启蒙造就企业家

    财富网(Fortune.com)定期从网站“250字”(250 Words)挑选最引人入胜的短文、趣闻轶事和作者访谈。美国西蒙与舒斯国际出版公司(Simon & Schuster)开发该网站，旨在探讨世界各地最新出版的商业佳作。

    为撰写本期专栏，“250字”的山姆•麦克纳尼与前通用电气公司(GE)高管，连续创业家费萨尔•霍克坐在了一起。霍克最近与他人合写了一本新书：《万物相连：在创意、创新和可持续发展的时代如何变革和领导》(Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability)【麦格劳-希尔教育出版公司(McGraw-Hill Education)出版发行】。在这部著作中，霍克把拥有2,500年历史的东方哲学智慧与达芬奇的见解结合在一起，深度揭示了企业如何才能永立潮头的奥秘。山姆与作者讨论了正念(mindfulness)、“深层次”多样性，以及究竟何为创新等话题。

    麦克纳尼：在《万物相连》的开始部分，你写道，“亲社会是你能够做的对企业最有利的事情之一，全面和人性化是成就伟业的关键所在。”你能解释一下这些观点的意思吗？

    Fortune.com selects the most compelling short essays, anecdotes, and author interviews from "250 Words," a site developed by Simon & Schuster to explore the best new business books—wherever they may be published.

    For this installment, 250 Words' Sam McNerney sits down with Faisal Hoque, former GE executive, serial entrepreneur and co-author of the new book Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill Education). Combining the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies with insights from Leonardo da Vinci, Hoque reveals how businesses can succeed in the long run. Sam talks to the author about mindfulness, "deep level" diversity, and what it really means to be creative.

    McNerney: At the beginning of Everything Connects you write that, "Being prosocial…is one of the most probusiness things you can do…being holistic and humanistic is key to doing great work." Could you explain what you mean?

    霍克：首先，我们需要了解企业的目标是什么，什么样的成就才称得上伟业。我并不是第一个宣称我们正生活在一个破坏时代的人。我和另一位作者德雷克•贝尔在书中谈到过美籍奥地利经济学家约瑟夫•熊彼特得出这项预言的经过。由于在我们这个时代，“整个产业”完全被其他产业取代。要想保持领先地位，仅凭稍稍降低生产同一种产品的成本是不够的，企业还需要推出一种完全不同、能够提供更大价值的产品【比如，百视达公司(Blockbuster )与奈飞公司(Netflix )的影音租赁市场之争】。彼得•德鲁克也谈到，企业需要以长远的眼光看待破坏；企业的隐性和显性责任在于产生社会影响。如此一来，我们就可以逐渐明白，为什么亲社会、全面和人性化具有这么重要的意义：正是通过这些措施带来的安全感，团队才能最终产生危险的创意。对待社会的友善态度建立起一条连接市场的情感纽带。

    你把东方哲学编织到了一本以创新和创造力为主题的著作之中。乍一看，两者似乎风马牛不相及。但事实证明，正念有助于开阔视野，使我们不再拘泥于我们长期持有、却可能妨碍我们产生新奇见解的倾向和模式。那么，保持“正念”究竟是什么意思？

    保持正念就是清楚自己正在干什么。虽然听起来很容易，但其实并非如此。它需要我们与最深处的自我以及我们所处的环境进行一场对话：留意你的呼吸就是知道你正在呼吸；留意你的言语就是知道你正在说什么。正念的另一个重要组成部分是，不要不假思索地接受一切传递给你的“智慧”——据说，佛祖悉达多•乔达摩曾经像测试金子那样，在集市上测试自己的教义。创新与破坏的真谛在于推翻继承下来的规范。正如本书所解释的，正念有助于训练我们，发现那些不利于生产的遗留影响。

    Hoque: First we need to understand what the ends of business are, what constitutes great work. I'm not the first to say that we live in an era of disruption—co-author Drake Baer and I talk in the book about how Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted it—but since we live in a time where whole industries are displaced by other industries, staying ahead requires not just making the same thing a little bit cheaper, but making an entirely different product that delivers better value (Blockbuster vs. Netflix for example). Peter Drucker also talked about the long view regarding disruption, and that the implicit and explicit responsibility of business is to make a social impact. Thus, we can begin to understand why being prosocial, holistic, and humanistic makes so much sense: it is through the security that these approaches provide that teams can finally create dangerous ideas. Being prosocial creates an emotional connection to the marketplace.

    You weave Eastern philosophies into a book on innovation and creativity. At first, this relationship seems unlikely, but it turns out that mindfulness can help us see past long-held tendencies and patterns that might prevent us from making novel insights. What does it mean to be "mindful?"

    Being mindful is to know what you're doing. While that sounds easy, it's actually a conversation we need to have with our deepest selves and the situations we find ourselves in: being mindful of your breath is knowing that you're breathing; being mindful of your words is knowing what you're saying. Crucially, another component of mindfulness is to not unquestioningly accept whatever "wisdom" has been passed down to you—Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, said to test his teachings like gold in the marketplace. Innovation and disruption is about upsetting inherited norms. Mindfulness, as explained in the book, trains us to spot those unproductive inheritances.