評論
打印
Good morning, everyone.In the last few lectures I've been dealing with business finance, but now I'm going to move on to business systems.
在過去的幾次演講中，我提到了企業財務處理的問題，但是現在我將談談商業系統。
And in today's lecture I'm going to talk about what can go wrong when businesses try to copy their own best practices.
在今天的演講中，我將談一談當企業試圖復制以往的成功案例時會遇到的錯誤。
Once a business has successfully introduced a new process - managing a branch bank, say, or selling a new product
一旦商業成功地引進一套新的程序，比如說管理銀行分行，或銷售某新產品，
the parent organisation naturally wants to repeat that success, and capture it if possible on a bigger scale.
母公司自然想復制其成功模式，如果可能的話，在更大范圍上將之據為己有。
The goal, then, is to utilise existing knowledge and not to generate new knowledge.
目的是使用已有知識，而不產生新的知識。
It's a less glamorous activity than pure innovation, but it actually happens more often, as a matter of fact.
這比純粹的發明來說就缺乏魅力了，但是其實這更為普遍。
However, surprisingly, getting things right the second time is not necessarily any simpler than it was the first time.
然而令人驚訝的是，第二次做好一件事不一定比第一次容易。
Now, there's been a lot of research into how companies can repeat their previous successes,
現在有很多研究調查公司是如何復制它們先前的成功案例，
and it certainly hasn't been confined to the United States.
而且這當然不局限于美國。
It seems that most large industries are trying to repeat their own successes,
看起來似乎大多數大型工業試圖復制他們自己的成功模式，
and manage the knowledge they've acquired - but even so it has been shown that the overwhelming majorityof attempts fail.
操控他們已有的知識，但是即使如此，大多數的嘗試還是歸于失敗。
A host of studies confirm this, covering a wide range of business settings:
大量的研究證明了這點，其中包括許多商業背景：
branch banks, retail stores, real estate agencies, factories, call centres...to name but a few.
銀行分行、零售店、房地產中介、工廠、電話中心...... 這里只列舉幾例。
