新规则下的人力资本宣言

I recently spoke at the World Strategy Forum event in Seoul, where the theme was “The new rules: reframing capitalism. Predictably, the discussion focused on global financial infrastructure. But, as one of the few non-economist speakers, I instead argued that employment/unemployment is even more affected by the changing nature of work – and the wildly accelerating effectiveness of technology, which is encroaching on activities that employ tens of millions of people, especially in the developed world.

最近，我在韩国首尔举行的、主题为“新规则：重塑资本主义的世界战略论坛(World Strategy Forum)上发表了讲话。全球金融基础设施自然是此次讨论的焦点所在，但作为现场少数非经济学出身的发言人之一，我话锋一转，指出由于工作性质的变化，以及技术带来的生产效率的迅猛提高，就业/失业问题受到的影响更为严重。技术侵入了涉及千万人就业的生产活动，尤其是在发达国家。

This is, I believe, in the mid to long term, both the number one problem and the number one opportunity for businesses and wider society. But the specifics of what follows were triggered by the debate at the event and were eventually encapsulated in what I grandly call: “A human capital development manifesto at the enterprise and national government level.

我认为，这是企业和整个社会在中长期内的头号问题和头号机遇。但之后，接下来何去何从在论坛上引起了激烈讨论，我把这些内容不失豪迈地概括为：“企业和国家政府层面的人力资本发展宣言。

●Maximising what I’ll call “gross domestic development of the workforce, driven at the level of the individual enterprise, is the primary source of growth, productivity, wealth creation and social stability.

·经济增长、生产率、财富创造和社会稳定的第一源泉，是从企业层面出发，实现我所称的员工“内部总发展(gross domestic development)最大化。

●Development of “human capital should always be the top priority – albeit a commandment all too often honoured in the breach. But this is an inescapable imperative in an age in which imaginative brain-work is de facto the only plausible survival strategy for individual enterprises of consequence and higher-wage nations in their entirety. Generic “brain-work, the traditional and dominant white-collar activities that now employ the bulk of us, is increasingly undertaken by exponentially enhanced artificial intelligence applied at ever increasing speed.

·发展“人力资本始终应放在首位，尽管人们对这一金科玉律往往是说一套做一套。如今，无论是单个大型企业，还是整个高工资国家，只有依赖创造性脑力劳动，方有机会立于不败之地。在这种情况下，发展人力资本成为必须要面对的当务之急。而一般的“脑力劳动，即传统的、占主导地位并且涉及大量就业的白领活动，正越来越快地被日新月异的人工智能取代。

●Generals and admirals (and symphony conductors and sports coaches and police) obsess about continuous training. Why is it an almost dead certainty that in a random 30-minute interview with a CEO you are unlikely to hear a word on this? I would hazard a guess that most CEOs see an IT investment as a “strategic necessity, but training expenses as “a necessary evil. This must be set on its ear, with training in its broadest sense placed atop the enterprise agenda, on a par with capital expenditures. Moreover, the imaginativeness of the training must be subject to a quantum leap.

·军队将领、交响乐指挥、体育教练和警察都对重复不断的训练痴迷有加。但为何，随便挑一场30分钟的采访，CEO们几乎都不会对此说上什么？我不妨大胆猜测一下：很多CEO视IT投资为“战略需要，却把培训开支看作“躲不掉的灾祸。因此下面的建议一定会引起一片哗然：将涵盖内容广泛的培训摆在企业日程的首要位置，使其与资本支出的重要性不相上下。另外，培训的创造性也必须取得质的飞跃。

●Proposition: the chief “training officer becomes the top staff job in a business, with a charge equivalent in gravity to that of the chief financial officer or chief information officer.

·提议：应在企业高层职位中设置首席“培训官，其职责应与首席财务官和首席信息官同等重要。

●It is imperative, and long overdue, that we maximise the rate of development of women leaders at every level. Among other reasons, evidence suggests they are more likely than men to champion the imperative of maximising human asset development.

·尽管迟迟未能付诸实施，但对各个层级女性领导人的加快培养刻不容缓。其中一项原因是，有证据表明女性比男性更倾向于支持人力资本最大化发展的紧迫使命。

●The educational infrastructure must be upended to underpin support for the creative jobs that will be more or less the sole basis for employment, economic growth and wealth creation. Central to this would be a dramatically enhanced, appreciated, compensated and accountable role for teachers; teaching should be a career of choice for a nation’s best and brightest. Instilling insatiable curiosity, the foremost attribute of a creative person, is no easy task; but it cannot be avoided if one looks at future definitions of employability.

·必须从根本上改变教育基础设施，以加强对创造性工作岗位的支持，这些岗位多少将成为就业、经济增长和财富创造的唯一基石。要实现这一点，最关键的是显著提高教师的地位，让他们受到更大的重视，获得更高的收入，肩负更多的责任——教书育人，应当成为一国英才的首选职业。永不满足的求知欲是创新型人才的最大特点，培养它并非易事，但绝不可以逃避这一使命——展望未来对可雇性的定义便知其中原因。

●Most of us work in smaller enterprises; hence growth objectives based on human capital development must extend even to single-person enterprises. Collective productivity improvement through human capital development among small businesses has an unimaginably large, and undervalued pay-off. Many small businesses appreciate this, but they are typically unprepared to take the steps necessary to engage their employees in seeking improvements in productivity and creative work.

·大多数人就职于规模较小的企业，因此以人力资本发展为依据的增长目标必须延伸至哪怕是只有一个人的企业。小企业通过人力资本开发提高集体生产率，其中的益处大到难以想象，并且被低估了。众多小企业深知这一点，但常常准备不足，无法通过必要措施来让员工参与提高生产率，增加创造性成果。

●Associated with the above is a radical reorientation of leadership education and development throughout the enterprise/education/ continuing-education establishment. The MBA and executive education will require open-heart surgery – aimed at shifting focus from finance and marketing to human resources. To deal with the most probable future employment scenarios, leaders will need to be masters of the liberal arts – a clear-cut determinant of responding to the universal need to pursue creative work.

·与上述措施相配合，应在整个企业、教育、继续教育体系层面对领导能力教育和发展进行彻底重新定位。MBA和高管教育需要一场大手术，将重点从金融和营销转变为人力资源。为应对将来最有可能发生的就业状况，企业领导人需要精通人文科学——这一点也无疑决定了他们能否应对对创造性工作的普遍需求。

The agenda implied by my “manifesto is a long way from where we are now. But?in?my?opinion this, or something like it, falls into a category of “not optional.

我们的现状与“宣言中提到的日程还相去甚远，但在我看来，追求这个目标（或是类似的目标）是势在必行、别无选择的。

The writer is co-author of ‘In Search of Excellence’

本文作者为《追求卓越》(In Search of Excellence)的合著者。