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Business
商业版块
Bartleby
巴托比专栏
Howler horror
犯错恐惧
How to learn from your mistakes
如何从错误中学习
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery,” wrote James Joyce in “Ulysses”.
“错误是通往发现的入口。”詹姆斯·乔伊斯在《尤利西斯》中写道。
In 1888 Lee Kum Sheung, a young cook in a coastal province in southern China, forgot the oyster soup he was boiling on the stove until it simmered down to a thick, sticky gravy.
1888年，中国南部沿海省份的年轻厨师李锦裳忘记了炉子上还煮着生蚝汤，直到汤煮成了浓稠、黏腻的肉汁。
Once he discovered how tasty it was, he decided to sell his “oyster sauce” in jars.
他一发现这肉汁非常美味，就决定把“蚝油”装在罐子里出售。
That lucky mistake would make him and his heirs rich.
这个歪打正着使他和他的继承人们变成了富翁。
According to Forbes, the Lee siblings—his great-grandchildren—are worth $17.7bn, making them the fourth-richest family in Hong Kong.
据《福布斯》报道，李氏兄弟（李锦裳的曾孙）身家177亿美元，为香港第四大富豪家族。
Your guest Bartleby has not been so fortunate in her mistakes.
笔者犯的错就没这么幸运了。
As with most people, hers have led not to riches but, usually, to stomach-churning embarrassment and a good deal of self-flagellation.
和大多数人一样，笔者犯下的错误没有带来财富，反而常常让她心烦意乱、尴尬和自责不已。
From fat-fingered spreadsheet errors and incoherent interventions in meetings to failed mergers and bungled products, failure is a part of corporate life.
从电子表格中的手滑和开会时前言不搭后语的插嘴，到失败的合并和搞砸的产品，失败是公司生活的一部分。
Yet even the most humiliating mistake can prove to be useful.
然而，即使是最丢人的错误也可能被证明是有用的。
Some failures can be chalked up to a lack of experience.
有些失败可以归咎于缺乏经验。
Katharine Graham wrote in her autobiography of the many ignominious blunders she made after she became the publisher of the Washington Post overnight, following her husband’s suicide.
凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆在她的自传中写道，在她丈夫自杀后，她一夜之间成为了《华盛顿邮报》的出版商，之后她犯了许多可耻的错误。（注：公司为家族企业，凯瑟琳在丈夫去世后不得不接手公司。）
“I made endless unnecessary mistakes and died over them,” she wrote.
“我犯了无数不该犯的错误，而且后悔得想死。”她写道。
She was determined to guard against them.
她决心要防止犯错。
Warren Buffett recalled walking into her office ten years after she had taken over to find a sheet of paper on her desk that read: “Assets on the left, liabilities on the right”.
沃伦·巴菲特回忆起在她接管公司十年后，他有一次走进她的办公室，发现她的桌子上有一张纸，上面写着：“左边是资产，右边是负债。”
Of course, even those with plenty of experience are not infallible.
当然，即使是经验丰富的人也不是万无一失的。
In “Right Kind of Wrong”, Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, explores how to build a healthy relationship with failure.
在《正确的错误》一书中，哈佛商学院教授艾米·埃德蒙森探讨了如何与失败建立健康的关系。
In a complex world, she argues, excellence requires taking risks.
她认为在复杂的世界中，卓越需要承担风险。
The important thing is to establish what needs to be done differently next time.
重要的是要确定下一次需要做出什么改变。
For companies the occasional failure may be the price of innovation.
对于公司来说，偶尔的失败可能是创新的代价。
Within months of the Amazon Fire smartphone being introduced in 2014 it was clear to all that the device was a resounding flop, with Amazon forced to write off $83m of unsold inventory.
2014年，亚马逊Fire智能手机发布后的几个月内，所有人都清楚地看到这款设备是一次彻底的失败，亚马逊被迫将价值8300万美元的未售出库存作资产减值计提。（注：资产减值指某项资产的实际价值下降，如手机已经卖不出去了，则在财务报表中需要记录下该资产的价值损失。）
The device was late to the market and had limited features, but was nonetheless priced in the same range as the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy.
该设备上市太晚，功能有限，但定价却与iPhone和三星Galaxy处于同一档。
Jeff Bezos, the tech giant’s chief executive at the time, would later argue that such misfires were the cost of an organisation relentlessly focused on continual innovation.
当时的亚马逊CEO杰夫·贝佐斯后来争辩说，这种失误是组织坚持不懈地专注于持续创新的代价。
“If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now,” he said two years after the fiasco.
“如果你认为那是一次重大失败，那么我们现在正在进行更大的失败。”他在那次惨败两年后说道。
Mistakes are unavoidable.
错误是不可避免的。
But they are rarely the end of the story.
但错误很少是故事的结局。
Graham went on to transform the Washington Post from a city newspaper into a respected national institution; Amazon’s market value today is around 15 times what it was when it made its disastrous foray into phones.
格雷厄姆后来将《华盛顿邮报》从城市报纸转变为受人尊敬的全国报社，亚马逊今天的市值大约是它灾难性地进军手机市场时的15倍。
So how can individuals and companies successfully bounce back?
那么个人和公司如何才能成功地反弹呢？
In her book Ms Edmondson argues that neither people nor organisations can learn if they deny that an error has happened.
埃德蒙森在她的书中指出，如果人们或组织否认错误已经发生，那么他们就无法从错误中学习。
Instead, failures need to be carefully and dispassionately examined.
相反，失败需要被仔细和冷静地审视。
That may mean having a process in place to signal when things have gone awry.
这可能意味着要有一个到位的程序，以便在事情出错时发出信号。
Workers on Toyota’s production lines, for instance, can pull a cord to raise the alarm when problems arise at its car factories, allowing the team to work out what has gone wrong and where.
例如，在丰田汽车生产线上，当汽车工厂出现问题时，工人可以拉绳子发出警报，让团队可以找出哪里出了问题。
Drugmakers, too, have processes in place to learn from failures.
制药商也有从失败中吸取教训的程序。
Ms Edmondson describes the example of Eli Lilly, today the world’s most valuable drugmaker.
埃德蒙森描述了礼来制药的例子，该公司是如今全球市值最高的制药商。
After the firm discovered that a chemotherapy drug called Alimta it had spent vast sums developing was unsuccessful, the physician who conducted the trials pored over the results to understand what had gone wrong.
在该公司发现其斥巨资研发的一种名为“力比泰”的化疗药物不成功后，进行试验的医生仔细研究了结果，以了解出了什么问题。
He spotted that although some patients had benefited from the drug, those with a folic-acid deficiency had not.
他发现尽管一些患者从这种药物中受益，但那些缺乏叶酸的患者却没有。
Simply adding supplements to the drug in subsequent trials greatly reduced the treatment’s toxicity and improved the survival rate of patients.
只需在后续试验中向药物添加补充剂，就大大降低了治疗的毒性，并提高了患者的生存率。
Alimta went on to be a blockbuster for the business.
力比泰后来成了该公司的一个重磅产品。
You cannot error-proof a career or a company. But you can seek to improve.
你无法让职业生涯或公司永不犯错。但是你可以寻求改进。
And if all else fails, a bit of perspective might help.
而且如果一切都失败了，那么有一点远见可能会有所帮助。
Although it may not feel like it at the time, your error will probably not make the list of history’s most notorious howlers.
你的错误可能不会被列入史上最臭名昭著的大笑话之列，尽管犯错时你可能没有这种感觉。
In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to America for $7.2m, around $160m in today’s money, handing its future rival 1.5m square kilometres of oil-rich territory and access to the northern rim of the Pacific.
1867年，俄国以720万美元的价格把阿拉斯加州卖给了美国，约合今天的1.6亿美元，将富含石油的150万平方公里领土，以及通往太平洋北部边缘的通道拱手交给了未来的对手。
Few blunders in business are quite as dunderheaded as that.
在商业中，很少有错误能这么愚蠢。
