The new big idea from business’s greatest living guru seems a bit undercooked
来自最伟大的商业思想家的最新理论似乎还不够成熟
Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition
HE HAS been one of the world’s leading business thinkers for three decades. His work on strategy forms the foundation-stone of business-school courses the world over. Business titans and prime ministers beat a path to his door. In so far as there is an official line in the managerial world, Michael Porter lays it down. Mr Porter’s recent books are as chunky as his earlier ones: his 2006 tome on health-care reform might have been more influential had it made more concessions to the reader. His students smirk at his arriving for classes with an entourage of flunkies. But most regard his lessons as high-points of their time at Harvard.
他居全球商界顶级思想家之列已达三十年之久。他关于商业战略的研究奠定了全球所有商学院相关课程的基础。商业巨头和政治家争相登门拜访向他求教。如果说在商业世界存在一条权威规则的话，那一定是迈克尔·波特先生制定出来的。和他过去一样，波特先生最近又出了一本十分厚实的书：不过2006年他那本关于医疗制度改革的大部头书如果可以更精简更通俗易懂的话可能会更有影响力一些。波特先生上课的时候经常需要带着一群为他拿书的随从，这常常引起学生们的假笑，但是大多数的学生还是承认这是他们在哈佛收获最大的课程之一。
Yet Mr Porter has not had the equivalent of a number-one hit since “The Competitive Advantage of Nations” 20 years ago. He is also discovering that there is a downside to hobnobbing with the world’s most powerful people. Like Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister, and Howard Davies, who resigned last week as director of the London School of Economics, he helped to engineer the rapprochement between the West and Libya’s murderous Qaddafi regime. Mr Porter’s boasts about his dinners with Saif al-Islam Qaddafi now seem deeply embarrassing.
虽然波特先生还没有写出可以和20年前那本《国家竞争优势（The Competitive Advantage of Nations）》相提并论的著作。但他最近还发现与那些世界上最有权势的人过从甚密也有不好之处。就像托尼·布莱尔（英国前任首相）和霍华德·戴维斯（此人上周才刚刚辞去伦敦经济学院院长一职）一样，他帮助恢复了西方世界与利比亚残暴独裁者卡扎菲之间的联系。波特先生过去曾经以与小卡扎菲（Saif al-Islam Qaddafi）共进过晚餐而引以自豪，现在看来这是多么让人难堪。
So for the sake of Mr Porter’s brand a good deal depends on the reception of his latest big idea. He claims to have found nothing less than a formula for reinventing capitalism: “shared value”. Old-fashioned capitalists focus too narrowly on profits, he argues. Newfangled corporate social responsibility (CSR) types are bewitched by the idea that there is a tension between business and society. But shared value offers companies a way to pursue their self-interest while also acting in the common good. It will unleash a cascade of innovation and productivity gains. And provide capitalism with the popular legitimacy it clearly needs.
因此，能否挽回波特先生的名誉就取决于他的最新思想被公众接受的程度了。他宣称自己已有个大发现， 那就是为重塑资本主义找到一个不折不扣的法宝。他认为老式的资本家过于狭隘的仅仅关注利润。比较新潮的公司社会责任（corporate social responsibility，CSR）又太过强调商业利益与公众利益之间存在的紧张对立。与此不同，共有价值为商业公司提供了一种新的发展方式，在追逐商业利益的同时照顾到公众利益。这会有效地促进创新，提高生产力。同时为资本主义制度提供当前迫切需要的正当性。
What does this mean in practice? Mr Porter focuses on three things. First, the need to create market “ecosystems”, especially when selling to the poorest in developing countries; this may require firms to make partnerships with NGOs and governments. Second, expanding their value chains to include such unconventional partners. And third, creating new industrial clusters.
Some of the examples Mr Porter provides are already familiar. GE’s “ecomagination” strategy of creating environmentally friendly products is said to be responsible for $18 billion in annual revenues. Walmart has saved a fortune by reducing wasteful packaging. IBM and Intel are helping utilities cut power use. Five per cent of Unilever’s sales in India now come from an army of underprivileged women entrepreneurs. Some are less well-known, such as a scheme to support small cocoa farmers in C?te d’Ivoire, which raised their incomes by over 300% by improving yields, product quality and procurement.
Opinion is divided on Mr Porter’s big new idea. He thinks “shared value” may have at least as big an impact as his earlier work. Many corporate titans echo his sentiments. The bosses of PepsiCo, Nestlé, Prudential (of Britain) and Petrobras expressed enthusiasm about his arguments at the recent Davos summit. However, Larry Summers, a former American Treasury secretary and a colleague of Mr Porter’s at Harvard, was overheard asking “Do you seriously believe this [expletive unrecorded]?”
Mr Porter is right to worry that capitalism is suffering a crisis of legitimacy. The 2007-08 global economic panic has generated widespread worries that the capitalist system is too short-term and too crisis-prone. He is also right that CSR—the boardroom’s favourite response to this crisis of legitimacy—is a tired label. Two of its loudest corporate proponents, Enron and BP, messed up dramatically. Few people outside the public-relations industry can listen to the CSR mantras of “win-win” and “doing well by doing good” without grimacing.
Mr Porter’s examples suggest he is mostly concerned with encouraging companies to be less short-termist: he thinks they should understand better that environmental damage harms the bottom line too, so it is in their direct interest to curb it; and firms selling in the emerging world must do more to help consumer markets develop. But none of this is new: efforts have been made for years to get companies to see the full benefits of cutting pollution, while emerging-world giants like Hindustan Unilever and Tata are well aware that they are in the business of creating and shaping markets. There is a striking similarity between shared value and Jed Emerson’s concept of blended value, in which firms seek simultaneously to pursue profit and social and environmental targets. There is also an overlap with Stuart Hart’s 2005 book, “Capitalism at the Crossroads”.
波特先生举得这些例子说明他十分想鼓励企业不要太过短视：他认为企业必须明白破坏环境的同时也在破坏整个游戏规则，因此企业有责任制止这种行为；同时那些在新兴市场做生意的企业也必须做更多的工作以培育当地的消费者市场。但这些都不是创新性的想法：尽管新兴市场中的巨头比方说印度斯坦联合利华公司还有塔塔集团还在认为他们处于创造和培育市场的阶段，但人们为了让企业了解制止污染的好处已经为此努力了几十年了。共用价值概念与Jed Emerson的混合价值（blended value）概念惊人的相似，都是要求公司在追求利润的同时追求社会与环境目标。同时这个概念也与那本《十字路口的资本主义（Capitalism at the Crossroads）》（Stuart Hart，2005）中的观点有重复之处。
Is there no alternative?
难道没有更好的选择么？
Worse, it is not clear that Mr Porter has come up with any tangible improvement on the current way of doing business. Is it true that shared value will “drive the next wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy”, or merely a pious hope? For all we know the next such wave may come from energy-hungry, socially divisive businesses, given the paucity of evidence Mr Porter offers to support his thesis. His arguments have some common flaws: he persistently plays down the difficult trade-offs that businesses often have to make, even in ventures with clear potential for social good (eg, advising a ravaged country on how to cut poverty, at the risk of bolstering its dictatorship). In arguing that “the purpose of the corporation must be redefined as creating shared value, not just profit per se,” he risks giving politicians carte blanche to meddle in the private sector.
更糟糕的是，似乎波特先生还没有想出能对现有的商业模式做出切实改善的方法。共有价值概念能带来“下一波全球性地创新和生产力提升的风潮”，亦或是只是一次良好的祈愿，现在还不能确定。因为Porter先生用以支持自己观点的例证太少， 下一波的创新也许会来自患能源饥渴症造成社会分裂的企业， 亦未可知。而且他的论证还存在一些显而易见的缺陷：他固执地贬低商业社会无时无刻都需要面临的艰难抉择，即便是在那些可能明显提高公众利益的企业中这种抉择也是存在的（比方说，帮助一个伤痕累累的国家减少贫困人口却可能同时在扶持独裁者）。而在论证企业必须创造共有价值，而不仅仅是利润的过程中，他给了政客们随意插手私有部门的机会。
No one should underestimate Mr Porter’s intellectual energy or ambition. He has colonised entire fields of business theory. He has published 18 books to date. But for “shared value” to have the same impact that his earlier output undoubtedly had, he will need to do a lot more work on the idea.
