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2010年6月23日 星期三

CEO薪酬

2010 年06月23日 15:10 PM

日产戈恩成日本薪酬最高CEO
Nissan’s Ghosn receives $9.5m package




Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn has topped the list of Japan’s best-paid executives after the Japanese automaker revealed on Wednesday that it paid its Brazilian-born chief $9.5m last year.

日本汽车制造商日产(Nissan)周三披露,该公司去年支付给其首席执行官卡洛斯• 戈恩(Carlos Ghosn)的薪酬为950万美元。出生在巴西的戈恩因此登上了日本高管薪酬排行榜榜首。

Mr Ghosn – one of the longest-serving chief executives of a carmaker – took home more than twice the pay of Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chairman and chief executive, who made $4.4m in salary and bonuses running the electronics and entertainment group in the financial year that ended in March.

在所有汽车生产商中,戈恩是服务时间最长的首席执行官之一。其去年薪酬比索尼 (Sony) 董事长兼首席执行官霍华德•斯金格爵士(Sir Howard Stringer)高出逾一倍。在截至3月的上个财年,斯金格薪水和奖金共记440万美元。

Under new rules introduced this year, listed companies in Japan must report the compensation of executives earning more than Y100m.

日本今年发布新规定,规定上市公司必须通报薪酬超过1亿日元的高管的收入。

Mr Ghosn’s pay does not include the €1.24m ($1.5m) he made running Renault, Nissan’s French alliance partner, in 2009.

戈恩的收入还不包括他在2009年运营日产法国伙伴雷诺(Renault )公司的所得——124万欧元(合150万美元)。

The league table of executive pay is still emerging, as not all Japanese groups have reported yet. But Mr Ghosn is widely expected to remain at the top in a country where senior managers generally earn far less than their counterparts elsewhere.

并非所有的日本企业都已发布薪酬报告,意味着这个高管薪酬排行榜尚不完整。然而,业界 广泛预测戈恩将停留在榜首位置,因为在日本,高级经理的薪酬整体上要比其他地区的同行低得多。

Fewer than one in 10 Japanese chief executives are believed to make enough to land them on the new disclosure lists.

在日本所有首席执行官中,薪酬高到必须披露的据信占不到十分之一。

Before the rule change, Japanese companies were required only to report the pay of directors as a group. As a result, debate about chief executives’ compensation among analysts and the public was hampered by guesswork.

在此新规出台之前,日本公司只需披露董事薪酬。造成的结果是,分析师以及公众有关首席 执行官报酬的辩论,都因为只是基于猜测而受阻。

Only a tiny handful of listed Japanese companies have foreign chief executives. All were brought in from outside, and as a result their pay is closer to international averages. However, even Sir Howard’s pay, for example, does not stand out when compared with other executives responsible for Hollywood studios.

仅有寥寥数家日本上市公司雇佣外籍首席执行官。他们全部都是从外部引进,所以薪酬更接 近国际平均水平。但即使是斯金格爵士的薪酬与好莱坞片场的其他高管比起来,也并不出众。

Speaking at Nissan’s annual shareholder meeting, Mr Ghosn defended his pay by pointing out that the car industry’s best-paid chief executive – Ford’s Allan Mullaly – made $17.4m last year.

戈恩在日产年度股东大会上为自己的薪酬进行了辩护。他指出全球汽车产业中薪酬最高的首 席执行官——福特(Ford)公司的艾伦•穆拉利(Alan Mulally)——去年的收入为1740万美元。

2010年6月22日 星期二

Herman Miller’s Design for Growth

Published: May 25, 2010
/ Summer 2010 / Issue 59



Herman Miller’s Design for Growth

The office-furniture design leader is betting on innovation as it continues to push the envelope of management practice.

At the start of the 2000s, Michael Volkema, then the chief executive officer of Herman Miller Inc., became convinced that growth in the white-collar workforce was going to slow in the company’s main markets. That was a threat to this office-furniture maker, based in Zeeland, Mich., whose revenues depended on products sold to the white-collar workforce — products such as office desks, chairs, panels, shelves, and cabinets. Volkema’s solution was to create the Creative Office, a capability within Herman Miller for identifying adjacent markets in which the company could build businesses that would provide significant new streams of revenue.

The CEO chose Gary Miller, a 26-year company research veteran, to spearhead the effort, with the aspiration of doubling the size of the company’s business playing field in three to five years. Miller (no relation to the Miller in the company name) knew he would be exploring unfamiliar market territory. Although he would stay within the boundaries of office interiors, he would need to step beyond Herman Miller’s traditional niche making furniture and cubicles.

Still, Miller didn’t want to butt heads with incumbent companies. Why compete with giants dominating existing markets? “Gary went out and asked, ‘What are the unsolved problems out there?’” says Brian Walker, the company’s former chief financial officer, who took over as CEO in 2004. “He didn’t ask, ‘How do I respond to the market for specific products like lighting?’”

Miller’s multiyear research and development effort, which included creating a partnership with West Coast and East Coast technologists and architects, led to a burst of new concepts. In lighting, for example, GE, Philips, and Osram Sylvania were then focusing on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as substitutes for standard incandescent light fixtures. Miller and his team saw an alternative: using the low-voltage DC power of LEDs for novel kinds of illumination — light tunnels, walls, lighted objects, wearable light. Why restrict lights to conventional overhead fixtures? Why not integrate them into office furniture and fixtures in new ways?

That effort led to a suite of product prototypes dubbed Programmable Environments, and later to a new business named Convia. Among the prototypes were illuminated, movable “visual shields” that changed color and a suspended wall with integrated LEDs. Integral to the new product suite was the notion of programmability. Office workers themselves would be able to use various devices, including their desktop computers, to reconfigure and reprogram the office environment. The new hardware and software allowed Miller and his team to redefine how people would think about personal space, office geometry, privacy, and illumination. In the end, the R&D project spawned 25 patent applications, and Convia was established as a Herman Miller subsidiary in 2006.

The creation of Convia might sound like a tale of pure product innovation, or even of technology adoption, but it is actually a story about management — and only the most recent of several similar stories at Herman Miller. Over many decades, the company has made itself a laboratory for testing new management ideas and turning them into effective practice. Since 1995 in particular, under CEOs Volkema and Walker, Herman Miller has adopted a string of management innovations — shareholder value–based decision making, lean production, supplier and dealer integration — and made them work for the long term.

As testimony to the benefits of disciplined management practice, Herman Miller has weathered the recent financial storm while continuing to fund high-risk ventures like Gary Miller’s. Herman Miller competes in an industry slammed by arguably the worst commercial real-estate crisis in a generation. Still, despite a 19 percent plunge in sales for fiscal 2009 (ending in May), the US$1.6 billion company reported a $68 million profit, albeit down from $152 million in fiscal 2008. Over the last 10 years, its stock has consistently outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

Building the Foundations

Herman Miller’s management journey started with decades of nurturing by the De Pree family. D.J. De Pree founded the company in 1923. (He named it after his father-in-law, who put up the money for the firm.) D.J. passed the CEO baton to his sons, first Hugh (for 18 years) and then Max (for seven years). The family, with D.J. De Pree in the lead, embedded two key principles that continue to inform the company’s management approach. One was a commitment to participative management; the other, a problem-solving approach to design.

The company adopted the so-called Scanlon plan for employee gain-sharing in 1950. A maverick idea at the time, the Scanlon plan called on production workers to make decisions to boost productivity, and recommended paying workers bonuses for doing so. Although the plan has gone through many incarnations, the company still engages all workers in decisions and pays them bonuses based on performance.

Max De Pree, CEO from 1980 to 1987, drew broad attention to the culture at Herman Miller by writing the bestselling Leadership Is an Art (Dell, 1990). Of participative management, he wrote: “Each of us, no matter what our rank in the hierarchy may be, has the same rights: to be needed, to be involved, to have a covenantal relationship, to understand the corporation, to affect our destiny, to be accountable, to appeal, to make a commitment.”

As if to complement the novelty of participative management, the company adopted a unique approach to problem solving, stemming from D.J.’s decision to involve the company in the world of premium industrial design — in particular, contemporary design. Outsiders familiar with Herman Miller often know more about its iconic products than anything else about the company. The Eames Lounge Chair, a cradle of molded wood veneer holding calfskin cushions, introduced in 1956, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Aeron, the mesh-backed, ergonomic desk chair that became an icon of the dot-com era — and is still ubiquitous in many offices — was named the Design of the Decade (1990s) by Business Week.

Herman Miller came up with these products because D.J., and then Hugh and Max, made big bets on the vision of outside designers, a practice uncommon in industry then and now. Perhaps the most revered of these outsiders was Charles Eames, who started work for the company in 1946, and, together with his wife and close collaborator, Ray Eames, produced pathbreaking designs into the mid-1970s. Many continue to sell well today, decades after their introduction. The Eames Lounge Chair remains a classic in both homes and offices.

Though observers often see the Eameses’ designs as works of art, the couple’s approach was highly analytical and practical, and left its mark on Herman Miller. Charles Eames held that the first task of a designer was to recognize “constraints,” including factors like price, size, production time, strength, and support, and that the best design was the one that best balanced them. In a New York showroom, he reportedly said, “Don’t give us that ‘good design’ crap.... The real questions are: Does it solve a problem? Is it serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?” Even though he was never a Herman Miller employee, Eames’s image appears in photos and posters across Herman Miller’s facilities and literature. His thinking has become Herman Miller’s thinking. And even today, company managers talk about business in Eames’s terms of constraints and problem solving.

Solving a Financial Crisis

Despite Herman Miller’s grounding in the disciplined management of the De Pree family, executives at the company began to lose their way in the early 1990s, and the board of directors became concerned, particularly about a lack of spending discipline and a decline in profitability. The board promoted then president Volkema in 1995 to be CEO, giving him the urgent task of restoring solid financial performance.

Volkema, who stepped down as CEO in 2004 but remains chairman, notes that healthy profitability should have been a cinch when he took over: The industry was growing at a double-digit rate. The company “had really gotten off track,” he says. “We had operating margins that were out of control. We were going to break even in a year when we really should have made a lot of money.”

To rectify the lackluster profitability, he and then CFO Walker took the path many companies started down in the 1990s: focusing on shareholder value. The key lesson that Herman Miller took to heart was that a company doesn’t create shareholder value unless it creates economic value added, or EVA — and it doesn’t create positive EVA unless it generates returns above the cost of capital, enough to pay for debt and equity capital. In much of the industry, that insight resulted in a lot of cutting and restructuring, little more. But at Herman Miller it also involved an effort to get people at every level to make better, more informed financial decisions.

Walker led a program to cascade EVA training down to every employee, very much in the spirit of D.J. De Pree. He wanted everyone at the company to calculate the financial effect of decisions big and small. It didn’t matter if they were involved in buying, selling, building, designing, billing, paying, or financing. Or whether they were charged with controlling quality, reliability, inventory, waste, energy use, scrap, or the kinds of staples people used. They were expected to embed EVA into their thinking. As everyone grasped what it took to create a true economic profit, Walker established a new level of business literacy.

Heather Kerres, who started as a cushion stapler on a chair assembly line, remembers the introduction of EVA. Before that time, she recalls that she and her co-workers sometimes bought things “frivolously.” Afterward, she says, “On the line, we really watched what we spent.” Her assembly line also strived as never before to make chairs perfect the first time, so the company could sell more. They understood they needed to exceed the previous year’s EVA. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get a bonus.

Walker himself hewed closely to the shareholder value constraint. During the dot-com crash, he and Volkema used EVA to nix one appealing acquisition. The target company, which Walker declines to name, fit nicely with Herman Miller’s product line. It was growing fast, had good margins, and could pump up revenues and earnings handily. But an EVA analysis revealed a different picture. For every spurt of growth, the operation would need a slug of capital. “It was uneconomic,” the CEO says. He walked.

Developing the Performance System

Although the focus on economic profit restored financial discipline to Herman Miller, Volkema faced another crisis at the same time, this one in manufacturing. Ironically, the crisis first emerged in a unit Volkema had himself run some years before. At the company’s Spring Lake, Mich., file cabinet plant, big customers like Hewlett-Packard and AT&T were pulling their orders. So was one of the company’s own business units, an express-delivery division that accounted for some 25 percent of Spring Lake’s volume. A Herman Miller competitor just 60 miles away was offering better quality at lower prices. “We’d reached one of those threshold moments when you have to do something,” says Ray Muscat, operations chief at Spring Lake at the time. “Here’s someone in the family telling you they don’t want your services.”

Muscat (now senior vice president of operations engineering) and others started to question the wisdom of their commitment to batch manufacturing, for which they had spent heavily to build product in lots of 500 or more. At Spring Lake, they had invested in a giant robot assembly that welded supports inside file cabinet housings, including a tractor-trailer-length automated welding line with 1,000 sensors. The Holy Grail of this approach was to drive labor completely out of the process. “Our dream was a ‘lights out’ factory,” says Matt Long, then the head of manufacturing engineering.

But the batch manufacturing approach had created several problems. Some customers had started to reduce the size of orders. They wanted file cabinets in lots of 100 instead of 500. Other customers wanted file cabinets in two weeks instead of six. And many of them wanted much higher quality, the kind apparent in products like the Lexus and Acura cars that were now dominating the luxury auto market.

The Spring Lake plant couldn’t deliver, and certainly not for the lower prices customers demanded. To Muscat and his colleagues who had been raised on the wonders of big-batch manufacturing, the prospect of change was mind-bending. Desperate, they searched for solutions, finally reaching out to the global leader in lean manufacturing, Toyota. Starting in 1995, they adapted Toyota’s leading-edge formula for plant-floor management into an approach they called the Herman Miller Performance System (HMPS).

Having followed these lean principles for more than 10 years, the plant now ships a product in two and a half hours instead of the former 60. It engages 20 people on one assembly line rather than 120 on two. Instead of manufacturing in lots of 500, it manufactures in lots of one. As just one example, a metal stamping machine once took more than four hours for changeovers. Now operators conduct a changeover in about 15 minutes — and are working toward a goal of eight minutes. So adept are workers at what people now call lean manufacturing that the plant has been used as a demonstration site by Toyota itself for many years. Toyota’s inspectors reaffirmed that status in mid-2009.

In implementing the HMPS approach, plant managers across Herman Miller have learned that the best-run plants rely on people, not machines. Only people can solve problems to make assembly lines go faster, run cheaper, and deliver higher quality. As Long (now director of the corporate HMPS team) toured the file cabinet plant recently, a visitor paused by a welding robot and asked, “Why don’t you use more robots?”

“Robots,” Long said, “can’t make themselves better.”

Another lesson that the Herman Miller team learned from the lean approach was the importance of reducing waste — waste in space, cost, material, motion, process, and inventory. In the world of lean production, “waste” is anything that doesn’t yield customer value. At some companies, managers make periodic stabs at cutting waste. At Herman Miller, they make a practice of it daily.

Muscat, Long, and others then spread the essence of the lean production system to all Herman Miller plants. Meeting demand for the company’s best-selling Aeron ergonomic chair required five assembly lines back in 1998. Although the lines could collectively make several thousand units per week, they covered 27,000 square feet (2,500 square meters), and employed 77 people in three shifts. Now Herman Miller has equal or greater production capacity in a mere 2,500 square feet (230 square meters), using 24 people in three shifts on one line.

Adopting Win-win Supplier Relations

The success of testing and adopting lean manufacturing in Herman Miller plants led to efforts to similarly transform the supply chain. The company recognized that its suppliers ran their plants largely the way Herman Miller did at Spring Lake in the 1990s, and that they were equally rife with wasted effort and material. If suppliers were to help Herman Miller in lowering costs, changes in supply chain management were required that would be probably even more radical than those that Herman Miller had undertaken in its internal operations.

Purchasing chief Drew Schramm launched the “First Mile” program in 2002 to reverse old practices. Each person in Schramm’s operation had been managing 30 to 40 suppliers, spending most of his or her time studying spreadsheets and working the phone for quotes. In the new program, Schramm shifted some purchasing people to managing only core suppliers. Instead of 30 suppliers, people in the core group manage just five, spending their time developing their capabilities. This became the dawn of Herman Miller’s adoption of collaborative, win-win supplier relations.

Schramm kicked off the First Mile program by meeting with small groups of core suppliers, usually represented by presidents or owners. This is what he told them: Herman Miller wants continuous improvement in quality, delivery, and price. We will help you, providing experts such as former shop-floor leaders from Spring Lake, to work on your shop floor to introduce HMPS-style changes. The alternative outcome is that Herman Miller will gradually shift its business to other, leaner suppliers.

The first hurdle was to get suppliers to take Herman Miller’s new overture seriously. The purchasing business had long been a game of playing one supplier off against another to drive prices down, and the suppliers were used to the way the game was played. Chad Anderson, a member of the lean manufacturing consulting team that now works with suppliers, says the suppliers’ first reaction was one of incredulity: “You mean the guy who was beating me up is now going to help me?”

Progress on the new program was uneven. One large supplier signed on but lacked enthusiasm. After making one round of improvements, the supplier’s vice president of operations argued that the value of the gains was modest. He said Herman Miller was due about $6,000 in pricing benefit. By Herman Miller’s estimates, the benefit should have been more like $100,000.

Schramm, annoyed, was ready to cut ties with the supplier. But events intervened. The supplier’s parent company demanded the supplier vacate 20,000 square feet (1,860 square meters) of space to make way for more parent-company manufacturing. The vice president, with no room to spare yet a demand from his higher-ups to shrink his plant footprint, suddenly embraced the notion of lean manufacturing as a solution, and he asked Herman Miller to ramp up its First Mile effort.

Herman Miller, now armed with leverage to press the supplier to move quickly, asked to receive its share of the expected benefits from reduced waste and increased efficiency up front. Herman Miller managers estimated that the supplier would be able to pass savings of $150,000 on its charges through to Herman Miller. To their surprise — and in a reversal of previous behavior — the supplier came back with a whopping pricing benefit of $890,000.

To the Last Mile

On top of spreading the lean thinking upstream from company operations, Herman Miller extended it downstream, launching, in 2004, a “Last Mile” program to target its dealers. Last Mile aims to help make dealers as healthy and successful as possible — and to help them best represent Herman Miller’s strengths as a company.

The Last Mile experts began by improving the dealers’ purchase-order-to-cash cycle. Paul Iles, vice president of distribution, reports that Herman Miller has helped shorten those cycles by 15 to 20 days. The company has since taken a close look at how dealers install products. Iles likes to remind people in Herman Miller manufacturing that in the customers’ eyes, “We don’t actually make the product. It’s our dealers.” After all, the dealers do the final assembly of panel systems, desks, and other parts of the office interior; they are the face of Herman Miller.

The dealers now struggle with several issues. One is that unpacking trailers, which were loaded to suit Herman Miller shipping requirements, often takes longer than installing the products. Another is that Herman Miller products come with many supplemental parts, because the factory doesn’t know the configuration in which the dealers will install the pieces. Any excess parts are waste.

Herman Miller’s engineers have been visiting dealer sites to observe installations. They figure they’ll find plenty of waste to cut. Perhaps the simplest example, beyond supplemental parts, involves instruction sheets. A dealer receiving multiples of a product receives multiple sheets — maybe dozens. Herman Miller spends $1 million a year printing them, so big savings are possible from eliminating extras.

The Last Mile program has begun to change dealers’ handling of the logistics of Herman Miller products. Ten years ago, when delivery and quality were abysmal, dealers routinely added weeks of buffer time to delivery commitments. They also stashed plenty of extra stock in warehouses, knowing they couldn’t count on timely deliveries. Now that Herman Miller delivers on schedule 99.7 percent of the time, dealers can do away with both the buffer time and the buffer space.

In effect, Herman Miller has taken its program for win-win supplier relations and begun to duplicate it with its dealers, creating an increasingly smooth end-to-end process. One sign of the dealers’ pleasure with this development: The Office Furniture Dealers Alliance chose Herman Miller for its 2008 Manufacturer of the Year Gold Award.

Creating New Markets

The management skills and rigor acquired by Herman Miller since the 1990s provided the stability and financial support for the skunkworks program of Gary Miller, its Programmable Environments initiative, and the creation of the new Convia subsidiary — which may significantly expand the playing field on which Herman Miller can battle for future revenue. Early on, the Convia team was concerned about its survival because it launched during the dot-com crash, at which time Herman Miller sales plunged as much as 40 percent in some quarters.

Volkema and Walker continued to fund the program in the midst of huge cuts in costs and workforce, reinforcing the company’s commitment to long-term growth. And they continued to support the approach taken by Gary Miller, demonstrating once again Herman Miller’s devotion to fresh thinking about management.

Miller’s first challenge was setting up his Creative Office unit in 2001. To do so, he took into account several facts of corporate life. One was the tendency for companies to support only work that replicates past successes — the not-invented-here syndrome. Another was the tendency to use all available capital to feed the maw of the current product stream — something Miller calls the “tyranny of the urgent.” A third was pressure in economic downtimes for top executives to cut high-risk investments.

Any one of these concerns could have killed Miller’s new-markets initiative. So for starters, he asked Volkema, Walker, and two other top people to sit on his internal board of directors. The objective was to have top decision makers invest themselves in the work — to be companions on the journey, not simply judges of it. “The idea,” Miller says, “was to change the dynamic from traditional review-and-approve to advocacy.”

Second, he walled his group off from current operations. Herman Miller had always formed partnerships with outside designers — like Eames or more recently Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick for the Aeron chair — and then had inside engineers complete development. Miller wanted his group to go it alone, independent of any internal staff resources. The team would give birth to ideas, incubate its own prototypes, and lay the groundwork for the new business.

During the first six months, his group of seven identified key trends and studied current products. They all found the same thing: Incumbent companies plied the waters of many established, but separate, oceans of commerce — but none were exploring the uncharted waters between them. The incumbents weren’t even talking with one another. “That’s our opportunity,” Miller realized. “It’s in the gray space.”

That’s when his group recognized the opportunities to use LED lighting in new ways. Flush with that and other design concepts, the team looked for an outside designer. By fiat, Miller prohibited the hiring of a furniture designer. Instead, he hired two well-known technologists and alumni of Disney Imagineering — Bran Ferren, an architect and special effects designer, and Danny Hillis, a computer designer — from Applied Minds, a Glendale, Calif., think tank cum prototype shop. Miller also hired Sheila Kennedy, a Boston architect who teaches at Harvard University. He then gave the team a set of product boundaries instead of a product brief.

The new team created a stream of innovations, reinventing many aspects of office interiors. In a 5,000-square-foot (465-square-meter) Glendale warehouse, they installed the suite of product prototypes that included the LED concepts; a programmable electrical system; and articulating, ceiling-mounted walls and room dividers. From the explosion of design created by the team, Herman Miller chose a subset for development.

Herman Miller launched Convia in 2006 as a product suite mixing hardware and software, with the intent of addressing an entirely new market, for programmable workspace. The hardware amounted to an infrastructure backbone. Installed in a building’s ceiling, the backbone carried an intelligent, modular electrical system with its own data network to enable programmability. It also provided a structure for suspending components of office interiors. The software allowed facilities managers and building occupants to program all aspects of the backbone’s operation.

Herman Miller now had a product to help it grow in a market outside its traditional furniture niche. To property developers, the company could sell a means of building and reconfiguring offices without throwing away wires, conduits, panels, or other material. For facilities managers, it could sell the benefits of managing energy, light, and HVAC for each desk. To users, it could promise the ability to personalize space, light, heat, and sound with a few clicks of a mouse or hand wand.

Miller admits to waking up in the middle of the night during the multiyear project. He worried about how much he had spent, how little distance he had covered. “It takes patience with ambiguity to the nth degree,” he says. One of the biggest hurdles was figuring out how to commercialize products in a market — building infrastructure — in which Herman Miller was a novice. Miller solved that problem in 2009 by partnering with Legrand and its subsidiary Wiremold, a maker of electrical and network gear for buildings.

Whether Convia and Programmable Environments will solve the bigger Herman Miller problem of growth into new markets remains to be seen. The hurdles are many: selling a new concept to builders, teaching a furniture sales force how to sell to builders, complying with unfamiliar electrical and building codes, and of course showing customers the value of the new products. But the new business has gotten off to a solid start. It has attracted customers like Notre Dame, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, which chose the Convia system for the Envisioning Lab — a facility at the Redmond, Wash., campus where the company shares its long-term vision of technology with customers and partners.

So far, Legrand has trained 400 sales reps to sell the Convia technology. And Herman Miller continues to expand its product line. It recently introduced an energy management component to help companies detect energy-saving opportunities and monitor reductions.

Herman Miller has moved itself from selling furniture to providing the entire building envelope with intelligent infrastructure. If it succeeds in this effort, the company will have demonstrated that it has successfully applied a new process for producing breakthrough products in new markets. That capability would add another leading-edge practice to its portfolio of management capabilities.

Steady in the Storm

The biggest challenge of late for Herman Miller has been staying focused on its management practices during the financial meltdown. Innovative programs often fall by the wayside when corporations are under severe financial pressures. But Herman Miller seems to regularly demonstrate that time-tested practices will not lose support.

As markets contracted in 2009, CEO Walker says he told executives that the company had to cut costs more, but cutting more people would probably hurt the company’s future. Walker decided to make other moves instead. First, he made a decision similar to one made by many other companies during the downturn. To save money, all employees, executives included, would be furloughed every other Friday. He also suspended matching contributions to 401(k) plans.

Second, he created a new bonus plan called a wage-recovery plan. On top of the bonus that originated with the Scanlon plan (and that had been reformulated to use EVA), Walker and his executives proposed to pay people back for money they lost in the furlough — provided the company did well. The finance people calculated how much money the company had to make to sustain itself, without cutting outlays for key investments. Walker then guaranteed that if the company reached that goal, the plan would split every additional dollar 50/50 between employees and shareholders. Walker admits that there were skeptics. The board, he recalls, asked: “You’re going to pay them when they don’t even work the day?”

But Walker argued that in the feeble economy, the main goal was to keep the business sustainable, not to increase profitability at the expense of employees. He believed that instead of sapping employees’ energy during a retrenchment, the wage-recovery plan would show them they should continue to make progress through the management practices that had sustained the company for so long. Walker says he hoped employees would reason this way: “Gee, I can continue to innovate in my work in a way that improves the performance of the business, and if I do that, I’ll get some of the money back.”

As it turned out, in the first three months after the plan was initiated in the spring of 2009, Herman Miller earned more than the threshold amount. Employees won a wage-recovery bonus worth nearly half of what they had lost in the furlough. In the second three months, employees earned no bonus, but in the third, they earned well more than half of what they lost. Walker says he has no regrets about paying people for time not worked, as the program generated a lot of goodwill and credibility for top management.

Of course, the program has done something else as well: It has reinforced Herman Miller’s dedication to sticking with its longtime management practices — in this case, paying bonuses to people for improving company fortunes, just the way D.J. De Pree did nearly 60 years ago.

Reprint No. 10206

Author Profiles:

  • Bill Birchard is a journalist, author, and book consultant who specializes in management and the environment. He is at work on a book about Herman Miller.

2010年6月20日 星期日

中國南方報業傳媒集團(Southern Daily Group)

五有媒體報道說﹐中國南方報業傳媒集團在嘗試收購美國 《新聞週刊》(Newsweek)失敗後﹐正在尋找機會收購另一家西方新聞出版機構。

官方報紙《中國日報》(China Daily)報道說﹐南方報業傳媒集團下屬《南方週末》執行總編向熹說﹐收購《華盛頓郵報》公司(Washington Post Co.)旗下的《新聞週刊》僅僅是開始。

向熹在報道中說﹐南方報業傳媒集團正在尋求聯合一批投資者競購其他海外媒體。

收 購《新聞週刊》的嘗試據稱是中國第一次競購西方雜志。《中國日報》援引向熹的話說﹐此舉是為了讓世界更好地瞭解中國﹐也讓中國更好地瞭解世界。

他 說競購失敗的原因可能在於競購者的國籍﹐而不是給出的價格。據《中國日報》的報道﹐《新聞週刊》收到了約70份收購請求。

報道援引向熹的 話說﹐他們其實並不瞭解中國的媒體人﹐……他們不知道我們為什麼參與競標﹐但我知道﹐一家美國媒體來收購這家機構要更容易一些。

向熹說﹐《新聞週刊》以九種不同的語言出版﹐擁有全球性的傳播資源和影響力﹐這個平台符合我們的追求。

報 道說﹐南方報業傳媒集團曾聯合上證上市公司成都博瑞傳播股份有限公司(Chengdu B-ray Media Co.)和另兩家投資基金競購《新聞週刊》。

報道援引博瑞傳播一位人士的話說﹐競購一家外國媒體就像約會一樣﹐一個約會對象不喜歡你沒關 係﹐你從中獲得了成長。

週五早盤﹐博瑞傳播股價下跌2.2%﹐上證綜合指數下跌0.1%。

本文譯自 MarketWatch

industrial actions in China

丰田在华工厂结束罢工
STRIKERS END ACTION AT TOYOTA SUPPLIER



Japan's two leading car companies extended additional wage and benefit concessions to their Chinese workforces at the weekend in moves they said would end strikes affecting their operations in the country.

日本两大汽车公司周末向在华工厂的中国工人作出进一步工资和福利让步,他们表示,这将 结束影响其在华业务的罢工。

Toyota expects its car plant in Tianjin to return to normal production today following the end of a strike at a local supplier.

丰田(Toyota)预计,继其在天津的一家供应商结束罢工后,其在天津的整车厂也将 于今日恢复正常生产。

Xinhua, China's official news agency, reported that workers at a Tianjin plant run by Toyoda Gosei, which makes plastic parts for Toyota, returned to work yesterday after a three-day strike which stopped production at the Tianjin vehicle assembly plant on Friday.

中国官方的新华社报道,丰田合成(Toyoda Gosei)天津厂工人经过3天的罢工后,于昨日复工。此次罢工导致丰田在天津的整车组装厂上周五停产。丰田合成为丰田生产塑料零部件。

Toyoda Gosei did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

丰田合成未立即答复置评的请求。

Japan's Kyodo news agency said the company had offered workers increased allowances for summer heat and perfect attendance.

日本共同社报道,丰田合成已向工人提出增加夏季高温补贴和全勤奖。

However, it refused demands for an additional pay rise over a 20 per cent increase previously offered.

不过,该公司拒绝了在此前所提加薪20%的基础上进一步加薪的要求。

Xinhua quoted one worker at the Toyota-invested parts supplier as saying that the company had promised workers a Rmb200 ($30) monthly full-attendance bonus.

新华社援引由丰田投资的该汽配厂的一名工人说,丰田合成向工人承诺全勤奖为每月200 元人民币(合30美元)。

It said that the average wage at the Tianjin parts plant was Rmb1,500 and that management had previously offered workers a 17 per cent wage increase.

报道称,该天津汽配厂的平均工资为1500元人民币,管理层之前向工人提出加薪 17%。

Meanwhile, workers at a Honda supplier in southern Guangdong province ended a week of industrial action after the company offered them a Rmb280 increase in monthly salary and benefits.

与此同时,本田(Honda)在广东的一家供应商结束了为期一周的罢工,该公司提出把 工人的月工资和福利增加280元人民币。

“The problem is resolved,” the company said.

该公司表示:“问题解决了。”

Workers at Honda Lock in Zhongshan, Guangdong, had asked for a Rmb700 increase in base monthly pay to Rmb1,600.

位于广东中山的本田制锁(Honda Lock)的工人此前要求将月基本工资增加700元人民币,达到1600元。

The industrial action was organised by workers independent of China's only government-sanctioned union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions.

组织此次罢工的工人独立于中国唯一受政府认可的工会——中华全国总工会(All China Federation of Trade Unions)。


译者/杨远

本两大汽车公司周末向在华工厂的中国工人作出进一步工资和 福利让步,他们表示,这将结束影响其在华业务的罢工。

丰田(Toyota)预计,继其在天津的一家供应商结束罢工后,其在天津的整车厂也将于今日恢复正常生产。

中国官方的新华社报道,丰田合成(Toyoda Gosei)天津厂工人经过3天的罢工后,于昨日复工。此次罢工导致丰田在天津的整车组装厂上周五停产。丰田合成为丰田生产塑料零部件。

丰田合成未立即答复置评的请求。

日本共同社报道,丰田合成已向工人提出增加夏季高温补贴和全勤奖。

不过,该公司拒绝了在此前所提加薪20%的基础上进一步加薪的要求。

新华社援引由丰田投资的该汽配厂的一名工人说,丰田合成向工人承诺全勤奖为每月200元人民币(合30美元)。

报道称,该天津汽配厂的平均工资为1500元人民币,管理层之前向工人提出加薪17%。

与此同时,本田(Honda)在广东的一家供应商结束了为期一周的罢工,该公司提出把工人的月工资和福利增加280元人民币。

该公司表示:“问题解决了。”

位于广东中山的本田制锁(Honda Lock)的工人此前要求将月基本工资增加700元人民币,达到1600元。

组织此次罢工的工人独立于中国唯一受政府认可的工会——中华全国总工会(All China Federation of Trade Unions)。

译者/杨远

CMI評表現 醫界反彈

醫學中心忽略重症?楊志良用CMI評表現 醫界反彈

〔記者魏怡嘉/台北報導〕衛生署長楊志良以CMI(病例組合指標)偏低,點名台北馬偕、 中山附醫、台北萬芳及國泰等四家醫學中心多收治輕症病患,重症病患卻收治的少,是不及格的醫學中心,昨日引來醫界的反彈,連健保局官員都私下認為,用 CMI來認定醫院的整體表現,有失公允。

楊志良除批評部分醫學中心CMI不及格外,也痛斥醫學中心未做好收治急重症病患角色,今年新的「急 症能力分級評鑑」,十九家醫學中心只有彰基、童綜合醫院、高雄榮總及中國醫藥大學四家過關,包括台大醫院及北榮都沒過關,依規定,若醫學中心在評鑑的那一 年「急症能力分級評鑑」沒有過關,將自醫學中心除名。

台大表示,該院收治急重症病患全國第一,也有足夠的照顧能力,尊重衛生署的複核,也自 認現在就已經符合標準;北榮則表示,該院僅有一項複雜的急重症檢查超出評鑑要求的時間,其他都已過關,正努力做準備複核,且一定要過關。

健 保局官員表示,CMI通常用於衡量不同醫院間平均每個住院個案資源耗用的比較,健保在今年實施DRG(住院診斷關連群)後,亦將CMI導入做為加乘給付的 指標,一般認為CMI高,表示耗費醫療資源比較多,病患的病情應較為嚴重,但其僅止於參考,因為若是浪費醫療資源,CMI也會比較高;每年都會將CMI給 衛生署做為醫院整體評鑑之用,但僅為評鑑項目之一。

一家合於署長標準的醫學中心院長表示,醫院收治輕、重症病患有很多因素交互影響,每家醫 院都會有特定的醫療族群,病患交通也是一個因素,僅以CMI就下定論,似不太妥當。

被點名不及格的國泰醫院則表示,該院經醫策會評鑑通過為 醫學中心,近來又獲得癌症A級醫院及冠狀動脈疾病認證通過,對醫療品質深具信心,署長引用的是九十七年的資料,但該院九十八年的CMI為一.三○二六,高 於署長一.二標準。


Case mix index (CMI) is the average diagnosis-related group weight for all of a hospital's Medicare volume. It can be used to adjust the average cost per patient (or day) for a given hospital relative to the adjusted average cost for other hospitals by dividing the average cost per patient (or day) by the hospital's calculated CMI. The adjusted average cost per patient would reflect the charges reported for the types of cases treated in that year. If a hospital has a CMI greater than 1.00, their adjusted cost per patient or per day will be lowered and conversely if a hospital has a CMI less than 1.00, their adjusted cost will be higher.

A link to the 2009 spreadsheet of the CMI for all US providers is called FY 2009 Final Rule Case Mix Index at the HHS webpage [1]

An analysis of that file shows that there are 3619 hospital records. The number of cases for the hospitals ranges from a low of 1 to a high of 36,282 cases at Florida Hospital in Orlando, FL (Medicare ID 100007). That hospital has a Case Mix Index of 1.57. The mean number of cases across all the hospitals in the database is 3,098 with a standard deviation of 3,102. As far as the Case Mix Index, the average is 1.37 with a minimum of .58 and a max of 3.73 and a standard deviation of 0.31.

See also


CMI值 (病例組合指標)比一比,讓掛車尾的幾家醫學中心直跳腳。健保局則表示,患者住醫院畢竟不像住旅館方便,醫院主掌決定大權,因此計算出疾病的嚴重度,再調 整健保局對醫院的給付,鼓勵大醫院多看重症。衛生署也認為,CMI可以看出醫院的經營重點。
----

熱門話題-醫學中心照顧CMI值高的病患

  • 2010-06-12
  • 中國時報
  • 【曹昌堯/中山醫學大學附設 醫院副院長】

 近日衛生署署長楊志良嚴峻地指出有四家醫學中心照顧的病患CMI值(可約 略代表疾病的相對嚴重度)偏低,需要好好地改善,否則,不能成為醫學中心。本人身在被點名的其中一家醫學中心服務,深深地了解署長關切以及對醫學中心的期 待。

 然而,在台灣要成為醫學中心有許多條件,首先要醫院評鑑為特優級、教學醫院評鑑為優等,然後再符合衛生署醫策會要求的醫學中心六大任務指 標的各項要求。換言之,要成為醫學中心需符合在醫療、教學、研究、社區服務及國際醫療等數百項指標的檢驗,雖然CMI值 也是其中之一,卻不是唯一。同時,病人有自由選擇就醫醫院的權利與自由,醫院本著救人原則,實在也無法依CMI值來選擇病人。

 日昨,貴報新聞報導引述本人發言關於楊志良署長指出四大醫學中心CMI值偏低時,列出的內容,與本人的原意有出入,本人當時只是強調 CMI值只是醫學中心評鑑的眾多項目之一,如果單以CMI值來評鑑醫學中心是否夠格,惟恐醫學中心為求拉高CMI值,被迫拒絕診治CMI值較低的病人,更 擔心若是CMI值成為醫學中心評鑑的最重要因子,可能會出現極少數以輕報重,或輕病重醫的令人遺憾現象。

2010年6月14日 星期一

鴻海/富士康 危機與機會

董事長:郭台銘
總經理:郭台銘
資本額:858億台幣
創立於1974年,鴻海在董事長郭台銘先生的領導下,以前瞻性的眼光,自創顛覆電子代工服務領域的機光電垂直整合『eCMMS』商業模式;提供客戶從共同設計(JDSM)、共同開發(JDVM)…… 到全球運籌及售後服務等等之全球最具競爭力的一次購足整體解決方案。

鴻海科技集團是全球3C(電腦、通訊、消費性電子)代工領域規模最大、成長最快、評價最高的國際集團,集團旗下公司不僅於臺灣、香港、倫敦等證券交 易所掛牌交易,更囊括當前臺灣最大的企業、捷克前三大出口商、大中華地區最大出口商、富比士及財富全球五百大企業,及全球3C代工服務領域龍頭等頭銜。

集 團多年來致力於研發創新,以核心技術為中心,包括:奈米技術、環保製程技術、平面顯示器技術、無線通訊技術、精密模具技術、伺服器技術、光電 / 光通訊技術材料與應用技術及網路技術等。集團不僅具完善的研發管理制度,更在智權管理上努力耕耘,積極地以提升華人之國際競爭力為己任,並在企業社會責任 與節能、減排、綠化、循環等環境保護方面全力推動與奉獻;截至2007年底已在全世界共獲超過20,000件專利,不僅連續三年蟬聯臺灣年度專利申請數及 獲准數雙料冠軍,在美國麻省理工學院的全球年度專利排行榜(MIT Technology Review)中,集團亦是全球前二十名中唯一上榜的華人團體。也因如此,鴻海被美國財富雜誌評鑒入選爲全球最佳聲望標竿電子企業15強,並成為全球唯一 能連續六年名列美國商業週刊(Business Week)科技百強(IT100)前十名的公司!

鴻海集團獨創之eCMMS營運模式與輝煌之營運成果,帶給集團及臺灣之榮譽:




建立集團軟體中心,更完善集團eCMMS一站式垂直整合服務;

榮與全球最大企業間電子商務平台阿里巴巴結盟;

獲韓國德鈴集團加盟,強化集團於軸承、玻璃鏡面、按鍵及微型馬達等關鍵技術,更完善集團eCMMS一站式垂直整合服務;

……


2006年 FIH成爲香港藍籌–恒生指數成分股;


獲普立爾科技團隊加盟,強化集團機光電整合,並成爲全球第一大數位相機代工廠;


榮獲Cheers雜誌調查票選爲臺灣上班族最嚮往公司;


再次榮獲IR Magazine當年度臺灣區最佳投資人關係公司提名;


榮獲IR Magazine當年度臺灣區最佳公司治理提名;


榮獲104人力銀行問卷調查票選爲臺灣最幸福企業;

……


2005年 成爲全球第一大手機代工廠;


獲奇美通訊團隊加盟,強化集團RF及手機共同設計/開發(JDSM/JDVM);


獲安泰電業團隊加盟,集團正式進軍汽車産業,邁向6C大道;


首次榮獲天下雜誌評鑒爲臺灣第一大企業;


榮獲美國財富雜誌評鑒入選爲全球最佳聲望(Most Admired)標竿電子企業15強;


成爲電子產業行為規範(EICC)成員,致力於推廣企業社會及環保責任(SER);

……


2004年 獲國碁電子團隊加盟,強化集團網通垂直整合能力;


以172億美元營收首次成爲全球第一大3C代工廠;


應客戶要求,開啟包括主機板等產品的自有品牌零組件事業;

……


2003年 獲芬蘭藝模及摩托羅拉奇瓦瓦廠團隊加盟,首次奠定手機eCMMS垂直整合;


首次成爲大中華地區最大出口商;


榮獲IR Magazine評鑒爲當年度臺灣區最佳投資人關係公司;

……


2002年 榮獲遠東經濟評論爲亞太區200大企業排名第2;


榮獲亞元(Asian Money)雜誌評鑒爲最佳企業策略;


入列富比士(Forbes)雜誌全球最佳400大企業;

……


2001年 首次榮獲天下雜誌評鑒爲臺灣第一大民營製造業;


榮獲S&P標準普爾BBB評等;

……


2000年 宣示開啓機光電整合計劃;

……


1999年 首次GDR募資,以10%溢價,創下臺灣企業海外籌資歷史記錄;


榮獲亞元雜誌評選爲當年度臺灣最佳管理公司;

……


1998年 首次入列美國商業周刊全球資訊百強;


董事長郭台銘 鴻海 稱霸「集、急」十年

作者:採訪/蕭富元‧熊毅晰  出處:天下雜誌 446期 2010/05


四月二十七日,鴻海成功拿下「台北資訊園區BOT案」。這個由鴻海董事長郭台銘親自領軍參與口試的案子,讓製造實力起家的鴻海,在台灣正式跨入科技業的最後一哩──通路,產業供應鏈更極致的垂直整合。

今年三月中,鴻海集團也才透過三合一,將群創、奇美電及統寶合併為新奇美,成為鴻海旗下的次集團,營收規模也瞬間超越友達,躍為面板一哥。

郭台銘指出,「我們不需急著進去任何一個產業,但是當到達一個成熟點時再進去,就能很快擴大。」

所以在大環境趨勢「集」與「急」的雙重夾擊下,郭台銘宣布暫不退休,再給自己十年,全心思考鴻海集團「集」的策略。

《天下》專訪中,郭台銘不僅大談鴻海「先廣再集」的新事業切入哲學,更透露了鴻海下一個十年的集團發展。

對企業而言,二○一○年不會很困難,但現在只能看到上半年,景氣能見度愈來愈短。主因是出現了兩種集(急),一個是集中的集,一個是急單的急。

第一個趨勢是「集」

很多時候,單一的事件都可以處理,最怕集中,例如八八水災,就是下雨在短期間內太集中了。

現在新科技的交替也趨向集中。過去說三C,現在是三個螢(screen),mobile screen(手機),front screen(PC)、back screen(電視),這三個螢以雲端平台串起來,就是集中。

以前,預測是以過去的經驗看未來,現在強調創新,跟過去不一樣,過去的經驗不一定適用,因為現在的改變不是單向。

我們的能源、科技,很多創新都集中在往後這十年,我覺得未來十年會很有趣。

往後這十年,地球上會有很多新的事物層出不窮的發生,是你無法預測的,例如天氣的變化,醫療技術的進步,各種的生物,還有像現在遇到的H1N1等疾病。


所以,舊有的體制來應付這麼多的集中,真是同時要有經驗,又要有創新思惟來帶領。

第二個趨勢是「急」

眼前第二個趨勢是「急」。政治人物的限制就是四年,歐巴馬說他只做一任,他決定的法案,等到要落實到每個州,兩年也過去了。為了怕下一任的人想法跟他不一樣,現在就要很急著進行,很短的時間要解決。但經濟的問題,冰凍三尺,很難。

我不一樣,我是董事長,雖然有任期制,今年要改選,但我要宣布,我會繼續留下來。因為鴻海艦隊裡很多事業群,加上新奇美的成軍,我們有很多很多事情要做。

「集」跟「急」湊在一起,所以我希望好好利用這很有趣的十年,而不是為了股價。

政治人物急,我不急,最起碼我沒那麼急。

今天,天底下很多事不在你做對多少,而在你做錯多少,一急就容易出錯。我自己也發覺到,所以我最近心態也調整,特別當我想到女兒二十五歲時,我都八十五了。所以我給自己訂了個目標,就放緩,不急了。

我希望未來十年,整個鴻海集團在二個集(急)上,我先挑集中的集來做,兩個影響因素我消去一個(急),先安定軍心。

用「廣」來迎戰「集」

要怎麼解決「集」?從另一面來說就是「廣」。我們現在比較廣,在很多地方都先灑下種子,都涉獵,都去試水溫。

鴻海的發展從機械、光學、電子領域,再進入軟體,現在《全面攻進奈米科技與太陽電池》這本書談的內容,我們最近也都在看,包括雲端。

奈米,其實是機械的一環,奈米產業鴻海已經研究十年了,今年,第一個產品就要出來,是用無人化的工廠。無人化工廠雖然沒有作業員,但仍需要很多人, 包括自動化工程師、品管工程師、材料工程師、標準作業流程工程師、精密機械工程師。因為鴻海集團在大陸也缺工,所以做無人化工廠,我們已經進行兩、三年 了。


還有太陽能,台積電入主茂迪之前,其實是我們和茂迪坐在這(郭台銘信義區的宅邸)談的,考慮的結果是我們不要花很多錢去試水溫。例如太陽能大家都在 談轉換效率,轉換效率過程中很多都流失掉,其實只要幾個零組件,像是inverter(變頻器)的升級等就能改善效率。我們很廣的在看,但不會很急著跳進 去。

我們不需急著進去任何一個產業,但是當到達一個成熟點時再進去,就能很快擴大。像鴻海很晚才進入桌上型電腦組裝產業,現在卻已經是全世界最大,而且還賺錢。

新奇美成立之後,我相信鴻海集團在這領域也會交出很好的成績單。不需要靠政府任何補助,而是自己整合,這就是鴻海的價值,也是我現在做事努力的方向。

鴻海不需要急

所以鴻海現在的「集」,是在很多領域都先試水溫。但現在都不深,然後再集中選擇最適當的產業及時進入也不遲。因為鴻海的規模已經大到某個地步,不需要急,我們已經很習慣大規模作戰了。

《天下雜誌》的一千大排行,鴻海從九百多名一直到現在,每年還要成長二、三○%,真的是滿大的挑戰。所以希望放遠一點,以十年來看,鴻海一定會繼續成長下去,但是公司就不會再拆解嗎?其實我也一直在探討這個問題。

當然群創和奇美合併的新奇美,已經是一個次集團,我們還有很多零組件事業群,將來整個會怎麼走,其實對一個經營者來說,是前無古人,後無來者,所以我才需要多花點時間思考。

未來這有趣的十年,我認為不管企業或是政府都需要具備同樣的能力及條件。

第一是領導力(leadership)。任何組織都要有一個非常有經驗的掌舵者。豐田今天為什麼出問題?日本企業的傳承都已經到第二、第三、第四代,這些人大部份都沒有參與企業剛開始建造的過程,他們參與的都是成果的分享。

所以第一,一定要有一個有經驗的領導人。經驗是時間、金錢累積出來的。今天不是我很能幹,而是我做的事情比別人多,犯的錯比別人多,然後我自己反省。

我在美國住過十年,斷斷續續台灣、美國兩地跑,有陣子為了買設備、學技術,我也常去日本。還有因為我在歐洲捷克有設廠,也住在捷克廠裡約一年,大陸更不用說。

全台灣的企業領導人,除了康師傅之外,真正在大陸扎根的電子科技業,就屬鴻海了。龍華廠是從一片荒地,一草一木這樣建立起來,從一九九六到現在,建了一個三十萬人的工業區,是我在那流的血、流的汗堆砌出來的。

第二,要有top down的管理。

日本豐田這次發生問題,過去它是習慣bottom up(由下而上)做事的公司,這時候的危機處理只能top down(由上而下),因為沒那麼多時間去商量。

第三,一定要掌握科技及時機。就像美國太空梭回到地球,一定有個衝破大氣層的角度,那角度要在一瞬間掌握好。

台灣將變成幾大集團的競爭

科技的timing要能掌握住,然後把企業壯大,不只是一個小格局,否則台灣本身沒有國內市場,生存會有困難。所以台灣將來的中小企業,我想可能面臨的挑戰會比較大。

將來台灣可能會變成幾大集團的競爭。所以我說的鴻海艦隊,不是光一個航空母艦,還要有驅逐艦、巡航艦、偵察艦、魚雷艇,統統都要配備,最後打的是一個全球戰爭。不管是財務、法律、專利、國際運作,所有的綜合考量,台灣中小企業要修的學分滿多的。

但後浪推前浪,永遠有三、五個鴻海、郭台銘出現,歷史發展的軌跡告訴我們,江山代有才人出。(黃靖萱整理)



*****
富士康十二跳背後 高壓失靈 管理新一代的兩難

作者:江逸之.黃靖萱  出處:天下雜誌 448期 2010/06

相關關鍵字:富士康;自殺;郭台銘

富士康員工連續自殺,引發高度關注,不僅突顯中國新一代工人所面臨的身心壓力,更是數以萬計企業在管理上的共同困境。

專輯精采重點:

facebook討論》你的「職場偶像」是誰?跟天下粉絲分享你的經驗!

想了解更多精彩議題,請參考448期天下雜誌

郭台銘一生最重要的禮物

五月二十六日,鴻海董事長郭台銘親自帶著三百多位中港台與外籍記者,要說明位於深圳龍華的富士康不是「血汗工廠」。年初跳樓身亡的富士康員工馬向前的父母,突然跪地陳情喊冤,「我要見郭董,馬向前死得不明不白,」馬父流著鼻涕大聲哭訴。

很諷刺的,幾十位富士康員工站在深藍色「Foxconn」招牌後,冷漠地看著這一幕。

走進面積相當於九座台北大安森林公園的富士康龍華廠,就像是闖入了一座巨大的迷宮,所有廠房長得都一樣,唯一不一樣就是小小的廠房編號,四十五萬名員工在龍華幾個廠區內,變成一隻隻沒有名字的小螞蟻,只能用制服顏色來辨別所屬單位,個人價值隱沒在鴻海帝國裡。

龍華廠的每棟廠房牆壁都爬滿了一條條修補裂痕的「成長痕跡」,見證鴻海的高速發展歷程,「廠房剛蓋好,我們等不及水泥乾燥,就直接開工,造成牆壁龜裂,」一位富士康陸幹透露。

廠房外牆龜裂,可以重新修補,但高速擴張企業版圖,管理員工的機制卻跟不上企業成長速度。

富士康龍華廠處處感受得到郭台銘鐵血治軍風格,每一座樓梯都貼滿了「魔鬼都藏在細節裡,走出實驗室,就沒有高科技,只有執行的紀律」的郭語錄,任何人上下樓梯都得複習「郭語錄」。

龍華廠就像是一座與世隔絕的小王國,在廠區內各項生活機能一應俱全,每棟宿舍一樓都是餐廳、便利店、水果店與銀行。但一走出龍華廠,卻是另外一個落 後世界,馬路上漫天灰塵,大卡車橫衝直撞,整個龍華地區就只有一家設備簡陋的電影院,連間像樣的餐廳都沒有,四十幾萬的富士康員工嚴重缺乏娛樂休閒活動。

八○後、九○後的富士康員工佔八成以上,下班後唯一的娛樂就是上網,雖然富士康在廠區內設置了網吧,每位員工都有免費的上網點數,但仍僧多粥少,無法滿足年輕員工上網打發時間的需求。

龍華廠區每平方公里容納了超過十萬人,即使是全台灣人口密度最高的城市永和市,人口密度也不過四萬人。

最接近的陌生人

相較於其他大陸企業的簡陋員工宿舍,富士康的員工宿舍蓋得美輪美奐,十四層樓的宿舍裡,第一線作業員平均每八人一間房間,十多坪的空間裡,四張上下鋪鐵床與整排內務櫃,生活空間尚屬寬敞。

但為了避免同鄉串連、結黨;在工廠裡,刻意地將同鄉員工拆開在不同的車間;在宿舍,同生產線的員工,也一定會拆在不同宿舍。因為不同上班時間、不同 生產線、不同家鄉,同宿舍不見得會交談,「往往一個月都看不到同房間的人,我睡覺時候,他們都在上班,等到我上班時候,同房間的人都在睡覺了,」來自雲南 的小鋼抱怨。四十五萬人,彼此成為最接近的陌生人。

新一代中國工人

就在郭台銘帶媒體參觀關愛中心時,一通電話打進了關愛中心,電話那一頭的員工大聲泣訴著想要自殺,關愛中心網路平台立即顯示為特急案件,一位資深的 心理醫生立即衝進來接聽電話,不斷地安慰對方,「我們一定要讓電話不斷線,就有機會搶救這位員工,」一位關愛中心主管指出。富士康在去年成立員工關愛中 心,培訓一百位的心輔員,其中七十一位通過考試合格。

今年中國科學院在二月初,針對深圳八家企業進行員工抗逆力調查,發現富士康員工的抗逆力低於八家企業的平均值,「二十歲以下的員工抗逆力水平很 低,」中國科學院心理所社會與經濟行為研究中心主任時勘分析,中國正處於一個容易發生貧富不均壓力的社會階段。時勘建議富士康,首先要控制負面情緒的感 染,其次從所有員工中篩選出有負面情緒的員工,同時建立起員工援助計劃(EAP),所有幹部都必須學習心理學與社會學,「愈是困難時,愈要倡導正面情 緒。」


面對接連而來的員工自殺事件,郭台銘徹夜難眠,眼珠充滿血絲,雙手發抖地高舉筆記本,「我們沒把握沒有下一個(自殺的員工),我不知道明天要如何面對媒體,想到什麼,就馬上爬起來寫筆記。」

富士康員工十二跳引發兩岸三地的高度關注,自殺引發的負面情緒效應也逐漸擴散到其他工廠,珠三角的很多工廠員工都以自殺做為威脅,要求老闆加薪,甚至連本田汽車中國區四座工廠也爆發罷工潮,抗議工資過低。

這不僅僅是一家代工廠的問題,而是中國這一代工人的所面臨的生存困境,也是所有在大陸設廠的各國企業所必須面對的問題,當然首當其衝的是台商。

2010年6月8日 星期二

FOXCONN QUESTIONS CHINESE SYSTEM

富士康拟将社会职能还给中国政府
FOXCONN QUESTIONS CHINESE SYSTEM




The manufacturing model that has made China the workshop of the world has been called into question after the region's largest electronics maker announced it was reviewing its system of running large factory towns.

使中国成为“世界工厂”的制造业模式已受到质疑。此前亚太地区最大的电子产品制造商宣 布,将重新审视其运营大型厂区的制度。

Terry Gou, the head of Foxconn, whose clients include Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, said at the parent group Hon Hai's annual meeting in Taipei that a spate of suicides at his manufacturing hub made him realise that the “structure [of the manufacturing industry in China] has to change”.

富士康(Foxconn)董事长郭台铭(Terry Gou)在母公司鸿海精密(Hon Hai)在台北举行的年会上表示,富士康制造中心发生的连环自杀事件使他意识到,“(中国制造业的)结构必须改变”。富士康的客户包括苹果 (Apple)、戴尔(Dell)和惠普(Hewlett-Packard)。

About 270,000 people live and work at the self-enclosed Foxconn campus in Shenzhen, the Chinese city bordering Hong Kong.

大约27万人在富士康自成一体的深圳工业园生活和工作。深圳是邻近香港的中国城市。

Mr Gou said companies such as Foxconn had to build a community from scratch around their factories when they entered China during the early days of its opening up in the 1980s. But “today we are going to return these social functions to the government”.

郭台铭表示,像富士康这样的企业在上世纪80年代中国改革开放初期到中国大陆开创业务 时,不得不从零开始,在自己的工厂周围构建社区。但是,“如今我们打算把这些社会职能交还给政府”。

Foxconn on Sunday announced a second big pay rise for its front-line workers across China. The group said it would offer a 66 per cent performance-related pay rise from October 1, on top of a 30 per cent wage increase announced last week.

富士康在上周日宣布,再度大幅上调中国各地厂区第一线工人的薪资。该集团表示,在上周 宣布的30%加薪基础上,从10月1日起将执行66%的绩效关联加薪。

“Today we are going a bit quickly and moving ahead of everyone else” but, when the adjustment to a higher-wage environment comes, “its speed and ferocity will be greater than you can imagine,” Mr Gou said.

郭台铭说:“眼下,我们的动作快了一点,抢在其他所有人前面”,但是,当朝着较高薪资 环境的调整到来时,“其速度与猛烈程度将超出你的想象。”

The move is a departure from the China investment model pioneered by Hong Kong and Taiwanese manufacturers.

此举背离了港台制造商开创的中国投资模式。

It comes amid further signs of worker unrest in southern China. Honda confirmed yesterday that workers at a factory that supplies the Japanese carmaker had gone on strike. The workers appear to have been inspired by a successful industrial action at another Honda facility in nearby Foshan.

与此同时,中国南方正出现更多工人不安定迹象。本田(Honda)昨日确认,为这家日 本汽车制造商供货的一家工厂的工人已投入罢工。这些工人似乎受到邻近佛山市另一家本田工厂劳工行动取得成功的鼓舞。

Mr Gou said Foxconn was still exploring ways to separate the work and living environments of its workers but one option was to sell its dormitories to the government and rent them back for its staff as needed.

郭台铭表示,富士康仍在探索分隔工人工作与生活环境的方式,但其中一个选择是,将宿舍 卖给政府,然后根据需要为员工租赁这些宿舍。

“If a worker in Taiwan commits suicide because of emotional problems, his employer won't be held responsible, but we are taken to task in China because they are living and sleeping in our dormitories,” he said. This has become too big a burden for Foxconn to bear, Mr Guo said.

“如果台湾的一名工人由于情绪问题自杀,他的雇主不会被追究责任,但我们在中国大陆受 到责备,因为他们居住和睡在我们的宿舍里,”他表示。郭台铭称,这个负担已变得过于沉重,富士康承担不起。

In Hong Kong, Samuel Chin, chairman of Hong Kong-listed Foxconn International, said that price negotiations with its clients would be concluded within the next quarter and that the company aimed to pass on “as much as possible” of the increased costs to them.

在香港上市的富士康国际 (Foxconn International)董事长陈伟良(Samuel Chin)表示,与客户进行的价格谈判将在下一个季度内完成,公司将力求把“尽可能多的”增加的成本转移给客户。


译者/和风

2010年6月7日 星期一

THE DEAN POISED TO SHAKE UP BUSINESS

哈佛商学院的新院长
THE DEAN POISED TO SHAKE UP BUSINESS




Blame it on Harvard” ran the incendiary and, in retrospect, rather unfair headline to an article I wrote for this newspaper in the autumn of 2008. Only a few weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Harvard Business School had marked its centenary by holding a grand

“把它归咎于哈佛”是我在2008年秋季为英国《金融时报》撰写的一篇文章的标题—— 该标题具有煽动性,而且事后看来,也有点儿不公平。在雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)破产仅仅数周后,哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)举办了为期3天的盛大活动,以纪念其百年华诞,我出席了这一活动。

three-day event, which I attended.

在那样一段紧张时期举办庆典,引发了诸多辩论:商学院在危机中扮演了何种角色?以及全 球金融体系的崩溃是否应被归咎于全球MBA毕业生的“奇袭”?

The anniversary, falling at that tense moment, was the cue for much debate about the role of business schools, and whether it was the shock troops of MBA graduates around the world who should be criticised for bringing down the global financial system.

前一阵子,哈佛商学院任命现年48岁的教授尼廷•诺里亚(Nitin Nohria)担任新院长。对于所有指摘和谩骂,上述消息是一个迟到、但却有力的回应。这是一个重大时刻,原因如下:

Last week's news of the appointment of Nitin Nohria, the 48-year-old HBS professor, as the school's new dean was a delayed but telling response to all that finger-pointing and name-calling. This is a big moment, for several reasons.

诺里亚是人们记忆中的第一个并非出身于经济学和金融领域的哈佛商学院院长。他的专业领 域是领导力和道德规范。有人指出,这个MBA精英工厂制造出了自私和不道德的经营者——他们主要寻求个人财富最大化,不惜损害所在机构的利益。哈佛商学院 的这一决定,远非规避这种批评,而是希望与其正面交锋。

Prof Nohria will be the first HBS dean in living memory not to emerge from the fields of economics and finance. His specialist subjects are leadership and ethics. Far from dismissing the criticism – which has suggested that this elite MBA factory has produced selfish and amoral operators who seek mainly to maximise their personal wealth at the expense of their organisations – HBS wants to engage with this debate head on.

第二,诺里亚代表着过去几年间哈佛商学院兴起的进步主义思想。诺里亚与同事拉凯什•库 拉纳(Rakesh Khurana)一起,主持了有关专业标准的讨论,提出引入一种管理上的希波克拉底誓言(Hippocratic oath)。他们在18个月前发表在英国《金融时报》上的一篇文章中辩称,对经理人提出更高期望,将会对他们产生一种纠偏性压力,“将经理人转变为社会利 益在日渐兴旺的经济企业中的代理人”。哈佛商学院鼓励许多学员追求自己版本的经理人誓言,而且在最近出版书籍中描述的MBA学员国际化运动,已如雨后春笋 般兴起。

Second, Prof Nohria is identified with the progressive thinking that has been bubbling up at HBS during the past few years. With his colleague Rakesh Khurana, he has led the discussion over professional standards, proposing the introduction of a kind of Hippocratic oath for management. In an article for the Financial Times 18 months ago, they argued that placing higher expectations on managers would exert a kind of corrective pressure on them, “turning managers into agents of society's interest in thriving economic enterprises”. Many of HBS's MBA students were encouraged to pursue their own version of an oath for managers, and an international movement of MBA students, described in a recently published book, sprang up.

第三,在哈佛商学院这家令人敬畏的机构,诺里亚是首位非美国出生的院长。他将为当代一 些最紧迫的企业问题,带来不同的看法和见解。亚洲的崛起对全球其它地区意味着什么?企业如何在一个极度不平等的世界中运营?我们能够继续可持续增长,同时 不会耗尽这个星球有限的资源,也不会让许多人的生活变得无法忍受吗?

Third, Prof Nohria is the first

前一阵子,我和诺里亚的另一位同事罗莎贝丝•摩斯•肯特(Rosabeth Moss Kanter)在电话里谈论这个问题时,肯特听起来对该任命非常激动。她告诉我:“我的确认为这是历史上的一个重大时刻。”这话有些过头?请想一下吧:哈 佛商学院不仅在商学院中具有巨大的象征意义,而且通常对企业来说也是如此。我们关注它的一言一行。这非常重要。

non-US born dean of the august institution. He brings a different perspective and insights into some of the most urgent business questions of the day. What does the rise of Asia mean for the rest of the world? How should business operate in a world of startling inequality? Can we continue to grow sustainably, without depleting the planet's finite resources and making life intolerable for many?

肯特解释称,新院长(的任命)体现了一种领导力方面的思路,将挑战整个商业领域。她告 诉我:“这与负责任的领导有关。我可以把它描述成向道德资本主义转变的开始,而不只是一种纠正。这是一种新事物。”

Another of Prof Nohria's colleagues, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, sounded thrilled by the appointment when we discussed it on the phone last week. “I really think this is a big moment in history,” she told me. Over the top? Consider: HBS has a symbolic significance, not only among business schools, but for business generally. We notice what it does and says. It matters.

塔克商学院(Tuck School of Business)教授维贾伊•戈文达拉扬(Vijay Govindarajan)同样兴奋。他在自己的博客中表示,此次任命是“美国的一个重大时刻”。

Prof Kanter explained that the new dean embodied a way of thinking about leadership that would challenge the entire business community. “This is about leaders who take responsibility,” she told me. “I could characterise it as the start of a shift to moral capitalism. And not just as a corrective. This is something new.”

如果这一切开始听起来像是压在某个人肩上的重担,我们不应过分担心。朋友和同事们谈到 了诺里亚协作的方式。他们相信,诺里亚同时拥有合适的气质和必要的专业技能,能够在这种关键时刻领导哈佛商学院。

Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at the Tuck School of Business, is similarly enthused. The appointment is “a signature moment for America”, he declared on his blog.

不管怎样,我们知道,一段时期以来,他一直在认真思考领导力的问题。2001年,他与 詹姆斯•尚皮(James Champy)一起发表了《管理你的企图心》(The Arc of Ambition: Defining the leadership journey)。从该书的章节目录,可以推断出他眼下可能会如何行动:“见识人之所未见”,“迈着坚定的步伐前进”,“不改变,毋宁死”,“决不违背价 值观”。

If this is all beginning to sound like a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of one individual, we should not be overly concerned. Friends and colleagues point to Prof Nohria's collaborative approach. They are confident that he has both the right sort of temperament and the necessary expertise to lead the school at this crucial time.

在更近时期出版的作品《Paths to Power: How insiders and outsiders shaped American business leadership》中,诺里亚及其合著者们探讨了人们的背景如何影响他们人生机遇的问题。作为一位在哈佛商学院从教20年的资深人士,看起来他几乎预 见到了自己的升职:“可能会出现一种崭新而不同的内部人士,”这本书告诉我们,“但人们相对于外部人士的优势仍然存在”。

In any case, we know that he has been thinking hard about leadership for some time. In 2001, with James Champy, he published The Arc of Ambition: Defining the leadership journey. Its chapter headings give a clue as to how he may now proceed: “See what others don't”, “Follow a steadfast path”, “Change or die”, “Never violate values”.

诺里亚的院长任期将从7月份开始。情况将变得十分有趣。把它归咎于哈佛吧。

In a more recent work, Paths to Power: How insiders and outsiders shaped American business leadership, Prof Nohria and his co-authors considered how people's backgrounds can affect their life chances. As a

2010年6月1日 星期二

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普公司(Hewlett-Packard Co.)稱﹐該公司計劃斥資10億美元對數據中心和其他部門進行自動化改造﹐這將導致今後幾年削減9,000個工作崗位。

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