Thomas D. Gorman: Understood. Hypothetically, if you were advising a Chinese company with a big global expansion plan on HR and recruitment matters, would you tend to think they should be recruiting MBA's and EMBA's from international business schools or US business schools? Or, do you think it really makes any difference?
Jim Collins: I don't think it makes a difference.
I think what really matters and we will circle back to this theme. What really matters is just getting great people and putting them in positions of responsibility. And they may come from many places, but if we look at the empirical evidence.
So if you ask the question, why is Procter & Gamble still on top of its game, it was founded in 1837. Ok, so the idea that a company can't survive great changes, cannot go through an inevitable business cycle, they're going to rise and fall. You really can't explain Proctor and Gamble from 1837. They went through the American Civil War, the Reconstruction, the turn of the (twentieth) century, the rise of major cities, the invention of electricity, telephone, telegraph, the whole deal, First World War, Depression, Second World War, I mean, and here they are today. And you ask yourself a simple question, why?
Well, there are multiple answers to that, but part of it is, long before there were even business schools, they were always bringing relatively young talented people into their system. They were developing them inside their value system, inside their ways of doing things, inside their different brands, populating them. And then constantly empirically validating who really is proving themselves as someone who can deliver great results consistent with our values.
And they'd been doing that since 1837, first as a small business, right? And now, of course, they recruit from business schools from all over the world. They recruit from other kinds of schools in their technology area, they're going to get people from engineering schools, and PhDs in chemistry and whatever else. But, the theme is the same, bring people in relatively young, grow them in our system, keep the very best ones, based upon their improving empirical capabilities. I believe that is still going to be an earmark of the more sustained great companies.
So if I was a Chinese company right now, the question I would be asking is, how do we begin, especially as we're growing, how do we begin to continue to bring in young people so that we can test them, or do we keep bringing them in and we're growing our own and growing our own and growing our own, so that at any given time, an opportunity opens up here.
We're going overseas, we're going overseas in Brazil, we're doing something in the United States, we have a new business area that you can look inside and say, this person has proven themselves, we can put that person into a larger seat now. And we can do that here and it becomes a constant self-reinforcing process.
If you don't look at it that way, at some point your growth is going to expand beyond your ability to have people to execute on that growth, and that's breaking Packard's Law. If you do that, you will fall. |
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高德思：明白。假設一家中國公司計劃在全球大舉擴張，在人力和招聘問題上咨詢您的意見，您會建議他們前往國際商學院還是美國商學院去招聘MBA和EMBA？或者說您覺得這兩者有什么區別嗎？
吉姆·柯林斯：我不覺有什么區別。
我過會兒還會繞回來講這個話題，我認為真正重要的是，讓有識之士擔任要職。從過去的經驗看，他們可能具有不同的背景。
如果你想知道成立于1837年的寶潔公司（Procter & Gamble）為何依然處于行業巔峰？有人認為，企業難以經歷巨大的變革而屹立不倒，他們都有自身的商業周期，最終都會興衰更替。這樣看來寶潔公司的案例的確令人費解。寶潔歷經美國的南北戰爭、戰后重建、世紀之交（19-20世紀）、主要城市的興起、電力、電話和電報的發明、一戰、大蕭條、二戰，直到今天。你可能會問一個簡單的問題：為什么（寶潔能夠屹立不倒）？
答案有許多，其中之一就是：早在商學院出現之前，寶潔就開始吸納青年才俊，在寶潔自身的價值體系內部，在公司處事方式的框架內，在不同的品牌的內部，培養這些年輕人，讓他們成為寶潔人。并持續地地根據現實中的表現檢驗誰能夠真正遵照寶潔的標準來創造卓越的業績。
在1837年，當寶潔還是一家小企業時，他們就開始這么做。當然現在，寶潔從世界各地的商學院招聘人才。他們也從其他學院招納他們這個技術領域的人才，比如招納工程學院畢業生、化學博士等。但是他們的初衷未改：招納年輕人，讓他們在自己的體系里成長，根據他們實際能力不斷提升的情況，留下最優秀的人。我相信這將繼續成為持久而卓越的企業的標志。
我想知道的是，如果我有一家中國企業，尤其當我的企業正在壯大過程中，如何才能從一開始就持續吸引年輕人，繼而考察他們？或者說如何才能不斷地吸引人才，然后擴大企業？這樣當機會來臨就能把握住。
我們在海外擴張，將業務拓展到巴西、美國等地。當我們有了新的業務領域，你會發現在這一領域，某些人更好地證明了自己的實力，所以我們就可以讓他承擔更多的責任。這會成為一種自我完善的過程。
如果不這樣想，當你的公司成長到一定程度，你會無法找到足夠的人才來滿足公司的發展需求，這就違背了普克定律（Packard's Law）。這樣你就會失敗。 |
