Last week the chief executive of UBS told all the bankers who work for him that henceforth it was OK for them to make mistakes. A culture in which everyone was petrified of taking risks, Sergio Ermotti said, was not in the interests of the bank or its clients.

近日，瑞银(UBS)首席执行官塞尔吉奥埃尔默蒂(Sergio Ermotti)向所有为他工作的银行家表示，从今以后他们就算出错也没什么关系。埃尔默蒂表示，人人害怕承担风险的企业文化，不符合这家银行或其客户的利益。

How mature, came the response. How refreshing to hear a bank chief acknowledge that risks need to be taken and honest mistakes will sometimes be made.

对此，人们的回应是，这是多么成熟的表现啊。听到一位银行首席执行官承认风险必须有人承担、人有时会犯一些“诚实的”错误，是一件多么新鲜的事啊。

But it wasn’t mature. It was mad.

然而，这并不是成熟，这是疯狂。

In a limited sort of way what he said made sense. The main point about risks is that they are risky — and risky things have a way of going wrong. Places where people get a bollocking for making the slightest slip tend not to be where the best decisions are made.

从某种有限的意义上说，他的话是正确的。风险的主要问题就是它们有“风险”——有风险的事物总有某种出错可能性。那种犯最小的过失也会遭到一场大骂的地方，往往不能做出最佳决策。

Yet the answer is not to tell bankers that it is fine to screw up. Mistakes are never OK. And they are particularly un-OK in banking. If I were a UBS client, I would be exceedingly displeased to learn that the bankers to whom I was handing over a king’s ransom were being taught that errors were perfectly acceptable.

然而，答案不是告诉银行家们，把事情搞砸了也没关系。错误永远也不会没有关系。在银行业尤其如此。如果我是瑞银的一名客户，我了解到我交付了一笔巨款的瑞银银行家们正被教导错误完全可以接受，我一定很不高兴。

This mistake-loving nonsense is an export from Silicon Valley, where “fail fast and fail often” is what passes for wisdom. Errors have been elevated to such a level that to get something wrong is spoken of as more admirable than getting it right.

这种热爱错误的谬论源于硅谷。在硅谷，“快速失败、经常失败”被当作一种智慧。错误被提升到了一个高度，以至于做错事情被说成是一种比做对事情更值得赞赏的事。

One company that dares to be different is Amazon. Among its values is the seditiously sensible notion that its leaders “are right, a lot”. Far from stifling innovation, this seems to have done the reverse. On the 2015 Forbes list of the world’s most innovative companies, Amazon is number eight. Facebook and Google, which have long talked about the marvellousness of failing, are not on it at all.

敢于与众不同的是亚马逊(Amazon)。在亚马逊的价值观中，包含了一条具有煽动性的理性观念，即其领导者“决策正确”。这条价值观并没有扼杀创新，事实似乎正与此相反。2015年福布斯(Forbes)最具创新力企业榜上，亚马逊名列第八。而一直以来谈论失败的美妙之处的Facebook和谷歌(Google)，则根本未曾上榜。

The glorification of failure is based on a couple of psychological misapprehensions. The first is the idea that we learn from our mistakes, when there is no evidence of anything of the kind. I certainly don’t learn from mine. I keep buying uncomfortable shoes, each time thinking I will wear them in. But they go on being uncomfortable, and I go out and buy more that pinch just as badly.

对失败的美化建立在两个心理学上的误解之上。第一个谬论是我们能够从我们的错误中学习，事实上根本没有任何这一类的证据。我就完全没有从我自己犯的错误中学到东西。我不断地购买不舒服的鞋子，每次我都想着自己会穿上它们。但它们依然穿着不舒服，而我继续购买更多穿起来一样挤脚的鞋子。

The world is full of people who go on making the same mistake. Men marry the same sort of unsuitable woman. Most of the journalists I’ve ever worked with display extraordinary loyalty to their particular brand of mistake — they are endlessly inaccurate, or endlessly prone to cliché.

世界充满了重复同样错误的人。男人与不适合自己的同一类女人结婚。我共事过的大多数记者对他们的标志性错误“忠贞不渝”——他们永远不准确，或者永远爱用陈词滥调。

A study a few years ago by neuroscientists at MIT showed that monkeys learn much more from getting things right than getting things wrong. When rewarded for making a correct choice they remembered it and could repeat it, but after a wrong choice they remembered nothing.

几年前，麻省理工学院(MIT)的神经科学家表明，猴子从做对事情中学到的东西要比从做错事情中多得多。当做出正确选择并得到奖励后，它们会记住这件事并能够加以重复，但在做出错误选择后，它们什么也记不住。

The second fallacy — which UBS has fallen for — says that fear of making mistakes paralyses us, so we must make them seem less scary.

第二个谬论——瑞银对此信以为真——是害怕犯错会让我们无法行动，因此我们必须让错误显得不那么可怕。

The experience of Henry Marsh, one of Britain’s best neurosurgeons, shows this is nonsense. He has to take mistakes seriously as when he screws up people die. Far from consoling himself with the thought that honest mistakes are fine, he has written a book, Do No Harm , cataloguing all his errors in goriest detail and making each one appear as un-fine as possible.

英国最优秀的神经外科医生之一亨利氠什(Henry Marsh)的经验表明，这也是一派胡言。他必须严肃对待错误，因为如果他搞砸了，病人就会死去。他并没有用所谓诚实的错误没关系的想法来安慰自己，相反他写了一本书《不要伤害》(Do No Harm)，极其详尽地罗列了他犯过的所有错误，并让每一个错误看起来都尽可能的不可接受。

Yet even with mistakes cast as catastrophes, Mr Marsh has not been paralysed. He admits to feeling dread before every operation, but once he gets started he feels a “fierce and happy concentration”. Nor is there any sign that his proper dread has stopped him taking risks. Instead he has pioneered a brilliant and daring system, in which patients are kept awake while he rummages around in their brains.

然而，即使马什把这些错误描述为灾难，他并未因此裹足不前。他承认，在每次手术前他都会感到恐惧，然而一旦他开始手术，他就会感到一种“强烈和愉悦的专注”。也没有迹象表明，他的这种恐惧让他无法承担风险。相反，他开创了一种绝妙和大胆的系统，在这个系统下，他在病人的整个脑部做检查时，病人是保持清醒状态的。

He catalogues his failures not in a Pollyanna-ish attempt to show how much he learnt, but simply as a fact of life — and death. It is as if the mistakes have become part of him, and have made him the person he is.

他罗列失败，不是一种显示自己学到了多少的盲目乐观的尝试，而仅仅是把它们当作一种生和死的现实。就好像这些错误已成了他的一部分，把他塑造成现在的样子。

Equally the mistakes we’ve made make us the employees we are.

同样的，我们犯的错误把我们塑造为现在这样的员工。

I haven’t killed anyone through my work, but I have harmed them. I often write about people anonymously in my columns, but sometimes they recognise themselves and they feel rightly hurt. Each time I have failed to disguise them well enough, or have misjudged their reactions.

我在工作中不曾置任何人于死地，但是却伤害过一些人。我常常在专栏中不指名道姓地写到一些人。但有时候他们能从中认出自己，理所应当地，他们因此觉得非常受伤。每次我都没有把他们的身份掩饰得足够好，或者误判了他们的反应。

Yet far from learning, I go on doing it. I never think: honest mistakes are OK. Instead I remember all the people I have wronged and wear them as a guilty badge. It might not make me a better journalist, but it makes me more clear sighted about what I do for a living.

然而我并没有从中吸取教训，依然在做着同样的事。我从来不去想：诚实的错误是可以接受的。但是我记得每一个我伤害过的人，并且一直背负着这种罪责。这也许不会让我成为一个更好的记者，但是它让我对自己的工作有一个更清楚的认识。

What Mr Ermotti should have made clear was that sometimes his employees must take risks, and sometimes things will go wrong. When that happens, no one must ever make light of their cock-ups. Instead they should carry the memory of all their mistakes as part of their own internal score sheet of how they have fared as a banker.

埃尔默蒂本应该做出这样的明确表示：有时他的员工必须要承担风险，而且有时事情会出错。当错误发生的时候，每个人都不应对自己的差错轻描淡写。相反，他们应该铭记所有犯过的错误，把它们记在自己心中评估自己作为银行家表现的计分表上。