Part A :

Good morning, everyone.

大家早上好。

In the last few lectures I've been dealing with business finance, but now I'm going to move on to business systems.

在过去的几次讲座中，我一直在讲商业金融，但现在我将继续谈一下商业体制。

And in today's lecture I'm going to talk about what can go wrong when businesses try to copy their own best practices.

在今天的讲座中．我将讨论一下当企业试图复制他们自己的最优方法时会出现什么问题。

Once a business has successfully introduced a new process-managing a branch bank, say, or selling a new product-the parent organization naturally wants to repeat that success, and capture it if possible on a bigger scale.

一旦一个企业成功地引入了一个新的流程一比方说，管理一个支行，或者销售一个新产品一母公司很自然地想要复制自己的成功，如果可能的话，在更大的范围内实施这个流程。

The goal, then, is to utilize existing knowledge and not to generate new knowledge.

It's a less glamorous activity than pure innovation, but it actually happens more often, as a matter of fact.

这听起来并没有创新来的抓人眼球，但实际上它经常发生。

However, surprisingly, getting things right the second time is not necessarily any simpler than it was the first time.

然而，令人惊讶的是，想要复制成功并不比第一次取得成功容易。

Now, there's been a lot of research into how companies can repeat their previous successes, and it certainly hasn't been confined to the United States.

现在，有很多人研究企业如何复制他们以前的成功，这样的研究不是只有美国才在做。

It seems that most large industries are trying to repeat their own successes, and manage the knowledge they've acquired - but even so it has been shown that the overwhelming majority of attempts fail.

看来，大多数大行业都在试图复制自己的成功，管理他们所获得的知识，但即使如此，绝大多数的尝试已经表明这样做很容易失败。

A host of studies confirm this, covering a wide range of business settings: branch banks, retail stores, real estate agencies, factories, call centres…to name but a few.

一系列的研究证实了这一点，涵盖了广泛的业务背景：分支银行，零售店，房地产中介，工厂，呼叫中心…等等。

So why do-so few managers get things right the second or third time?

那么，为什么想要复制成功的经理大多都没有成功?

Let's consider one reason for failure-placing too much trust in the people who are running the successful operation, the 'experts'-shall we say.

让我们考虑失败的一个原因一过分相信可以成功管理的人，也就是我们所说的“专家们”。

Managers who want to apply existing knowledge typically start off by going to an expert-such as the person who designed and is running a successful department store-and picking their brains.

想要应用现有知识的管理者通常都会先去找一个专家，例如一个设计并且成功经营百货商店的人，然后学习他们的经验。

Now, this approach can be used if you want to gain a rough understanding of a particular system, or understand smaller, isolated problems.

现在，如果你想要粗略了解某一个体系，或是更小更加孤立的问题，就可以用这种方法。

The trouble is, even the expert doesn't fully grasp the whole thing because when it comes to complex systems, the individual components of the process are interwoven with one another.

问题是，即使是专家并没有完全掌握整个大局，因为在复杂的系统里，流程的独立部分通常是相互交织的。

The expert never has complete access to the necessary information.

专家从来都不能完整的接触到必要信息。

And the situation's complicated even further by the fact that experts are usually not aware of their own ignorance.

而且情况会变得更加复杂，因为专家们通常不能意识到自己的无知。

The ignorance can take various forms.

无知可以采取各种形式。

For instance, a lot of details of the system are invisible to managers.

例如，经理室看不见许多体制的细节。

Some may be difficult to describe learned on the job and well known by workers perhaps, but impossible to describe in a way that's helpful.

有些细节可能很难描述，因为要亲手做了才知道，一半都是工人才能看到的，但是要有建设性地描述这些细节就更加遥不可及了。

And there are some things that people know or do that they're not even aware of.

而且有些细节是人们知道或者做的时候都没有意识到的。