人无完人（下）

Pride can also lead to greater effort (as well as to gigantic signatures).

傲慢也会让人付出更多努力(还会让签名变大)。

In an elegant paper looking into the performance of German fighter pilots in the second world war, Philipp Ager of the University of Mannheim and other researchers found that personal rivalry fuelled risk-taking behaviour.

曼海姆大学的菲利普·阿格尔和其他研究人员在一篇研究二战期间德国战斗机飞行员表现的出色论文中发现，个人竞争助长了冒险行为。

When pilots received public recognition for their exploits in a daily bulletin to the German armed forces, peers with whom they had flown in the past redoubled their own efforts.

当飞行员的功绩在德国武装部队的每日公报中得到公众认可时，曾与他们一起飞行的同行们会加倍努力。

Something propelled them to fly more missions, even though that meant a greater chance of being killed, and it wasn’t humility.

某种因素会促使他们执行更多的任务，尽管这样会导致他们的死亡几率变大，而这种因素绝不是谦虚。

Patience may be a virtue, but it is not always the best quality in a leader.

耐心可能是一种美德，但它并不总是领导的最佳品质。

Research on the impact of managers’ moods on performance is pretty thin: one deeply unpersuasive paper from 2017 used facial-recognition software to analyse CEOs’ TV appearances and concluded that expressions of anger and fear were associated with improved profitability in the following quarter.

关于管理者的情绪对业绩影响的研究非常站不住脚：2017年的一篇非常缺乏说服力的论文使用面部识别软件分析了首席执行官在电视上的表现，得出的结论是，愤怒和恐惧与下个季度盈利能力的提高有关。

Yet forbearance can plainly go too far.

然而，忍耐显然可能会过火。

Anyone who has worked in an office knows that the boss’s wrath can sometimes be the only thing that gets things moving.

任何在办公室工作过的人都知道，老板的暴怒有时可能是推动工作取得进展的唯一方法。

Greed is not something to admit to in polite society but acquisitiveness still motivates an awful lot of people.

在上流社会，贪婪是不能承认的，但贪婪仍然是很多人的动力。

In their research into CEO behaviour Ms Dey and her co-authors defined excessive materialism as owning a private home worth twice as much as the median house in the area; owning a car worth more than $75,000; or owning a boat that was longer than 25 feet.

在对首席执行官行为的研究中，戴伊和她的合著者将过度物质主义定义为：拥有一套价值是当地房价中值两倍的私人住宅；一辆价值超7.5万美元的汽车；或是一艘超过25英尺长的船。

Of her sample of CEOs, fully 58% ticked one or more of these boxes; only 42% counted as frugal.

在她的首席执行官样本中，足足有58%的人符合其中一个或多个条件；只有42%的人算作节俭。

Gluttony may not fuel ambition but it could well be a side-effect of the hierarchies that characterise companies.

暴食可能不会助长雄心，但它很可能是企业特有等级制度的副作用。

Research experiments in which strangers are assigned a high-status role and a low-status role and put in a room together have found that those placed in positions of authority help themselves to more biscuits than the others.

一些研究实验会给陌生人分配地位高和地位低的角色，并把他们放在一个房间里，这些实验发现，那些分到权威地位的人会自行比其他人吃更多饼干。

Even people who mean well may end up behaving badly if they acquire power.

即使是心怀善意的人，一旦获得权力，最终也可能行为不端。

If management is about getting the best out of people, it helps to understand base behaviours as well as noble ones.

如果管理是为了让人们发挥出最大的作用，那它就不仅有助于理解高尚的行为，也有助于理解低级的行为。

Employees are humans and humans are complex.

员工也是人，而人都是复杂的。

They seek to improve the world and would quite like their own swimming pool.

他们既追求改善世界，但也很喜欢自己的游泳池，无论好坏。

They want to mentor the disadvantaged and see their rivals fail miserably.

他们既想要指导弱势群体，却也会眼睁睁看着对手惨败。

They grab the biscuits.

他们会抢夺饼干。