????在剛剛結束的“2015年《財富》全球論壇”期間，我有一次晚宴活動時坐在了一位商人身邊。他上了年紀，闖蕩商界恒多年，管理的都是制造產品、創造利潤的企業。在會議第二天，他顯然快要無法忍受硅谷的那套“神邏輯”。他這樣告訴我：“如果再聽到誰說‘顛覆’或者‘創新’這種詞兒，我就得抓狂大叫了。”

????我能體會他的痛苦。在報道那些迅猛成長、卻往往毫無盈利的科技企業時，我也會感到不解，甚至惱火。之所以有這種反應，是因為我們以往所了解的任何一條商界規則，比如盈利和企業成長同樣重要，都不適用于那些科技企業。

????對于某些科技企業令傳統商界人士艷羨的現狀，云計算軟件界權威、Salesforce的首席執行官馬克·貝尼奧夫有過淋漓盡致的表現。我曾經主持過一個有關領導藝術的研討會。會上，貝尼奧夫緊接著雅虎CEO瑪麗莎·梅耶爾登臺。貝尼奧夫發言表示，和純為獲取投資回報的股東相比，利益相關者的價值更值得贊賞。他當時說，入股的投資者固然重要，但實現他設想的公司價值更重要。比如，促進社會公平和加強企業公益性就屬于這種他稱道并堅持的價值。

????稍后，貝尼奧夫又投下了一顆不大不小的“炸彈”，敦促科技行業那些市場估值10億美元以上的“獨角獸”公司，由私營企業轉而公開上市。他認為，只有將自己置于回應公開市場股東的嚴格標準之下，這些企業才能開始意識到自身真正的潛力。

????一方面將股東的價值放在第二位，一方面又宣揚公開上市的益處，兩者不一定自相矛盾，但也差不多了。而讓貝尼奧夫的論調顯得更為尷尬的是，他所領導的、已經成立了16年的Salesforce.com還在虧本經營。沒錯，這家網站現在的確有大量現金收入，它“以用戶訂閱獲得收益”的商業模式也讓未來收入顯得很有盼頭，但在傳統經濟里，有的是“不會因會計準則而使利潤被抹平”的訂閱業務。然而，盡管如此，Salesforce.com目前的估值卻已接近520億美元。

????這種氛圍不可思議，人們為之著迷，投資人也在為這些公司描繪的快速成長故事買單。這就難怪誰都想了解硅谷到底發生了什么，而且念念不忘要復制這種“神邏輯”。（財富中文網）

????譯者：Pessy

????校對：詹妮

????At dinner at the Fortune Global Forum this week, I sat next to a businessman of a certain age who has spent a career managing companies that make products and profits. By the second day of our conference, he clearly had reached the breaking point over Silicon Valley’s magical thinking. “If I hear the words ‘disruption’ or ‘innovation’ one more time, I’m going to scream,” he told me.

????I feel his pain. Covering the high-growth, often no-profit darlings of the technology world can be exasperating and confusing. This is so because all the rules one learns in business—earnings matter as much as growth, for example—go out the window for a select group of companies.

????Marc Benioff, the cloud-software mogul, gave a great demonstration of the charmed existence that certain companies enjoy. During a panel about leadership I hosted, in which Benioff was joined onstage by Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, the Salesforce CEO extolled the virtues of stakeholder value over shareholder value. Of course investors are important, Benioff said, but not so important as to get in the way of the values he envisions for his company. These laudable and opinionated values include advocating for social justice and corporate philanthropy, to cite two examples.

????Moments later Benioff dropped a tiny bit of a bomb by urging the tech industry’s “unicorns,” private companies worth more than a billion dollars, to go public. Only by submitting themselves to the rigor of answering to public shareholders can they ever realize their true potential, Benioff argued.

????Putting shareholders second while advocating the benefits of having public shareholders isn’t necessarily contradictory, but it’s darn close. What makes Benioff’s cognitive dissonance more awkward, however, is that at 16 years of age, Salesforce.com still loses money. Yes, it generate oodles of cash, and its subscription revenue model pushes revenue recognition out into the future. But the non-magical economy is full of subscription businesses whose profits aren’t erased by accounting rules. Salesforce.com, by the way, is worth nearly $52 billion.

????The weather is marvelous, the people are fascinating, and investors throw money at fast-growth ideas. It’s no wonder everyone wants to learn what’s going on in Silicon Valley. They crave their piece of the magic.