经济学人下载:IBM vs 卡耐基基金会

By 1911 Carnegie was near the end of his career, whereas Watson’s was only starting. But both men were fired by idealism to such an extent that their peers thought them strange. To some wealthy Americans, Carnegie’s 1889 essay, “The Gospel of Wealth”, with its assertion that the “man who dies thus rich dies disgraced”, smacked of socialism. (Ironically, founding the Carnegie Corporation was an implicit admission that Carnegie would indeed fail to give away all his fortune before his death, and thus need an institution to continue his philanthropic work.) Watson senior “struck his contemporaries as a nut and a crank with his policy that ‘People who perform are my partners’,” according to the late management guru, Peter Drucker.

到了1911年，卡耐基已经接近他事业的终点，而沃森才刚刚开始。但是这两个人都被理想主义的火焰点燃，甚至于他们的同行都视之为怪物。对于一些美国富人来说，卡耐基1889年的散文《财富的福音》宣称带有社会主义的味道，在里面他宣称“富有地死去的人，死得耻辱”。（讽刺的是，建立卡耐基基金会隐晦地承认卡耐基其实并未在去世前捐掉所有的财富，于是才需要一个机构继续他的慈善事业。）已故管理大师彼得??德鲁克（Peter Drucker）说沃森“给人的印象是一个思想奇怪的怪人，他的政策是‘凡表演的人都是我的搭档’”。

Idealism was sharpened by feelings of guilt over earlier ethical lapses. Carnegie regretted the brutal breaking of a strike by his workers at Homestead in 1892, which cost ten lives. Watson was chastened by his conviction for antitrust offences at his previous firm, NCR—though the conviction was later overturned.

对之前背弃道德的悔恨感加深了理想主义。卡耐基后悔1892年对他的工人举行的一次罢工的残酷镇压，那一次有10人丧生。沃森之前工作的公司是NCR，他因为对其进行反垄断的违法行为而被定罪，因此饱受折磨——尽管这项罪名后来被推翻了。

Both men brought about huge change by building institutions that became role models. The initial endowment of the Carnegie Corporation, at $125m ($3 billion in today’s money), exceeded the total value of all American foundations at the time. Over the following 20 years, spanning America’s first golden age of philanthropy, rich donors endowed around 250 new foundations with combined assets of $32 billion in today’s money, according to Philanthropy Magazine. Many of them tried to imitate the scientific philanthropy of the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. At IBM, Watson introduced employment practices that became the norm in big business decades later. In 1915 he gave a speech known as “the Man Proposition” declaring all employees equal. That was later expanded to include women, who from 1935 received equal pay for equal work. From 1945, all IBM workers received pensions.

二人都建立了后来成为模范的组织，引起了巨大改变。卡耐基基金会最初的一笔捐赠为1.25亿美元（在今天价值30亿美元）超过了当时全美所有基金会总共的价值。根据《慈善杂志》的报道在之后的20年中，跨越美国第一个黄金慈善年代，，富有的捐赠者对 250个新的基金会捐出的总额按今天的货币算为320亿美元。他们中的很多人都试图模仿卡耐基和洛克菲勒基金会的科学慈善模式。在IBM，沃森引进了雇佣惯例，这在数十年后成为大公司的规范。1915年，他进行了名为《人的主张》的演讲，宣称所有员工都是平等的。之后经过扩展，妇女也包括进去，自1935年起实施男女同工同酬。从1945年开始，所有IBM员工都享受养老金。

Still, in the first 50 years, the impact of the Carnegie Corporation on society dwarfed that of IBM. When it was created, the corporation’s power in some respects equalled or exceeded that of the state. One of Carnegie’s goals was to keep things that way, by building a model of society that differed from what he saw as dreadful, big-government socialism that was taking over in Europe. He succeeded only up to a point: the Carnegie Corporation’s initial endowment was 27 times bigger than the annual federal government education budget; the much larger endowment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is about double the annual education budget of New York City.

在头一个50年里，卡耐基基金会在社会的影响力让IBM相形见绌。建立之时，这个基金会在某些方面的力量可以与国家一较高下、甚至更强。卡耐基的目标之一是通过建造一个不同于他所看到的控制当时欧洲的糟糕的大政府的社会主义的社会模式来使各种事物保持原样。他只获得了一点点成功：卡耐基基金会最初的捐赠比联邦政府年教育预算多27倍；比尔&梅琳达??盖茨基金会的更大一笔捐赠是纽约市年教育预算的大约两倍。

With its benefactor as its head for the first eight years, the Carnegie Corporation operated largely as a treasury and headquarters for a host of other institutions and philanthropic initiatives that he had started earlier—including his most famous programme, which ended up building some 2,509 libraries, most in America.

卡耐基基金会建立的最初八年里，它的捐助者也是它的领导者，它像一个财政部和管理其他之前建立的组织和慈善的总部——包括他最著名的项目，即建立2509个图书馆，列全美之首。