Do lawyers have something important to learn from meerkats? Is their behaviour similar to that of the naked vole rat? That question might sound like the preamble to a bar joke. But not so, if Hugh Crisp, a veteran English lawyer is to be believed.
律师能向猫鼬学到什么重要的东西吗？律师们的举止与猫鼬这种不穿衣服的田鼠相似吗？这个问题听起来就像一个酒吧笑话的开场白。但实际上并非如此，如果你信任资深英国律师休•克里斯普(Hugh Crisp)的话。
For the first 30 years of his career, Crisp worked as a senior City of London lawyer, rising to the hallowed position of managing partner of the esteemed Freshfields law firm. But these days, Crisp has moved into a new career, teaching business, law and management skills at the Said Business School in Oxford. And that has prompted him to take an unusual track: these days he is brainstorming with zoologists at Oxford university, to analyse the secrets of what makes a 21st-century global law firm work. In particular, Crisp is convinced that the behaviour of naked vole rats, meerkats or even bees can shed a great deal of light on corporate life.
在职业生涯的前30年里，克里斯普在伦敦金融城(City of London)担任资深律师，升迁到受人尊敬的富而德律师事务所(Freshfields Law Firm)管理合伙人的神圣职位。但近来，克里斯普换了个职业，到牛津大学赛德商学院(Said Business School)教授商业、法律和管理技能课程。这让他闯出了一条不寻常的道路：最近，他在与牛津大学的动物学家们进行头脑风暴，以分析一家21世纪全球律所的成功秘诀。尤其是，克里斯普相信，猫鼬这种不穿衣服的田鼠、甚至蜜蜂的行为能给企业界提供大量的借鉴。
While 21st-century students tend to presume that modern economic life (like the animal kingdom) is driven by an individualistic survival instinct and profit motive, Crisp thinks this assumption is wrong. Instead, as he explained to me last week, law firms only work if there is an intense collaboration and group spirit. He adds that this spirit is widely found in the animal kingdom too, particularly among creatures such as the meerkat. Armed with a copy of a book called An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology, this is the message he is trying to teach to business and law students.
尽管21世纪的学生倾向于假定，现代经济生活（像动物王国一样）的驱动力是个体的求生本能和盈利动机，但克里斯普认为这一假定是错误的。相反，正如他上周向我解释的那样，只有当存在通力合作和团队精神时，律师事务所才能运转得起来。他补充道，团队精神也广泛地存在于动物王国中，尤其是在猫鼬等动物当中。借助《行为生态学入门》(An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology)这本书，他正向攻读商业和法律的学生传达这一信息。
As endeavours go, this one is fascinating in its own right (even, or especially, for human lawyers). However, it is also noteworthy as part of a much bigger trend. One way to describe Crisp's effort to apply zoology to business education is that it is a form of "silo busting" - the art of taking insights that have been developed in one institutional department or intellectual silo, and applying them somewhere else. If you look across the academic world these days, as well as in corporate life, it seems that silo busting is becoming all the rage.
就努力而言，这一努力本身就是引人入胜的（甚至——或者说尤其——对人类律师来说）。然而，作为一个更大趋势的一部分，它也值得一提。克里斯普把动物学应用到商科教育的努力，可被形容为一种"打破藩篱"的形式。"打破藩篱"是指吸收机构内某一部门或者学术领域积累的知识，然后将其应用到其他领域的艺术。放眼当今的学术界和商界，你会发现打破藩篱似乎正大行其道。
Last month for example, I met senior officials from Chicago university who explained how they are scrambling to force different departments to collaborate with each other and, in particular, with the students who are studying at the university's wildly popular "entrepreneurship" course. At the Aspen Ideas festival, I listened to fascinating presentations from Joi Ito, head of the MIT Media Lab: this initiative, which grew out of the architecture department, aims to force different types of researchers and entrepreneurs to collide with each other. Or as Ito says, the endeavour that is "not so much interdisciplinary, but anti-disciplinary", since it busts traditional definitions of research and entrepreneurship.
比如上个月，我遇到了几位芝加哥大学的高级官员，他们解释说，他们正费尽心思迫使不同的院系开展合作，尤其是与该校深受欢迎的"创业"课程的学生开展合作。在阿斯彭理念节(Aspen Ideas festival)上，我听到了来自麻省理工学院(MIT)媒体实验室主管伊藤穰一(Joi Ito)的精彩演讲：源于建筑系的这项倡议，旨在力推不同类型的研究人员和创业者相互切磋。或者正如伊藤穰一所说，这一努力"与其说是跨学科的，不如说是反学科的"，因为它打破了研究与创业的传统定义。
Similar initiatives are under way elsewhere, such as the Krasnow Institute at the George Mason University in Virginia, not to mention longer-standing centres such as the Santa Fe Institute or Palo Alto Research Centre. Some foundations, such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, are also funding silo-busting research: one recent case from Sloan is an initiative to combine the work of marine biologists with computer programmers to create a sort of "Google fish" system for tracking sea life.
其他机构也在采取类似的行动，比如弗吉尼亚州乔治梅森大学(George Mason University)的克拉斯洛高等研究院(Krasnow Institute)，更别提圣达菲学院(Santa Fe Institute)或帕洛阿尔托研究中心(Palo Alto Research Center)等历史更悠久的研究中心了。有些基金会，比如阿尔福莱德•P•斯隆基金会(Alfred P. Sloan Foundation)，也在资助打破藩篱方面的研究：该基金会最近的一个项目就是让海洋生物学家与计算机程序员进行合作，创建一种用于追踪海洋生物的"谷歌鱼"(Google fish)系统。
Silo busting is spreading into institutional quarters as well. At the Bank of England, economists such as Andy Haldane have collaborated with zoologists such as Robert May to study financial stability. At Bristol University and Carnegie Mellon, researchers are studying the parallels between nuclear science and financial markets, in tandem with some military groups. At the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, there have recently been brainstorming sessions between statisticians, economists and medical researchers to develop innovative ways to measure and tackle cancer care. And these are just the examples I know of - countless others undoubtedly exist, too.
打破藩篱的做法也正在蔓延至其他类型的机构。在英国央行(BoE)，安迪•霍尔丹(Andy Haldane)等经济学家曾与罗伯特•梅(Robert May)等动物学家合作，共同研究金融稳定性问题。在布里斯托尔大学(Bristol University)和卡内基梅隆大学(Carnegie-Mellon university)，研究人员们正与一些军方人员一道研究核科学与金融市场之间的相似之处。在长岛的冷泉港实验室(Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)，一群统计学家、经济学家和医学研究人员最近在进行头脑风暴，试图找出衡量与应对癌症护理的创新途径。而这些不过是我所了解的例子，其他例子无疑也是数不胜数的。
If you want to be cynical, it is possible to argue that some of this activity is mere tokenism, or just a statistical aberration. After all, for every example of "silo jumping" occurring in a university, government department or company today, there are numerous counter examples, where tunnel vision and tribalism predominate, and may be growing in power. The structure of most academic careers and research grants reinforces intellectual silos, and the growing complexity of technical operations in government and corporate bureaucracies tends to give "specialists" entrenched power. If employees or researchers are going to jump across boundaries, they need resources, or "slack", and that tends to vanish at times of economic pain.
如果你要扮演怀疑人士的角色，你可以说这种行为只是表面现象，或只是一个统计偏差。毕竟，对于如今大学、政府部门和企业中的每一个"打破藩篱"的例子，人们都能找出无数反例与之对应，证明"穴"底之见和同族意识仍是主流，其影响力或许还在增强。多数学术生涯乃至研究资助的架构，都会强化学科之间的"藩篱"；政府和企业机构的技术操作日趋复杂，往往增强了"专家"不可或缺的地位。如果员工或研究者打算"打破藩篱"，他们需要资源，或"空间"，而在经济不景气的时候，这两样往往都没有。
But there again, history suggests that the most powerful forms of innovation tend to happen when silo busting does occur. What defines whether a group or individual will be successful is whether somebody is mastered and trapped by silos - or can master and reorder them as needs and opportunities arise. So I, for one, applaud Crisp's intellectual exploration with meerkats, and other aspects of zoology, particularly after his three-decade career. Who knows whether those mammals really can teach lawyers something; but we all have reason to look at the world with fresh eyes. Indeed, in that spirit I would love to hear of any other examples where individuals or institutions are trying to "silo bust"; if nothing else, it could help broaden my own mind beyond the media world. Even without any vole rats.
但在这方面，历史经验似乎表明，最有影响力的创新往往诞生于"藩篱"被打破之时。集体或个人是否会成功，取决于人是被"藩篱"掌控和框死、还是能够在有需要和机会的时候掌控和重组原有的结构。因此，比方说我就认为，克里斯普有关猫鼬以及动物学其他方面的知识探索值得赞赏，他在从事律师30年后转而做这样的研究更是难能可贵。这些哺乳动物是不是真能教给律师一些东西，谁知道呢？但我们都应带着新鲜的眼光来观察世界。真的，从这个角度来说，我乐于知道更多个人或机构正试图"打破藩篱"的例子，即便没有任何其他收获，至少也有一样：这样的例子可能有助于拓宽我自己的思维，使其跳出媒体世界。这甚至不需要我研究什么田鼠。