When the Financial Times was auctioning off lunch with journalists for its seasonal charity appeal a few years ago, someone had the bright idea of advertising the “lots” as decorations on a Christmas tree: the editor was at the top, and other writers dangled from the descending branches.
若干年前，英国《金融时报》出于季节性慈善募捐的目的，向公众拍卖同旗下记者共进午餐的机会，有人想出一个巧妙的广告点子，把“拍卖品”做成一棵圣诞树上的装饰：总编辑位于树顶，其他撰稿人悬挂在下面的树枝上。
I doubt any organisation has published a more blunt, bauble-based depiction of its hierarchy. Plenty have a less festive version, though: the organigram — or org chart — with the boss on top and minions branching off by seniority and reporting lines.
我觉得没有哪个组织能把内部等级关系比这更直观、更花哨地公诸于众。不过，多数组织都有个没那么喜庆的等级体系图：组织结构图，老板位于顶部，下属按职位高低和上下级关系降次分布其下。
Half of a small group of personnel directors I asked think such diagrams are an uncomfortable straitjacket, a loathed compliance obligation, a hindrance to more natural interaction between colleagues, or all three. Aaron Dignan of The Ready, a consultancy that helps companies such as Lloyds Bank and General Electric change structure and culture, calls them “the dirty secret” of human resources. They always come “with the caveat that they aren’t true”.
我问过少数几个人事主管，他们中有一半认为组织结构图是一种让人不自在的束缚、人们讨厌遵循它们规定的责任义务、它们会妨碍同事们更轻松自如地交往，或者这三种弊端组织结构图全占。The Ready是一家帮助劳埃德银行(Lloyds Bank)、通用电气(General Electric)等企业实现结构与文化转型的公司，其创始人亚伦?迪南(Aaron Dignan)将组织结构图称为人力资源的“肮脏秘密”。它们总是伴随着“附加说明它们不是真的”。
But the other half of my HR sample says charts clarify how the business works. They are a vital tool, providing information on the role and identity of team members. They supply valuable “context”. One said the org chart was her company’s best-read online document.
而我询问的另外半数HR却说，组织结构图明确了公司业务是如何运作的。它们是很重要的一个工具，说明团队成员的角色和身份。它们提供了重要的“背景信息”。一位HR说组织结构图是她们公司阅读量最多的联机文档。
Even when everyone used to pay attention to the pyramid of power, though, the diagram was a poor reflection of corporate reality. Century-old examples are pockmarked with vacancies, indicating that chartmakers struggled to keep up with changes.
即便在过去人人都关注权力金字塔时，这种图也很难反映出企业的真实情况。老旧的图例充满了空缺的职位，表明制图者们难以紧跟变化。
Now staff turnover is more rapid, charts are relics of a command-and-control approach, where information flowed through fixed channels, from your boss’s boss, down to your boss, to you, and back again.
如今，员工流动加快，组织结构图是命令与控制工作方式的遗产，以往在那种工作模式中，信息总是通过固定渠道传递，从你上司的上司，下达到你的上司，再到你，如此反复。
It need not be this way. In many such plans, the dreaded “dotted reporting line” already signals that nothing is as neat as the chart may imply.
而现在并不需要这样。在许多组织结构图中，令人生畏的“用虚线表示的上下级关系”已经说明事情绝不像图表显示的那么简单。
As historian Caitlin Rosenthal has written, the first organigram — an 1855 schema of the New York and Erie Railroad — was surprisingly modern. It looks organic, not man made, and it reversed assumptions of top-down power. The plan gives day-to-day authority to divisional heads, who “possessed the best operating data, were closer to the action, and?.?.?.?were best placed to manage the line’s persistent inefficiencies”.
历史学家凯特琳?罗森塔尔(Caitlin Rosenthal)曾写道，世界上第一张组织结构图——1855年出自纽约伊利铁路公司(New York and Erie Railroad)——它出人意料地先进。它似乎是有机的，而非出自谁人之手，而且它还颠覆了人们关于自上而下的权力的设想。它将日常的管辖权交予部门的主管们，他们“掌握着最佳的运营数据，更贴近实际业务，并且……是解决路线持续效率低下的不二人选”。
In search of new ways of managing, radical thinkers have studied the murmurations of starlings and the oozings of slime mould, both of which co-ordinate movement without formal hierarchy. Experiments are under way at businesses. They include the transformation of Zappos, the Amazon-owned shoe retailer, to Holacracy, a self-management system, and the development of autonomous teams at longer-established companies such as Ericsson and Microsoft.
为探索新的管理方式，激进的思想家们研究了椋鸟群和黏菌释放的物质，发现两者在协同运动时都不存在正规的等级划分。他们在商业领域也做了实验。他们研究了亚马逊(Amazon)旗下鞋类零售商Zappos的转型——该公司采取了“合弄制”(Holacracy)的自我管理体系——以及在爱立信(Ericsson)和微软(Microsoft)这样历史悠久的公司中那些自主团队的发展。
But while shredding the org chart may be a satisfying way of triggering such change, it could make everything worse if it deprives workers of information about who does what. Businesses need some structure to be able to grow — and sooner or later someone will want to see what that structure looks like.
然而，虽然摧毁组织结构图也许是促成这种转型的一个有效方式，但如果它使员工无从得知同事们各自的职责则会令情况变得更糟。企业的成长需要一定的结构——而且迟早有人会想了解这一结构。
It would be better to develop alternative pictures of how teams work. Lindred Greer of Stanford Graduate School of Business says her MBA students often describe how demoralising it is when people above them in the chart are less competent. She suggests something more like a Venn diagram, in which even junior team members are shown controlling subsets. “The important thing is that they have areas where they can still make their own decisions,” she says.
更好的办法是制作一些图片来说明团队是如何运作的。斯坦福大学商学院(Stanford Graduate School of Business)的琳德丽德?格里尔(Lindred Greer)说她的MBA学生们常说，当见到组织结构图上那些职位比他们高的人能力不济时，他们是多么沮丧。她建议采用一种维恩图式的图表，在上面即使团队的基层成员也有控制的子集。“重要的是他们在一些领域可以自己拿主意，”她说。
Team members can define those areas by declaring which task they are best at. Peer pressure curbs any temptation to exaggerate skills, while recognition of colleagues’ expertise helps the team perform better overall.
团队成员可以通过声明自己最擅长什么来界定自主决策领域。来自同事们的压力会防止他们有意夸大自身的技能，而了解同事们的专业技能会令团队的整体表现愈加出彩。
Named leaders also need to take a lower profile. Prof Greer adds to the management menagerie with her suggestion that leaders must behave like hippos. They can remain under water, with just their eyes protruding to observe the team, and emerge only if they need to exert their full authority.
被委任的领导者也需要更加低调。格里尔教授还建议领导者必须表现得像动物园中的河马，能够一直潜在水下，只露出双眼关注团队，只有在需要行使全部职权时才现身。
The fixed org chart is already losing potency. Applications such as Asana or Slack could accelerate its decline by nudging groups to reform around the experts on any task, though Silicon Valley is yet to fulfil its promise that technology will re-plumb the corporate system.
一成不变的组织结构图已逐渐丧失效力。Asana、Slack之类的应用程序可能会加速它的衰落，这些应用会推动企业变革，在每一项任务中将相关专业人手作为核心，即便硅谷还未兑现其让技术重新探索企业制度的愿景。
Meanwhile, even those HR executives who favour organigrams point out that younger staff could not care less about the hidebound hierarchy they represent. They will happily take ideas to a senior partner or divisional director, bypassing old-fashioned channels, says one. It is a reminder that the chart, love it or hate it, is not the main impediment to change; the people in it often are.
与此同时，即使那些认同组织结构图的HR主管们也指出，年轻职员们也许并不怎么在乎那种僵化的等级关系。一位HR说，现在的年轻人很乐意越过那些过时的渠道，向高级合伙人或者部门主管献计献策。这提醒我们，不管我们喜欢与否，变革的主要障碍已不再是组织结构图；而往往是其中的人们。