虚浮不求实 改名无法挽救马航

Whenever a company suffers a setback or calamity, business school professors and management journalists lay out the lessons for other businesses.

每当一家公司遇到挫折或者灾难，商学院教授和管理类资讯记者就会为其它公司总结经验教训。

That was true for General Motors and its faulty ignitions (make sure employees who spot problems bring them to management’s attention) and Starbucks’ UK tax difficulties (don’t underestimate consumers’ ability to do you damage).

在通用汽车(General Motors)的点火开关缺陷（教训是保证发现问题的员工将问题传达到管理层）事件上是这样，在星巴克(Starbucks)在英国遭遇税务问题（教训是别低估消费者给你造成损失的能力）的时候也是这样。

But there does not appear much other companies can learn from Malaysia Airlines’ travails. Its twin disasters – one passenger jet lost and the other apparently shot down – are too unusual to generate advice for anyone else.

但是其它公司似乎没办法从马来西亚航空公司(Malaysia Airlines)的困境中学到什么。一架客机失踪，一架客机则明显被击落，马航遭遇的这两起灾难太不寻常，不能给其他人带来什么重要教训。

It is hard to see what the airline itself can learn from the tragedies. The first is still unexplained. The second was not its fault. It was flying over a war zone, but so were other respectable carriers.

马航自身能从这些悲剧中学到什么也很难说。第一起事故至今还未查明原因。第二起事故错不在马航。马航客机的确飞经战区，但是其他优秀航空公司也这样做。

Given these awful misfortunes, it is understandable that the airline is contemplating changing its name and starting again as something else.

考虑到这些可怕的不幸事故，也难怪马航正在考虑更改公司名称，以新的身份重新开始。

We can see how extraordinary Malaysia Airlines’ plight is by looking at the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s safety report.

看一看国际民航组织(International Civil Aviation Organisation)的安全报告，我们就能理解马航的困境有多不寻常了。

In 2013, 3.1bn passengers took a scheduled international or domestic flight. Of those, 173 died in an accident. This year’s figures will be higher – there have been other fatal crashes, including that of Air Algérie in Mali – but they will still be a tiny proportion of passengers.

2013年，有31亿名乘客乘坐国际或者国内的定期航班，其中有173人死于事故。今年的死亡人数会更高——除了马航两起事故以外，还发生了其他坠机事故，包括阿尔及利亚航空公司(Air Algérie)的飞机在马里坠毁——但依然只会占乘客总数的很小一部分。

But not even these statistics show how unusual the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and the downing of Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine were.

但仅仅这些统计数字还不能说明马航MH370航班失踪和MH17航班在乌克兰东部坠落有多么不同寻常。

The vast majority of air accidents take place while aircraft are landing or taking off. Just 10 per cent of 2013 accidents happened mid-flight.

绝大多数飞行事故是在飞机降落或者起飞时发生的。在2013年发生的飞行事故中，仅有10%发生在飞行途中。

And while both Malaysian aircraft were Boeing 777 jets, turboprop planes are more likely to crash. As many as 46 per cent of aircraft accidents involve turboprops, even though they account for a far smaller percentage of the world’s commercial fleet than jets do.

马航失事的两架客机都是波音(Boeing)777喷气式飞机，相比之下，涡轮螺旋桨飞机更有可能发生坠机事故。在世界商用飞机中，涡轮螺旋桨飞机所占比例比喷气式飞机要小得多，但前者发生的空难却占到了46%的比例。

There will be small lessons the airline industry can learn from Malaysia Airlines’ experience. They will have another look at how they communicate with customers after a tragedy. I was impressed, flying on Malaysia Airlines after its first disaster, to note that, rather than avoiding the subject, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, its chief executive, expressed his sorrow on the front page of the in-flight magazine.

航空业可以从马航的事件中学到一些小小的经验。他们应该反思在悲剧发生后怎么和客户沟通。在马航的第一起灾难发生后，我乘坐了马航的客机，发现马航没有对事故避之不谈，在飞机上的杂志的头版文章中，马航首席执行官艾哈迈德•乔哈里•叶海亚(Ahmad Jauhari Yahya)表达了他的悲痛之情，这给我留下了深刻的印象。

As to the lessons on flights across war zones: as Hugh Dunleavy, Malaysia Airlines’ commercial director, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, a central international body should determine what is safe, not individual airlines.

对于飞经战区的飞机的经验教训是：就如马航的商业总监休•邓利维(Hugh Dunleavy)在《星期日电讯报》(Sunday Telegraph)上发表的文章中所写的，应该由一个主要国际组织，而非个体的航空公司，来确立安全标准。

Malaysia Airlines appears to have suffered from two episodes of extreme misfortune rather than mismanagement (unless we discover something new about the lost aircraft).

让马航陷入困境的，似乎是这两起极其不幸的事故，而非管理不善（除非我们发现失踪客机的新信息）。

Yet its business is suffering. Bookings are down. “In this part of the world in Asia people are more superstitious so this works against them,” an industry executive told the Financial Times. It is not just in Asia; many others will hesitate before booking one of its flights.

然而马航的业务正在蒙受损失。机票预订减少了。“亚洲人更加迷信，所以这会对他们产生不好的影响，”一位行业主管告诉《金融时报》的记者。不只是在亚洲，其他地方的人在预订马航航班时也会犹豫不决。

So should Malaysia Airlines change its name? One person I expected to answer “definitely” was Paul Argenti, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck business school who, over a decade ago, studied 40 years of name changes and found that the company benefited in every case.

那么马航是否应该改名？我认为有个人应该会回答“当然”，那就是达特茅斯大学(Dartmouth)塔克商学院(Tuck business school)的保尔•阿根提(Paul Argenti)教授。十多年前，阿根提教授研究了40年以来公司改名的案例，发现每个案例中改名的公司都从中受益了。

He told me he expected to find the same results today. The reason was that a name change usually went along with a new strategy.

他告诉我，他认为现在也会是同样的结果。因为改名的同时，公司通常也会采取一种新的发展战略。

Malaysia Airlines needs one of those, and did even before its twin tragedies. The company has made net losses for the past three years. As with many large carriers, its long-haul operations are doing reasonably well, but its short-haul business is suffering because of competition from low-cost carriers such as AirAsia.

马航需要一项新策略，甚至早在两起悲剧发生之前就需要新策略了。在过去的三年中，马航连年净亏损。与其他许多大型航空公司一样，马航的长线航班业绩相当良好，然而短线航班业务则因遭受来自亚洲航空(AirAsia)等廉价航空公司的竞争而表现不佳。

But Prof Argenti told me that he thought that, even with a new strategy, Malaysia Airlines was the one company he had come across that should not change its name. There would be no point. Its disasters were just too big.

可是阿根提教授却告诉我，他认为，即使采取新策略，马航也是目前为止他遇到的唯一一个不应该改名的公司。因为改名毫无意义。马航遭遇的灾难太严重了。

What about Valujet, the US airline that, after a 1996 crash in the Florida Everglades, re-emerged, successfully, as AirTran? That was a US incident, Prof Argenti said. “This is a global story that everyone is following.”

那么美国瓦卢杰航空公司(Valujet)的例子呢？1996年在佛罗里达大沼泽地发生坠机事故后，这家公司更名为穿越航空(AirTran)，成功再次崛起。阿根提教授说，那是一起美国的事故。“马航事件则是每个人都在关注的全球性事件。”

He is right. Whatever Malaysia Airlines becomes, people will remember what it was. It needs to fix its business and win back fliers’ trust. A name change won’t help.

他是对的。不管马航改叫什么，人们都会记得它曾经叫着什么。马航需要重整业务，赢回乘客的信任。改名起不了什么作用。