“占领华尔街”运动抓住了要害

    我们当前的资本市场构建在一个危险的谎言之上，即企业的唯一使命是给股东价值回报。在这一框架下，华尔街交易员、按揭经纪人和其他人采取的每项行动都有正当理由，而且在道义上无可厚非。他们的工作就是尽可能多的扩大销售，赚取尽可能多的价值，从而给股东以价值回报。只要股东价值最大化仍是我们的指导原则，任何监管方面的改革都无法改变这种基本行为方式。因为高管们只是按规矩办事而已。

    因此，我们需要改变评判机制。我们需要认识到，让高管们关注股东，将股价作为衡量给股东价值回报的替代性指标，结果会让高管们忽视真正重要的东西。我们应当让高管们关注客户和雇员，让他们做出使客户最满意的决定，因为只有这样才能实现各种形式的价值。

    怎么才能做到这些呢？我们要逆转铺天盖地的股权激励潮。我们认为，股权激励计划并没有将股东利益同高管们的利益联系在一起，而是加剧了短视行为，造成股价大起大落，损害长期股东的利益。这类计划还导致高管们更看重预期性市场（即资本市场，也就是价值的交易环节）而不是真实市场（即制造和销售产品及服务的市场，也就是价值的创造环节）。如果我们的商界领袖们将注意力转回到真实市场（这个市场由来自99%人群的顾客和雇员构成），我们或许就可以解决美国切实存在的不满情绪了。

    “占领华尔街”运动可以成为变革的催化剂。但我们必须要问到点子上。到目前为止，这场运动的下一步尚不明朗。或许，冬季的到来会让占领者取消露营。或许，天气状况和紧张情绪将导致极端暴力的、非常糟糕的结局。或许，这场运动会继续扩大化，一如过去几周的情形，继续蔓延到更多的城市，卷入更多的人。无论是哪种情况，商界都需要深入挖掘这场抗议运动的根源，认真思考，慎重回应，重新制定规则，而不是被动等到由他人来改写规则的那一天。

    Roger Martin现任多伦多大学（University of Toront）罗特曼管理学院（Rotman School of Management）院长。他曾被提名为全球最具影响力的50位管理思想家之一和全球最有影响力的十位企业教授之一。他是《Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL》一书的作者。他还担任着汤森路透（Thomson Reuters）和黑莓手机制造商Research in Motion的董事。Jennifer Riel现任罗特曼管理学院Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking副主任，是《Fixing the Game》一书的编辑。

    Our current capital markets are structured around a dangerous lie -- that the sole function of the corporation is to return value to shareholders. Under this construct, every action undertaken by Wall Street traders, mortgage brokers and the rest make perfect sense and are morally unambiguous. It was their job to sell as much as they could, to grab as much value as possible, in order to return that value to shareholders. So long as shareholder-value-maximization remains our governing principle, no change in regulations will change the fundamental behavior. Executives are simply acting according to their incentives.

    So we need to change the incentives. We need to recognize that by focusing our executives on shareholders, and on share price as a proxy of the value delivered to them, we are turning them away from what matters. We should want executives to focus on their customers and their employees. We should want them to make choices that maximize customer delight, recognizing that value of all kinds will follow from that orientation.

    How do we get there? We reverse the pervasive trend towards stock-based incentive compensation. We recognize that rather than aligning the interests of shareholders and executives, stock-based incentive compensation drives the short-term thinking that creates volatility and produces crashes, working definitely against the interests of long-term shareholders. It creates orientations towards the expectations market (the capital markets, where value is traded) instead of the real market (the marketplace in which products and services are created and sold, where value is created). Perhaps if our business leaders were to turn their attention back to the real market -- composed of customers and employees from the 99% -- we could address the very real discontent that resides there.

    The Occupy Wall Street movement can be a catalyst for change. But only if we ask the right questions. As of now, next steps for the movement are unclear. Perhaps winter will cause the occupiers to decamp. Or perhaps conditions and fraying nerves will lead to a very violent, very bad denouement. Or perhaps the movement will continue to grow and spread, as it has over these past weeks, to more cities and more people. In any case, the challenge for business is to dig deeper into the roots of the protest and to respond thoughtfully, rewriting our own rules before they are rewritten for us.

    Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He has been named one of the top fifty management thinkers and ten most influential business professors in the world. He is the author of "Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL." He serves on the Thomson Reuters and Research in Motion boards of directors. Jennifer Riel is Associate Director of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School and editor for Fixing the Game.