Derrida's lesson for seekers of corporate truth
"No one in the lunch room has ever heard of him. I can look him up on Google if you like." When The Guardian newspaper sought tributes to Jacques Derrida, who died last month, that was the best the City of London could do. But Jacques Chirac, the French president, described him as "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time", itself enough to create apoplexy at The Wall Street Journal. Derrida's thought, the Journal said, "deserves unstinting criticism from anyone who cares about the moral fabric of intellectual life".
Derrida's most famous idea was deconstruction; his mantra "there is nothing but the text". As a child actor, I once played the messenger in Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett's masterpiece is not easy for anyone to understand, and not at all easy if you are 10 years old. I formed a plan to write to Beckett, explaining my predicament and asking him to tell me what the play was about. But Google had yet to be invented, and I never managed to find the playwright's address.
I now know Beckett was in Paris, perhaps consorting with Derrida in some Left Bank café. Jacques would have told the author how to reply. Reread the play of course: "There is nothing but the text." A play is not a textbook. The purpose of reading a video recorder manual is to deduce the intentions of the writer, and we judge the manual by how easy it is to interpret those intentions. If you lose the manual, you can, with sufficient skill and effort, reproduce its content. A video recorder is a material device with specific and unchanging functions.
But a play has no simple relationship between intention and function. If Shakespeare had wanted to warn of the perils of ambition, he could have used "AutoContent Wizard" to prepare a Powerpoint presentation, rather than engage in writing Richard III. The play he did write has many levels of meaning and can sustain many interpretations. What you learn from it is personal. The child prodigy Jedediah Buxton, asked what he thought of Richard III, observed (correctly) that the play contained 12,445 words. He had seen the same play as everyone else, yet a different one. Shakespeare no doubt thought of Richard III in terms of his royalties. All these perspectives are valid, none complete, and none, not even Shakespeare's, uniquely privileged.
But we think of businesses as if they were static machines like video recorders, rather than as evolving, complex entities, like plays. I have often described some episode in business history, only to be told by a member of the audience: "I was there, and this is how it really was." But insiders have no special insight into how it really was: only one, necessarily limited and prejudiced, perspective. Business journalists believe they learn the truth about a company by interrogating its chief executive - making the same childish mistake as I did in seeking advice from Samuel Beckett. And with less justification: Beckett wrote every word of Waiting for Godot, but no CEO can ever aspire to that degree of control over his organisation.
The cynical old European claim that there is no ultimate truth about human affairs explains the ire of The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages proclaim that truth every day. But there is no one true story, only more and less useful interpretations. Enron's financial statements may have been, in some literal sense, true, but its accounts were intended to mislead. Parmalat's are now under scrutiny. We will understand these companies better still by gaining understanding of the psychology of greed and the anthropology of small Italian towns.
A business history, like a profound play, has many strands, and when one is identified many more remain to be disentangled. In next week's column, I will illustrate this with the most famous of business case studies - Honda's success in the US motor cycle market.
When Harvard MBA students discuss case studies, they are told there is no right answer to the questions they will debate. I doubt they realise they are engaged in deconstruction. But, class, I like to think that Derrida would have approved.
企业真相启示
“午餐室里没人听说过他。如果你需要，我可以到Google上查查他的情况。”当《卫报》纪念上个月去世的雅克?德里达(Jacques Derrida)的时候，伦敦金融城所能做的仅此而已。但是，法国总统雅可?希拉克(Jacques Chirac)称他为“我们时代思想生活中最重要的人物之一”。这种说法本身就足以在《华尔街日报》上令人们目瞪口呆。《华尔街日报》称，德里达的思想，“理应受到每一个关心思想生活中道德层面的人毫不吝啬的批判。”
德里达最著名的思想是解构主义。他有一句名言“文本之外别无他物”。当我还是个儿童演员的时候，我曾在戏剧《等待戈多》中扮演那个小信使。萨缪尔?贝克特的这部伟大作品对任何人来说都并不容易理解，要是你只有十岁，那就根本理解不了。我打算给贝克特写信，跟他解释一下我的困难，请他告诉我这部戏到底讲什么。可是那时候Google还没有发明，我也就一直都没能找到这位剧作家的地址。
现在，我知道贝克特当时在巴黎，也许正和德里达在左岸的某个咖啡馆相谈正欢。雅克会跟这位作者说如何回答我的问题：要重读剧本，因为“文本之外别无他物”。剧本不是教科书。阅读一本录像机使用手册的目的，是推断作者的意图，我们通过解读这些意图的难易程度，来判断这本使用手册的好坏。如果你把手册给丢了，通过一定的技巧和努力，你还可以把它的内容再写出来。录像机是一种功能明确而不变的物质设备。
但是，戏剧在动机与功能之间的关系就没这么简单了。如果莎士比亚想过要提醒人们野心的危险性，他完全可以利用PowerPoint的“内容提示向导”功能，制作一个幻灯片演示，而不用花心思创作《理查三世》。而他写的这部戏，有很多层含义，可以有不同的解释。而你从中领悟的都是个人的理解。有人曾经问天才儿童杰迪戴亚?巴克斯顿(Jedediah Buxton)，对《理查三世》怎么看，他(准确地)说道，这个剧本有12455个单词。他和别人看的既是同一出戏，又是不同的戏。莎士比亚无疑从王权的角度考虑过《理查三世》。所有这些观点都是可以成立的，但没有一个是完全的，也没有一个(包括莎士比亚本人的观点)是值得特别看待的。
但是，我们却把商业看成录像机般的静态机器，而不是像戏剧那样不断演变的、复杂的事物。在我讲述商业史上某个片断之后，往往会有一位听众跳出来告诉我：“我当时就在那儿，这才是当时的真实情况。”但是，内部人员对真实情况不会有什么特别的洞见，而只有一种肯定存在局限性和偏见的看法。财经记者们往往相信，通过盘问一家公司的首席执行官，就能了解这家公司的真相，这就跟我当年试图向萨缪尔?贝克特求助一样犯了幼稚的错误，而理由甚至更不充分：贝克特至少亲自一字一句地写出《等待戈多》，可没有一个首席执行官能期望对他手下的企业具有这种程度的控制。
欧洲有一句愤世嫉俗的古老谚语：关于人的事情，没有最终的真相。这正可以解释《华尔街日报》的恼怒，该报的社论版每天都在证明这种说法的正确性。但是，不存在一个绝对属实的报道，只有用程度不同的各种解释。照某些字面上的意思，安然公司(Enron)的财务声明可能并没有错，但它的账目意在误导。帕马拉特公司(Parmalat)的账目目前在接受详细审查。如果我们能够了解意大利小镇的人类学和贪婪的心理学，我们就会对这些公司有更深的认识。
一部商业史就像一出复杂的戏剧，有许多线索纠缠在一起，即使其中一根被辨认出来，也还会有许多其他线索有待解开。在下个星期的专栏中，我将通过最著名的个案研究，即本田汽车在美国汽车市场上的成功，来阐明这一点。
哈佛商学院的MBA学员在讨论个案的时候都被告知，他们将要辩论的问题没有标准的正确答案。我怀疑，他们会意识到自己正在解构的过程中。但是，同学们，我倾向于认为德里达对此会表示认同。
