Fire-fighting foam starves the flames of oxygen. A handful of overused words have the same deadening effect on people’s ability to think. These are words like “innovation”, “collaboration”, “flexibility”, “purpose” and “sustainability”. They coat consultants’ websites, blanket candidates’ CVs and spray from managers’ mouths. They are anodyne to the point of being useless.
制氧灭火器的缺乏。供人们的能力去思考覆盖这层面的用语。比如从信息的入口处有“创新设备”，“合作成果“”灵活方便””计划“和”持续性“.他们披盖着顾问，网址，搜索引擎，CVS 和喷射器。他们分析这些都有被引用。
These words are ubiquitous in part because they are so hard to argue against. Who really wants to be the person making the case for silos? Which executive secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation officer? Is it even possible to have purposelessness as a goal? Just as Karl Popper, a philosopher, made falsifiability a test of whether a theory could be described as scientific, antonymy is a good way to work out whether an idea has any value. Unless its opposite could possibly have something to recommend it, a word is too woolly to be truly helpful.
这些单词的普遍应用因为他们是很难一致。谁真的想人制造一个摸具？管理层是私底下渴望成为一个停滞不前的长官?甚至有可能将漫无目的作为目标？正如卡尔波普尔，一位哲学家，做了一个证伪实验，一个理论是否作为科学一样被发，证伪是一个解决这个意向是否有任何价值的一种方法。直到这个意图可能成为某些事物的告诫。一个词太含糊不清了没有实际的意义。
Woolliness is the enemy of accuracy as well as utility. A word like “sustainability” is so fuzzy that it is used to encompass everything from a business that thinks sensibly about the long term to the end of capitalism. This column may well count as sustainable because it keeps recycling the same ideas. The lack of precision opens the door to grandstanding and greenwashing. Earlier this year Morningstar, a data provider, culled 1,200 funds from its European sustainable-investment list after a closer review of their prospectuses and annual reports. Regulators in America and Europe have been scrambling to define standards of sustainability disclosure.
模棱两可是精准的对立面但和实用一样好。比如单词“持续性”是一个围绕任何事物一个模糊不清的单词，是资本主义中用于商业上的认知。专栏也可以作为一种可持续性的因为它围绕同样的主题。精准度的缺乏开启了哗众取宠和掩饰之门。早些年的星辰，资料供应者，欧洲的可持续投资目录内部章程和分析报告中选出1200种基金。在美国和欧洲的校对者被推崇阐明了可持续公开的标准。
Woolliness also smothers debate about whether you can have too much of a good thing. Take “innovation”, for example. Too much innovation can be a turn-off for customers. A recent paper from Yingyue Luan and Yeun Joon Kim of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge looks at the effect of perceived novelty on the response of audiences to films. The researchers find that there is a sweet spot in experimentation, where films are distinctive enough to pique curiosity but not so radical that they up-end expectations. In that space between “Home Alone 4” and “Tenet” lie the real moneymaking opportunities.
最模棱两可让人窒息的数据关于是否你能拥有太好的东西。就拿”创新“来举个列子，太多的创新是为客户的。最近显示从剑桥大学商学学院毕业的Yingyue Luan and Yeun Joon Kim两个人为了影片在宣传会上寻找刺激的效果。调查者发现这是一个非常甜蜜的实验。电影在处理抱怨好奇心上非常独特，但是没有原则的顶级实验。在”智多星4“和”信条“之间位于现实的赚钱机会。
Innovation can also be trying for employees. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently looked at factors that predicted high levels of attrition among companies’ workforces. To their surprise, they found that employees were more likely to leave firms – like Tesla and Nvidia – with high levels of innovation. The authors hypothesise that the long hours and high pressure that typify innovative cultures can lead to higher staff turnover.
创新对雇工来说是难以忍受的。近来在麻省理工学院有一位学者在寻找一个因素关于消磨在公司强压下工作预测有高水准。使得他们惊奇的是，他们发现雇工比较喜欢离开这种严酷高水平创造的地方，像特斯拉，英伟达这些公司。作者假设高强度的工作来导致 了高频率的更换工作。
“Collaboration” is another word that repays closer scrutiny. It can be marvellous: boundaries dissolved, expertise and ideas flowing. But collaboration can also run wild. It often means having more and more people on every email thread and in every meeting. It can paralyse decision-making, as everyone and their dog gets to weigh in with their view. (To be fair, the dog often makes the most useful points.)
”合作“是接近与作为监督 回报的另一个单词。它可以是极好的：在技术和思想上融洽的交流。但是合作也会广泛。它也越来愈多地串流在邮件和每一个会议。它使决策瘫痪，由于每个人都看重他们自己的看法。（要公平，跟踪使得这个观点得到最大的发挥）。
And the rewards that flow from collaborativeness are uneven. “The No Club”, a new book by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart, examines the disproportionate amount of “non-promotable work” done by women – tasks like covering absences, organising logistics and mentoring. Collaboration is a much less attractive proposition if helping others means spending less time on the sort of work that gets recognised when it is time to hand out actual promotions.
从不公平的和和执行得到的反馈是”没有凝聚力“。琳达的一本新书，巴布科克，布伦达贝瑟，妇女没有促进工作的不平等的考核--补充者， 组织者，和经理。合作何等的有吸引力如果大家彼此合作可以花很少的时间达到肯定当时间不在控制的范围内。
A host of other woolly words also mask genuine trade-offs. The supremely fluffy notion of “purpose” disguises hard-edged questions of how managers should balance the interests of multiple stakeholders. “Flexibility” sounds like a boon to workers, but the reality for employees of coping with last-minute changes to schedules is often very different. The MIT study found that having a regular schedule was six times more powerful as a predictor of blue-collar-employee retention than having a flexible schedule.
另一个模棱两可热衷的单词是掩盖事实。经理如何平衡在诸多利益者努力伪装问题制造出”计划“这样极为无聊的意向。“灵活”听上去对工作人员很有益，但是对付有计划的最后几次转变的雇工来说是非常有差异的。
麻省理工学院学习发现蓝领雇工者6个小时的正规工作比起那些灵活时间工作表现更好。
Traits like innovativeness or collaborativeness are still qualities for firms to aspire to. And this is not an argument for constant qualification of what is meant: the one way to make “purpose” more annoying is to put the word “smart” in front of it. But it is a plea for managers to use woolly words thoughtfully. They are not going away, but they do not have to suffocate
在市场需求上创造性或者是合作性的特性仍然是质量。这不是持续条件的一个参数的意思是：用一种方法制造“计划”更多的分析是在它的面前放置一个“聪明”，只是用这些模棱两可的用词是作为掌权者一个套路，他们不会因为受到阻挡而离开。
