经济学人下载:IBM vs 卡耐基基金会

A game of two halves

一场比赛，两个半场

Still, not all of their contributions in their first 50 years were positive. Watson senior, as public as Carnegie in his enthusiasm for world peace, believed that this cause was best advanced through trade between nations, including Nazi Germany. In 1937 Hitler personally convinced him he did not want war. As soon as Germany invaded France in 1940 Watson realised his mistake, and tried to distance IBM from the Nazis, but the company’s German subsidiary provided a machine that was used in the Dachau concentration camp. (Lesson learned, IBM was among the first international companies to pull out of South Africa in the late 1970s in protest against apartheid.) The Carnegie name was also linked indirectly with the Nazis, through the Carnegie Institution’s funding of research into eugenics in the early 20th century that was later taken up by Germany.

不过，在最初的50年里并非所有贡献都是积极的。就像卡耐基公开自己对世界和平的远大理想一样，大家也都知道沃森相信这项事业最好能通过国家间的交易得到推动，包括纳粹德国。1937年，希特勒亲自让沃森相信他并不想要战争。1940年德国一侵占法国，沃森就意识到自己的错误了，他努力使IBM远离纳粹，但是公司在德国的分公司向达豪集中营提供了一种机器。（IBM从这件事中得到了教训，70年代末南非爆发反对种族隔离的抗议后，IBM是第一批撤离南非的国际公司。）卡耐基的名号也间接地与纳粹联系在一起，因为卡耐基学院资助了20世纪初有关优生学的研究，这项研究后来被德国人占据。

In their second 50 years the two institutions’ impact has arguably been reversed. Carnegie had a couple of triumphs in the 1960s, helping the launch of public broadcasting in America and the creation (for educational reasons) of “Sesame Street”, the most popular children’s television show ever. But since then, Carnegie has seen its influence decline. Among other things, it has suffered from philosophical self-doubt (a report it commissioned in the 1970s in effect urged America to embrace European-style socialism) and the emergence of newer, bigger philanthropies (by assets, it now barely scrapes into America’s top 20 foundations). Although Carnegie still does important work, such as its efforts to understand Islam, championed by Vartan Gregorian, its current president, the corporation is showing its age.

在第二个50年里，这两家机构的影响力都扭转过来，有事实可以证明。卡耐基在60年代胜利连连，帮助在美国建立了公共广播和创造《芝麻街》（出于教育目的），这是迄今为止最受欢迎的儿童电视秀。但是自那以后，卡耐基基金会就开始目睹自己影响力日渐衰落。别的不说，它遭遇了哲学上的自我怀疑（70年代它发布的一个报告事实上督促美国要接受欧洲式的社会主义）而且还有更新的、规模更大的慈善机构涌现（以资产计算，现在它刚刚挤进美国20大基金会之列）。尽管卡耐基基金会仍然从事着重要的工作，比如由现任总裁瓦谭??格里格瑞恩（Vartan Gregorian）领导的理解伊斯兰的行动，但是这个基金会的确垂垂老矣。

IBM, by contrast, is now as influential as it has ever been, with a stockmarket value of around $200 billion and nearly 427,000 employees, many of them in the developing world. It has sponsored—and ultimately benefited from—a continuous series of innovations, from the mainframe to the personal computer, services and cloud computing. Its corporate philanthropy has grown steadily, so that its annual grants now exceed those of the Carnegie Corporation. It has also tackled policy challenges in a head-on, Carnegie-esque way. In 1996 it became the first company to convene a summit meeting on American education. Out of that came a commitment to find ways to measure school performance, which IBM helped to develop.

反观IBM，现在它的影响力一如既往，其股票价值约为2000亿美元，拥有近427000名员工，很多都是在发展中国家。它赞助了——并最终从中得益——一系列持续性的发明，从大型计算机到个人电脑、服务与计算。它的公司慈善稳步增长，年拨款已超卡耐基基金会的了。它还以一种正面的、卡耐基式的方式应对政策上的挑战。1996年它成为第一个就美国教育问题召开峰会的公司。此峰会的成果是承诺寻找方法来衡量学校表现，由IBM帮助开发。

Judged on the past 50 years, there is a strong case for saying IBM has had more impact than Carnegie—especially if you count its accidental contribution to philanthropy by incompetently failing to stop Mr Gates from creating Microsoft. In part this is because its business, the management of information, has unusually large social benefits, and causes relatively few social or environmental costs.

从过去的50年看，有充分的理由表明IBM比卡耐基的影响力更大——特别是如果你算上它偶尔对慈善做出的贡献，原因是它没能阻止盖茨创立微软。部分看这是因为它的业务，信息管，拥有无比巨大的社会利益，而且引起相对比较少的社会或环境消耗。

In future, IBM expects to play an even greater role in profitably solving social problems by working with governments. “Everybody says they’re unsolvable—safe borders, clean water, energy. But the application of technology can solve a lot of these things we wrestle with,” points out Mr Palmisano. Firms in other, dirtier industries may not compare against philanthropy so well.

在未来，IBM预计会通过与政府合作在切实解决社会问题上发挥更加强大的作用。“每个人都说那些问题是无法解决的——安全的边界，干净的水和能源。但是应用科技能解决很多棘手的问题，”彭明盛先生指出。其他污染更严重的公司在慈善上也许无法与之相比。

IBM has also been unusual in keeping up its significant investment in relatively pure research, which can have large social benefits. They were seen most recently in the development of Watson, a computer capable of beating human champions at the game “Jeopardy!” just as its Deep Blue computer earlier saw off several human chess grandmasters. In this respect, IBM may be a model for Mr Porter’s idea of shared value. But is its approach replicable or is it just an exception? AT&T’s Bell Labs and Xerox PARC have left their glorious histories behind them, yet somehow IBM’s research culture has survived. What differentiated IBM seems to have been a decision in the late 1970s to create a series of joint projects between product developers and IBM researchers.

IBM还与众不同地对纯粹的研究持续地大笔投资，那些研究可以很好地造福社会。最近的例子是电脑沃森的开发，它能在“危险”游戏中击败人类冠军，就像之前的深蓝电脑击败了几位人类的国际象棋大师一样。从这方面看，IBM也许就是波特先生所说的共享价值的代表。但是它的方法是可以复制的还是只是一个例外呢？美国电报电话公司的贝尔实验室和施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心（Xerox PARC）的辉煌历史已经过去了，但是不知怎的IBM的研究文化却幸存下来。让IBM不同的似乎是70年代末的一个决定，即在产品开发者和IBM研究者之间创立一系列共同参与的项目。