职场英语：老板们的“管理废话”不分性别

究竟谁的“管理废话”更多，男性还是女性？

过去我曾以为，自己知道这个最令人好奇问题的答案：男性每次都会“击败”女性。部分原因在于，男性更喜欢用体育方面的东西来隐喻，还喜欢在替补席上提高水平的时候就露上一手。

但这同时也是因为，之所以说行话，要么是为了让自己显得了不起，要么是以此替代思想；而女性则不太热衷于表现自己，除非深思熟虑之后觉得不得不吐，否则不那么轻易发言。

然而，最近发生的几件事，让我对男性“废话”更多的观点产生了怀疑。首先是我参加的一场商界女强人的午餐会。与会女士个个口若悬河，“沟通” (reaching out)、“创造价值(delivering value)”和“going forward”这样的词语比比皆是，能让所有男性感觉很是投缘。

就在第二天，我接到邀请，请我出席一场有史以来规模最大的妇女狂欢活动。届时，将有3万名女士云集加州的长滩(另有一百万名女士会在网上同步参与)，该活动由加州第一夫人玛丽亚?施莱弗(Maria Shriver)组织，届时米歇尔?奥巴马(Michelle Obama)、梅格?惠特曼(Meg Whitman)和比莉?简?金(Billie Jean King)均将致辞。

在该活动的宣传视频中，施莱弗女士废话连篇。

“活出真我，实际上是我们对自身、社会乃至这个世界所能做出的最大贡献，”她说。

活出自我算得上是一种贡献吗？抑或只是一种赘述？如果这真是我所能做的最大贡献，那么对于我本人、社会乃至整个世界来说，都是件丢人的事，因为我们显然应该做出更大的贡献。

长滩活动的主旨是授权、教育以及激发女性成为“变革的建筑师” (Architects of Change?)。但我不太明白，为什么说所有女性都愿意这样。建筑师的职责是设计建筑物，因此总会与承建商以及掏钱买房的住户发生争执。一般来说，如果我真想当一名建筑师，那么我最不愿意“构建”(在管理圈，人们已完全接受这个词用作动词)的就是“变革”。好的变革就是好的，不好的变革就是不好，有的时候，维持现状往往是最佳选择。

你可能觉得我这样做有点两边讨好。毕竟，这是在加州，而且此次活动面向的是所有女性，而不仅仅是那些出类拔萃者。实际上，其中一场“突破常规的对话”(breakout conversations)的题目就是：“你能否坦然自若地穿着泳衣亮相？”

而同样在本周，华尔街女强人(Women on Wall Street)年会活动上，则没有这样拐弯抹角。

该活动的邀请函开门见山：“横亘在你与自己下一个重大突破之间的障碍是什么？”

我已经知道这个问题的答案：自己的惰性以及其他能人的存在。

接下来的问题是：“在你能否将创新理念付诸于行动方面，你的观点发挥了怎样的作用？”

姑且先把“观点”放在一旁，我一开始就不明白，为何人人都想把理念诉诸于行动。华尔街唯一不变的信条就是赚钱，至于如何赚钱，则没有一定之规。

这一切所昭示的，并非所有女性都废话连篇，而是当人们开始把女性作为一个主题来考量时，人人都会说些废话。

实际上，如今甚至说“女人”这个词，对有些人而言都过于粗鲁。我的一位读者最近刚刚刚参加了阿克苏?诺贝尔公司(Akzo Nobel)的董事会，他告诉我，为了提升董事会的多样化程度，公司正在物色“有女性背景”的人选。

这是最为有趣的一个进展。他们是想寻觅一个变性人来担任董事？还是想物色那些女人当家作主的家庭熏陶出来的人？

就在百思不得其解之际，我收到心理科学联合会(Association for Psychological Science ，APS)发来的一封电子邮件，标题是：“姐妹过多会影响男性性欲。”

邮件中说道，有人以老鼠为对象，进行了大量非常严谨的实验，结果是：相对于与同性老鼠一起长大的雄鼠，与很多雌性老鼠一起长大的老鼠性欲较低。

因此，以下是将让本人成为变革建筑师的可诉诸于行动的理念：遴选委员会在任命之前，首先应该弄清楚一位男性候选人有多少姐妹。姐妹太多，或许无法教会一位男士如何言谈得体，但肯定能教会他如何举止得当。

(译者：常和)

Who talks more management nonsense, men or women?

I thought I knew the answer to this most intriguing of questions: the man beats the woman every time. This is partly because men are fonder of the sporting metaphor, and like to step up to the plate whilst raising the bar on their bench strength in the level playing field。

But it’s also because the point of jargon is either to make you sound big or as a substitute for thought, and women are less keen on sounding big, and less inclined to speak before they have worked out what, if anything, they have to say。

However, several things have happened to me recently to make me doubt the superiority of men at talking guff. The first was a lunch I attended for top women in business. As these women held forth, there was an orgy of “reaching out” and “delivering value” and “going forward” that would have made any man feel quite at home。

The next day I was sent the programme for the biggest women’s jamboree the world has ever seen. This week, 30,000 women will gather in Long Beach and another million will follow online an event organised by Maria Shriver, the First Lady of California, at which Michelle Obama, Meg Whitman and Billie Jean King will each say their bit。

The promotional video for the event shows Ms Shriver talking a blue streak of drivel。

“Being who we are is in fact the greatest gift that we can give ourselves, our community and our world,” she says。

Is being who I am a gift? Or is it a tautology? If it is the best gift I can give, then that’s a shame for myself, our community and our world, as we all surely deserve better。

The point of the conference is to empower, educate and inspire women to be “Architects of Change?”. But it’s not quite clear to me why anyone would want to be such a thing. An architect is someone who designs a building and then invariably falls out with the builders who build it and the clients who pay for it. And if I wanted to be an architect, the last thing I’d want to architect (the noun now perfectly acceptable as a verb in management circles) would be change, in general. Good change is good, bad change is bad, and sometimes the status quo is the best of all。

You might think I’m being a bit on the mean side. After all, this is California, and this programme is aimed at all women, not just bright ones. Indeed one of the “breakout conversations” is entitled: “Are you comfortable in a bathing suit?”

There is no such excuse for the Women on Wall Street who are also having their annual knees-up this week。

The WOWS invitation begins: “What stands between you and your next big breakthrough?”

I know the answer to this already: laziness and other people。

“How do your perspectives influence whether or not you can turn that innovative idea into an actionable initiative?” it goes on。

Leaving perspectives to one side, I don’t see why anyone would want to make an idea into an actionable initiative in the first place. The only good idea on Wall Street is to make money, and there are no pat answers as to how one does that。

What all this tells us is not that all women talk drivel, but that everyone talks drivel when they start thinking about women as a general topic。

Indeed now even saying the word “women” is too blunt for some. A reader who has just returned from an Akzo Nobel meeting tells me that to promote board diversity the company is looking for candidates with a “female background”。

This is a most interesting development. Are they looking for transgender directors to sit on the board? Or people who were brought up in households where women predominated?

The very second that I was pondering this, an e-mail landed from the Association for Psychological Science with the subject line: “Too many sisters affect male sexuality。”

It said that various experiments had been most rigorously conducted on rats, the upshot of which was that rats brought up with lots of sisters spent less time mounting other rats than those brought up with males。

So here is my actionable initiative that will make me an Architect of Change?. Selection committees should find out how many sisters a man has before giving him a job. Too many sisters may not teach a man how to talk properly, but they do teach him how to behave。