The Search for Talent
求贤若渴
The world’s most valuable commodity is getting harder to find
世界上最珍贵的商品，正变得越发难觅
THESE are heady days for most companies. Profits are up. Capital is footloose and fancy-free. Trade unions are getting weaker. India and China are adding billions of new cheap workers and consumers to the world economy. This week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new high.
这是个令许多公司如痴如醉、欢欣鼓舞的年代。利润增长，资本自由流动，工会势力也日渐衰微。印度和中国为世界经济贡献了数以亿计的廉价劳动力和消费者。本周的道琼斯指数更是再创新高。
But talk to bosses and you discover a gnawing worry—about the supply of talent. “Talent” is one of those irritating words that has been hijacked by management gurus. It used to mean innate ability, but in modern business it has become a synonym for brainpower (both natural and trained) and especially the ability to think creatively. That may sound waffly; but look around the business world and two things stand out: the modern economy places an enormous premium on brainpower; and there is not enough to go round.
但只要跟老板们谈谈，你就会发现令他们寝食难安的大麻烦——人才短缺。管理学大师将许多日常词汇挪为己用，“人才”就是其中一个。它的本意是指天生的才能，但在现代商业中，它已成为智慧、脑力的同义词（无论是生而有之，还是后天培养的），并特指创造性思考的能力。这听上去像是无聊的文字游戏，不过放眼当今的商业世界，有两件事情非常引人注目：现代经济对人才无比重视；但人才就是不够用。
The best evidence of a “talent shortage” can be seen in high-tech firms. The likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft are battling for the world’s best computer scientists. Google, founded by two brainboxes, uses billboards bearing a mathematical problem: solve it for the telephone number to call. And once you have been lured in, they fight like hell to keep you: hence the growing number of Silicon Valley lawsuits.
高科技公司是“人才短缺”问题最突出的地方。雅虎和微软这类公司一直在争夺世界上最优秀的计算机科学家。两个天才计算机专家创建了Google，它的招聘广告更是别出心裁：公众场合巨大广告牌上登载的数学题，只有解开难题的人才能进入下一轮的测试。一旦优秀的人才不堪诱惑被“骗上贼船”，公司拼了命也要想办法留住他们。就因为这样，近年来硅谷人事纠纷的官司也越来越多。
As our survey this week shows, such worries are common in just about every business nowadays. Companies of all sorts are taking longer to fill jobs—and say they are having to make do with substandard employees. Ever more money is being thrown at the problem—last year 2,300 firms adopted some form of talent-management technology—and the status and size of human-resource departments have risen accordingly. These days Goldman Sachs has a “university”, McKinsey has a “people committee” and Singapore‘s Ministry of Manpower has an international talent division.
我们本周的研究报告显示，当今几乎所有的行业都正受到人才短缺问题的困扰。各行各业想找到合适的人才填补职位空缺，都要花费比以往更长的时间。许多时候公司因为找不到足够优秀的人才，只好将就着雇佣并不符合标准的员工。今天，公司在人力资源方面的投入比以往任何时候都更多——去年有2300家公司采用了某种形式的人才管理技术——所以相应的，各公司人力资源部门的地位和规模也都有了显著的提升。现在高盛拥有一个“公司大学”，麦肯锡有一个“人才委员会”，新加坡人力部也配置了一个国际人才署。
Trespassers will be recruited
闲人请进，可被录用
Some of this panic is overdone—and linked to the business cycle: there was much ado about “a war for talent” in America in the 1990s, until the dotcom bubble burst. People often talk about shortages when they should really be discussing price. Eventually, supply will rise to meet demand and the market will adjust. But, while you wait, your firm might go bust. For the evidence is that the talent shortage is likely to get worse.
世界对人才短缺的恐慌，有时显得未免太夸张了，这与经济周期有关。在上世纪90年代，美国曾经历过了一场“人才争夺战”的聒噪，当互联网泡沫破裂后，这场喧嚣便不了了之。人们大谈短缺，往往是因为价钱谈不拢。最终供给会增加，直到满足需求，市场将自动调整供需水平。但如果哪个老板胆敢守株待兔，坐等市场去调节供需关系，他的公司恐怕很快就要破产了。因为有证据表明，人才短缺问题可能还会雪上加霜。
Nobody really disputes the idea that the demand for talent-intensive skills is rising. The value of “intangible” assets—everything from skilled workers to patents to know-how—has ballooned from 20% of the value of companies in the S&P 500 to 70% today. The proportion of American workers doing jobs that call for complex skills has grown three times as fast as employment in general. As other economies move in the same direction, the global demand is rising quickly.
勿庸置疑，世界对人才密集型技能的需求在增长。技术高超的员工、专利还有技术诀窍，这些东西被称为“无形”资产。其价值在标准普尔500指数公司市值中所占的比例，从最初的20％飙升至现在的70％。美国就业市场上要求复杂技能工作岗位的比例飞速增长，其增速相当于全美就业机会增速的三倍。其他国家的就业市场也存在同样的趋势，全球对高技能人才的需求也因此高速增长。
As for supply, the picture in much of the developed world is haunted by demography. By 2025 the number of people aged 15-64 is projected to fall by 7% in Germany, 9% in Italy and 14% in Japan. Even in still growing America, the imminent retirement of the baby-boomers means that companies will lose large numbers of experienced workers in a short space of time (by one count half the top people at America’s 500 leading companies will go in the next five years). Meanwhile, two things are making it much harder for companies to adjust.
至于人才的供给问题，在许多发达国家，人口统计学的结论也令人担忧。到2025年，德国15－64岁的人口预计将减少7％，意大利和日本更是分别达到9％和14％。美国的人口仍然在增长，但战后婴儿潮的也即将迎来他们的退休时光。这意味着美国公司在短时间内将失去大量经验丰富的员工，有人预测美国500强公司中的高层员工，有一半将在今后5年内离职。与此同时，还有两个问题给公司的调整造成麻烦。
The first is the collapse of loyalty. Companies happily chopped out layers of managers during the 1990s; now people are likely to repay them by moving to the highest bidder. The second is the mismatch between what schools are producing and what companies need. In most Western countries schools are churning out too few scientists and engineers—and far too many people who lack the skills to work in a modern economy (that’s why there are talent shortages at the top alongside structural unemployment for the low-skilled).
员工忠诚的崩溃问题首当其冲。上世纪90年代，公司可以非常从容的解雇大批经理。现在员工则更倾向于跳槽以获得更高的报酬。学校教育与社会需求脱节的问题紧随其后。在大多数西方国家中，学校都培养不出几个科学家和工程师，却制造了太多太多缺少工作技能的人，这些人很难在现代经济中找到一席之地。（这就是为什么在高级人才匮乏的同时，社会也出现了低技能人员结构性失业的现象。）
What about all those billions of people in the developing world? Alas, adding willing hands to the global economy is not the same as adding trained brains. Both India and China are suffering from acute skills shortages at the more sophisticated end of their economies. Wage inflation in Bangalore is close to 20%, and job turnover is double that (“Trespassers will be recruited” reads a sign in one office). The few elite institutions, such as India‘s Institutes of Technology, cannot meet demand. And there are also cultural legacies to deal with: India‘s Licence Raj destroyed management skills, while China‘s Confucian tradition still emphasises “face” over innovation.
那么发展中国家那几十亿人口的情形又怎么样呢？唉，要为世界经济提供受过良好训练的脑力工作者，可没有输入几个吃苦耐劳的体力工人那么容易。中国和印度都饱受高精尖人才匮乏之苦。在印度IT重镇班加罗尔，工资的增长速度接近20％，公司人员的变动速度却更是高达这个数字的两倍。（一家公司的办公室里，赫然写着这样的标识：“闲人请进，可被录用”）像印度理工学院这样极少数的精英高校，完全没法满足社会对人才的需求。各国的传统文化也为人才的成长制造了障碍：印度“许可证为王”的文化与现代管理理念格格不入，而中国的儒家思想现在仍然一味强调“面子”排斥革新。
A problem for all of us
同我们大家都息息相关的问题
This poses different challenges for companies, governments and individuals. For companies the main task is simply to end up with more talented people than their competitors. Firms will surely have to cast their net wider, employing more part-time workers and more older workers, and spending yet more on training, even in places where workers seem cheap: the training budget at Infosys, an Indian tech giant, is now well above $100m. Human-resource managers, once second-tier figures, now often rank among the highest-paid people at American firms; they will have to justify that status.
人才短缺问题给公司、政府和个人带来了不同的挑战。对公司来讲，主要任务就是比竞争对手留住更多的人才。为达到这个目的，公司必然要把网撒的更广，雇佣更多的兼职员工、更多经验丰富的老员工，投入更多的资金进行培训。即使是在工资看似比较低廉的国家，这些成本也不容小觑：Infosys是印度的IT巨头，如今它的培训预算已超过1亿美元。人力资源经理在商业世界中一度只是二流角色，但现在他们已经一跃成为美国公司中薪水最高的员工，他们必须用行动证明自己物有所值。
But governments too need to act. Removing barriers is a priority: even America still rations the number of highly skilled immigrants it lets in, and Japan and many European countries do far worse. But education inevitably matters most. How can India talk about its IT economy lifting the country out of poverty when 40% of its population cannot read? As for the richer world, it is hard to say which throw more talent away—America‘s dire public schools or Europe‘s dire universities. Both suffer from too little competition and what George Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
在这个问题上，政府也决不是无事可作。消除人才流动壁垒是当务之急：甚至连美国也对高技术移民加以配额限制，日本和许多欧洲国家在这个问题上的限制还要多得多。谈到人才，教育自然是头等大事。印度现在还有40％的人口是文盲，任凭IT业发展得再好，它又怎么能夸耀经济的发展帮助国家摆脱了贫困呢？至于发达国家，美国糟糕的公立中小学和欧洲蹩脚的大学，很难讲哪个扼杀了更多的人才。它们在各自的领域都缺乏竞争，还有布什总统提到的“对不是那么优秀的孩子降低标准，放任自流”，这些都造成了它们教育的不力。
And the talented would do well to intervene in this debate on the side of the disadvantaged. For one last thing is sure to flow from the hunt for talent: even greater inequality. Most societies will tolerate the idea of well-rewarded winners, as long as there is equality of opportunity and the losers also clearly gain something from the system. If those conditions are not met, populist politicians from Toledo to Tokyo will clamp down—and everyone will be poorer for it. A global meritocracy is in all our interests. Be prepared to fight for it.
在这场人才问题的大辩论中，一些聪明人大有理由站出来，为才能较低的人说话。因为人才争夺战最终会导致一件事情：更大的不平等。大多数社会都允许成功者获得更丰厚的回报，只要社会提供给每个公民平等的成功机会，并且失败者也能从社会福利系统中分享受益。如果以上两个条件无法满足，从托莱多到东京的平民主义政治家就会给政府施加压力——这只会导致大家都越来越穷。全球范围内的贤能主义是许多人的梦想和追求。让我们时刻准备着，共同为之奋斗吧。