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。假设一家中国公司计划在全球大举扩张，在人力和招聘问题上咨询您的意见，您会建议他们前往国际商学院还是美国商学院去招聘MBA和EMBA？或者说您觉得这两者有什么区别吗？
吉姆·柯林斯：我不觉有什么区别。
我过会儿还会绕回来讲这个话题，我认为真正重要的是，让有识之士担任要职。从过去的经验看，他们可能具有不同的背景。
如果你想知道成立于1837年的宝洁公司（Procter & Gamble）为何依然处于行业巅峰？有人认为，企业难以经历巨大的变革而屹立不倒，他们都有自身的商业周期，最终都会兴衰更替。这样看来宝洁公司的案例的确令人费解。宝洁历经美国的南北战争、战后重建、世纪之交（19-20世纪）、主要城市的兴起、电力、电话和电报的发明、一战、大萧条、二战，直到今天。你可能会问一个简单的问题：为什么（宝洁能够屹立不倒）？
答案有许多，其中之一就是：早在商学院出现之前，宝洁就开始吸纳青年才俊，在宝洁自身的价值体系内部，在公司处事方式的框架内，在不同的品牌的内部，培养这些年轻人，让他们成为宝洁人。并持续地地根据现实中的表现检验谁能够真正遵照宝洁的标准来创造卓越的业绩。
在1837年，当宝洁还是一家小企业时，他们就开始这么做。当然现在，宝洁从世界各地的商学院招聘人才。他们也从其他学院招纳他们这个技术领域的人才，比如招纳工程学院毕业生、化学博士等。但是他们的初衷未改：招纳年轻人，让他们在自己的体系里成长，根据他们实际能力不断提升的情况，留下最优秀的人。我相信这将继续成为持久而卓越的企业的标志。
我想知道的是，如果我有一家中国企业，尤其当我的企业正在壮大过程中，如何才能从一开始就持续吸引年轻人，继而考察他们？或者说如何才能不断地吸引人才，然后扩大企业？这样当机会来临就能把握住。
我们在海外扩张，将业务拓展到巴西、美国等地。当我们有了新的业务领域，你会发现在这一领域，某些人更好地证明了自己的实力，所以我们就可以让他承担更多的责任。这会成为一种自我完善的过程。
如果不这样想，当你的公司成长到一定程度，你会无法找到足够的人才来满足公司的发展需求，这就违背了普克定律（Packard's Law）。这样你就会失败。 |
