At the Aspen Ideas Festival — an annual summer gabfest that presents all sorts of interesting ideas, from the improbable to the important — one of the big themes this year was jobs. How will America close the skills gap? Where will the good middle-class jobs of the future come from? I heard pleas for infrastructure spending as a job strategy, and creating jobs by unleashing our energy resources. There were speakers who believed that innovation would bring good jobs, and speakers who feared that some of those innovations — in robotics, for instance — would destroy good jobs.
阿斯彭思想节(Aspen Ideas Festival)是每年夏季举行的论坛活动，与会者会探讨各类有趣的观点，有些不太可能实现，有些则非常重要。今年的活动有一个大主题，那就是就业。美国如何缩小技能差距？未来我们上哪里找好的中产阶级职位？我听到有些人呼吁政府增加基础设施投入和开发我们的能源资源，以创造工作岗位。有些发言者认为创新可以带来好工作，而有些发言人则担心有些创新——比如机器人技术——会让人们找不到好工作。
And then there was Zeynep Ton.
还有泽伊内普·汤恩(Zeynep Ton)的发言。
A 40-year-old adjunct associate professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., Ton brought one of the most radical, and yet one of the most sensible, ideas to Aspen this year. Her big idea is that companies that provide employees a decent living, which includes not just pay but also a sense of purpose and empowerment at work, can be every bit as profitable as companies that strive to keep their labor costs low by paying the minimum wage with no benefits. Maybe even more profitable. Getting there requires companies to adopt what Ton calls “human-centered operations strategies,” which she acknowledges is “neither quick nor easy.” But it’s worth it, she says, both for the companies and for the country. Surely, she’s right.
40岁的汤恩是麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院(Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.)客座副教授，她为本届阿斯彭思想节带来了最为激进但也最合乎情理的观点之一。她的重要理念是，相比于通过付给员工最低标准工资且不提供任何福利、勉强维持最低人力支出的企业，那些让员工过上体面生活的企业，盈利能力一点也不会低。而体面生活意味着不仅仅给工资，还要让员工有使命感、有力量。要实现这一点，企业需要采用汤恩提出的“以人为本的运营策略”，她认为采用这种策略，见成效不会太快，而且也不会容易操作。但这种付出会很值得，她表示，不管是对于企业，还是这个国家来说，都是如此。她无疑是对的。
As Ton explained to me last week in Aspen — and as she has written in a book she published last year titled “The Good Jobs Strategy” — her thesis comes out of research she did early in her academic career on supply chain management in the retail industry, focused especially on inventory management. What she and her fellow researchers discovered is that while most companies were very good at getting products from, say, China to their stores, it was a different story once the merchandise arrived. Sometimes a product stayed in the back room instead of making it to a shelf where a customer could buy it. Or it was in the wrong place. Special in-store promotions weren’t being executed a surprisingly high percentage of the time. She saw this pattern in company after company.
就像汤恩上周在阿斯彭对我所说，她的论点来自她早前所做的有关零售业供应链管理的研究，尤其是在库存管理方面。她在自己去年出版的著作《理想用人策略》(The Good Jobs Strategy)中也讲到这一点。她和当时一起做研究的同事发现，尽管大多数公司都擅长进货，比如从中国买入，但是一旦货品运到店里，情况就不一样了。有时候一件货品会在库房里一直存放，而不是摆到货架上，让顾客可以购买。或者是放错地方。店内展开特别促销活动的次数少得惊人。这样的公司她见到太多太多。
As she took a closer look, Ton says, she realized that the problem was that these companies viewed their employees “as a cost that they tried to minimize.” Workers were not just poorly paid, but poorly trained. They often didn’t know their schedule until the last moment. Morale was low and turnover was high. Customer service was largely nonexistent.
汤恩讲道，在进一步了解之后，她意识到问题出在这些企业把员工看作“需要尽量减少的支出”。员工不仅薪资微薄，而且几乎没有什么培训机会。他们经常是在最后一刻才知道自己的排班情况。整体士气低下，人员流动频繁。
Yet when she asked executives at these companies why they put up with this pattern, she was told that the only way they could guarantee low prices was to operate with employees who were paid as little as possible, because labor was such a big part of their overhead. The problems that resulted were an unavoidable by-product of a low-price business model.
但是，当她问起这些公司的管理人员，为何要忍受这样的运作模式，得到的答案是，他们能保证店内商品低价的唯一方式就是用尽量少的钱雇人，因为劳动力支出是大头。而由此产生的各种问题都是采用低价商业模式无法避免的副作用。
Unconvinced that this was the only approach, Ton decided to search for retail companies — the same kind of companies that needed low prices to succeed — that did things differently. Sure enough, she found some.
汤恩不相信只有这一种选择，她开始寻找采用了不同方式的零售企业，也就是说，同样需要采取商品低价策略才能获得成功的企业。结果，她当然找到了一些。
The two companies she talks about most frequently in this regard are a Spanish grocery chain called Mercadona and QuikTrip, a Tulsa, Okla.-based chain of convenience store/gas stations that competes with the likes of the 7-Eleven chain.
这方面她谈论最多的两家企业，一个是西班牙日用品连锁店品牌Mercadona，一个是总部在俄克拉荷马州塔尔萨市的便利店/加油站连锁品牌QuikTrip，它的竞争对手是像7-11这样的便利连锁店。
What first struck her about Mercadona is that the annual turnover was an almost unheard-of 4 percent. Why do employees stay? “They get decent salaries, four weeks of training that costs the company $5,000, stable schedules … and the opportunity to thrive in front of their customers every day,” Ton said in a speech she forwarded to me. The grocery business is low margin, where every penny counts. If Mercadona couldn’t keep prices low with this strategy, it would have abandoned it long ago.
最先让她注意到Mercadona的一点是，它每年的人员流动率只有4%，这样的低比例几乎前所未闻。为什么它的员工会如此稳定？“他们薪水不错，有为期四周的培训机会，由公司支付每人5000美元的费用，有稳定的工作时间表……他们有机会每天在顾客面前一点点成长。”汤恩在她发送给我的一个演讲视频中这样讲道。食品杂货生意是利润率很低的行业，价格差一分钱都会有影响。如果Mercadona采用这一管理模式的同时不能保证商品低价，它早就放弃了。
QuikTrip, an $11 billion company with 722 stores, is a prime example of what Ton means by “human-centered operations strategies.” Paying employees middle-class wages allows the company to get the most out of them. Employees are cross-trained so they can do different jobs. They can solve problems by themselves. They make merchandising decisions for their own stores. The ultimate result of the higher wages QuikTrip pays is that costs everywhere else in the operation go down. At QuikTrip, says Ton, products don’t remain in the back room, and in-store promotions always take place, as they’re supposed to.
在全国有722家店、年营收110亿美金(约合680亿人民币)的QuikTrip，是汤恩所说的“以人为本的运营策略”的最佳范例。他们给员工支付中产阶级水准的薪资，换回来的是，员工为企业付出了自己所能发挥的最大价值。该公司员工会进行交叉培训，因此可以做多种不同的工作。他们可以自行解决问题。也会为自己所在的店做营销决策。QuikTrip为员工支付更高薪资带来的最终结果是，其他各方面的运营支出都大大降低。汤恩讲到，在QuikTrip，商品不会待在库房里，店内促销时时都有，就像便利店本来该有的样子。
Ton’s interest in the good jobs strategy is more than academic now; she has become a proselytizer, trying to spread the word that every company would be better served by this approach. “The assumed trade-off between low prices and good jobs is a fallacy,” she says. As we worry about where middle-class jobs are going to come from, Ton’s is a message that needs to be heard not just in Aspen but all across America.
如今，汤恩对理想用人策略的兴趣远远超出学术范畴，她已经变成一名说客，尽力将这种观念广泛传播，以使每个企业都能因此受益。“商品低价和提供好工作不可兼得，这是一种谬论，”她说道。就在我们担心中产阶级职位将来无处可寻的时候，汤恩的观点不仅应该被阿斯彭思想节的听众听到，更值得全美国人了解。