手段比差异化战略更容易被用来换取短期的利益。
• 你是在利用自身优势来行事吗？this is where management objectives, incentives, and the long-term interest of shareholders often collide. When we use the 10 timeless tests of Strategy10 to check the quality of strategies, it is often test #2 that leads to the most extensive and revealing discussions: “does your strategy tap your true source of competitive advantage?” In other words: “does it strengthen your differentiation?” 正是在这里，管理目标、激励机制以及股东的长期利益往往会发生冲突。当我们运用“Strategy10”中那10项永恒适用的评估标准来检验各种战略的质量时，往往第2项标准会引发最为深入且富有启发性的讨论：“你的战略是否真正利用了你的竞争优势所在？”换句话说：“它是否有助于增强你的差异化优势？”that breaks into two questions. First, do you understand what the source of your competitive advantage is? do you know why you make money today? these turn out to be incredibly interesting questions. If you ask 10 people, you get as many different answers. At a retail bank in Australia, for instance, the leaders wanted to expand into overseas markets. the logic was: We’re very successful, 这实际上可以分解为两个问题。首先，你是否清楚自己竞争优势的根源是什么？你是否明白自己今天为何能够盈利？这两个问题其实非常值得探讨。如果你询问10个人，很可能会得到10种不同的答案。例如，在澳大利亚的一家零售银行，管理层就想要拓展海外市场，他们的逻辑是：“我们目前已经取得了巨大的成功，……”

 Big moves are cumulative, not silver bullets

• capital. It mostly flows to the winners, condemning many laggards to playing along. Big moves are cumulative, not silver bullets. You don’t just wake up one day and decide you’re going to have better productivity and then expect it to be there the next day. rather, what you’ll find is that making these big moves is really the accumulation of good practices that build up over time. the companies that successfully deliver on their big moves make them a part of their day-to-day mantra. It’s the constancy of purpose that makes moves turn into big moves. 资本总是流向那些成功者，而许多落后者则被迫继续跟在后面。那些重大的变革是逐步积累起来的，而不是什么能够一劳永逸的解决方案。你不可能某一天突然决定要提高工作效率，然后期望第二天就能看到成效——事实上，这些重大变革往往是需要长期坚持良好的实践才能逐渐实现的。那些成功实现这些变革的企业，会将这些做法融入到他们的日常工作中去。正是这种持之以恒的精神，才使得这些小小的行动最终能够变成真正的重大成果。

 1. From annual planning . . . to strategy as a journey

• even if the dynamics in the strategy room were perfect, the world doesn’t unfold in nice, neat, annual increments. Things change all the time, both in your business and in the markets around you. Potential deals do not occur when you have your annual board strategy session; they occur when they occur, and you need to be ready. Why not discuss some of the key strategic questions and performance every week, or month, at a mini-mum, complementing traditional annual strategic planning processes? 即使战略规划会议中的讨论进行得十分顺利，现实世界的发展也并不会以整齐有序的年度节奏进行。无论是在你的企业内部，还是周围的市场环境中，情况都在不断变化。潜在的商业机会并不会在你每年召开董事会战略会议时出现，它们会在适当的时候出现，而你必须为此做好准备。为什么不在每周或每月至少讨论一些关键的战略问题及业务表现，以此来补充传统的年度战略规划流程呢？
• Strategy aS a journey 战略规划就像一场旅程。• Hold regular strategy dialogues instead of just an annual process• Track your portfolio of initiatives across multiple horizons and update your strategy based on progress• Monitor a 3-years-back/3-years-forward rolling plan—if you • 应定期开展战略讨论，而不仅仅是每年进行一次评估； • 需跟踪各项计划在不同时间阶段的进展，并根据实际情况及时调整战略； • 应制定一个涵盖过去三年及未来三年的滚动计划，并持续对其进行监控。

 Frame strategy as choices

• in a world where we are just focused on getting to “yes,” plans can end up being discussed in a vortex, with no reliable calibration. now, based on what we’ve explained about the empirics of strategy, you can test a strategy with real facts. explicitly using the “outside view” about your aspirations and big moves can help you overcome some of the biases that let the social side bog down the discussions in the strat-egy room. you get the opportunity to move away from those 150-page decks that are designed to create diversions and numb the audience into saying “yes” to the proposal. 在一个人们只专注于达成“共识”的世界里，各种计划往往会在缺乏可靠评估标准的情况下被反复讨论。然而，根据我们关于战略实践的阐述，你现在可以用真实的数据来检验某种策略的有效性。明确运用“外部视角”来审视自己的目标与长远规划，有助于克服那些会阻碍战略讨论顺利进行的偏见。这样，你就不会再被那些长达150页、旨在转移注意力、让听众不假思索地同意提案的文件所束缚了。even staying put on the Power curve is often a lot of hard work, and most management teams and their leaders don’t want to just stay put. They want to push the envelope, to stretch themselves. The problem is that “hard work” and “pushing the envelope” have very little to do with the real issue: moving on the Power curve. Moves on the Power curve are relative to competition—and, guess what, your competitors are pushing the envelope, too. of course they are! We often hear teams complain about their ceos overloading them 即便只是维持在“发展曲线”上的现有位置，往往也需要付出巨大的努力，而大多数管理团队及其领导者并不想仅仅停留在原地。他们渴望突破极限、挑战自我。问题在于，“努力工作”与“挑战极限”其实与真正重要的目标——在“发展曲线”上取得进步——几乎没有关联。在“发展曲线”上的进展实际上是与竞争对手相比而言的，而你猜怎么着，你的竞争对手也在不断挑战极限。当然了！我们经常听到一些团队抱怨他们的首席执行官给他们安排了过多的工作。

 Play to win

• 4. From approving budgets . . . to making big moves 4. 从批准预算……到采取重大行动We’ve discussed how the social side of strategy can make the 3-year plan a cover for the real game: negotiating year 1, which becomes the budget. Managers tend to be interested in years 2 and 3 but absolutely fascinated by year 1, because that is where they live and die. So, we need a shift to end the situation where the strategy is little more than the opening act to the budget. 我们已经讨论过：战略中的社交层面是如何让这个为期三年的计划成为掩盖真正目的的幌子的——其实真正的重点在于第一年的谈判工作，而这一谈判结果最终会体现为预算方案。管理者们往往更关注第二年和第三年，但对第一年却格外关注，因为这一年的成败直接关系到他们的利益。因此，我们必须改变这种现状，让战略不再仅仅成为预算编制前的序幕而已。

 6. From sandbagging . . . to open risk portfolios

• and stock turns (return on inventory), then the incentives to release resources to more productive uses are stronger. in other cases, the solu-tions may be more complex but, nonetheless, need to be found to make sure that resources are allocated as effectively as possible. Without continual freeing of resources, strategy becomes a paper exercise constrained by a limited budget. That doesn’t work in a world where big moves are required. As you create resource liquid-ity, you breathe fresh air into the strategy room. big moves become possible. 当库存周转率较高时，将资源用于更具生产力的用途所带来的收益也会更加显著，因此人们更有动力去这样做。在其他情况下，解决方案可能会更为复杂，但无论如何，都必须找到切实有效的办法来确保资源能够得到最有效的配置。如果不能持续地释放资源，那么各种战略计划就只会成为受预算限制的纸上谈兵，而在那些需要采取重大行动的世界里，这种做法是行不通的。一旦资源流动性得到了改善，战略规划室就会重新焕发生机，各种重大举措也就变得可行了。nXP had 14 businesses when they spun off from Philips. over time, nXP moved all its resources to 2 businesses and freed cash and people from all the others. These 1-in-10 choices in automotive and identification, backed by full resource shifts, were big moves that cre-ated a winning streak for nXP—the likely movers were “resourced to win.” 恩智浦从飞利浦分拆出来时，旗下拥有14个业务部门。随着时间的推移，恩智浦将所有资源集中到了其中2个业务领域，从而释放出了其他业务所需的资金和人力。在汽车电子与身份识别这两个领域所做出的这些关键决策——通过全面调整资源配置来实现——为恩智浦带来了连续的成功。可以说，那些被重点投入资源以推动发展的业务部门，正是恩智浦取得成功的关键所在。

 Reflect probabilities in incentive plans

• instead, we propose an “unbalanced score card.” This has two dis-tinct halves: on the left is a common set of rolling financials with a focus on two or three, such as growth and roi, that connect up to the economic profit goals of the division and enterprise. on the right are a set of strategically relevant initiatives and actions that under-pin the plan. here is how the incentive works: your economic profit determines a 0–100 percent range for incentives. Then, each of the strategic changes can be a “knock-out” at the discretion of the “evalu-ator.” in other words, the way you got the results matters as much as the results. And a knock-out is a knockout. each factor can knock your bonus out, but there is human judgment, too: P50 moves will be treated more softly on failure than P90 moves. could that change the game? it would certainly force a new conversation! Play as a team. Some tasks have short time-horizons, have a very obvious link between activity and outcome, are easily monitored, and allow only a small role for luck. in these cases, detailed kPis with heavy individual incentives probably make sense. but for many other tasks, 相反，我们建议采用“不平衡积分卡”。这种积分卡分为两个部分：左侧是一组常规的财务指标，主要关注增长率、投资回报率等两三个关键指标，这些指标与部门及企业的经济利润目标紧密相关；右侧则列出一系列对战略实施具有关键作用的计划与行动。激励机制的具体运作方式如下：你的经济利润水平会决定你能获得的激励幅度，范围在0%到100%之间；而各项战略举措是否会被视为“关键因素”，则由评估者自行判断。换句话说，取得成果的方式与成果本身同样重要，而一旦被认定为“关键因素”，其影响将是决定性的。每个因素都可能使你的奖金被取消，但其中也包含人为判断的因素：对于那些风险为P50的任务，如果失败了，处罚会相对较轻；而对于风险为P90的任务，处罚则会严厉得多。这种差异会不会改变整个局面呢？肯定会引起新的讨论！ 团队合作至关重要。有些任务具有较短的时间跨度，活动与结果之间的关联十分明显，易于监控，且运气在其中起的作用很小。在这种情况下，制定详细的绩效指标并设置强烈的个人激励措施可能是合理的。但对于许多其他任务来说……

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