难倒商界老江湖的硅谷“神逻辑”

    在刚刚结束的“2015年《财富》全球论坛”期间，我有一次晚宴活动时坐在了一位商人身边。他上了年纪，闯荡商界恒多年，管理的都是制造产品、创造利润的企业。在会议第二天，他显然快要无法忍受硅谷的那套“神逻辑”。他这样告诉我：“如果再听到谁说‘颠覆’或者‘创新’这种词儿，我就得抓狂大叫了。”

    我能体会他的痛苦。在报道那些迅猛成长、却往往毫无盈利的科技企业时，我也会感到不解，甚至恼火。之所以有这种反应，是因为我们以往所了解的任何一条商界规则，比如盈利和企业成长同样重要，都不适用于那些科技企业。

    对于某些科技企业令传统商界人士艳羡的现状，云计算软件界权威、Salesforce的首席执行官马克·贝尼奥夫有过淋漓尽致的表现。我曾经主持过一个有关领导艺术的研讨会。会上，贝尼奥夫紧接着雅虎CEO玛丽莎·梅耶尔登台。贝尼奥夫发言表示，和纯为获取投资回报的股东相比，利益相关者的价值更值得赞赏。他当时说，入股的投资者固然重要，但实现他设想的公司价值更重要。比如，促进社会公平和加强企业公益性就属于这种他称道并坚持的价值。

    稍后，贝尼奥夫又投下了一颗不大不小的“炸弹”，敦促科技行业那些市场估值10亿美元以上的“独角兽”公司，由私营企业转而公开上市。他认为，只有将自己置于回应公开市场股东的严格标准之下，这些企业才能开始意识到自身真正的潜力。

    一方面将股东的价值放在第二位，一方面又宣扬公开上市的益处，两者不一定自相矛盾，但也差不多了。而让贝尼奥夫的论调显得更为尴尬的是，他所领导的、已经成立了16年的Salesforce.com还在亏本经营。没错，这家网站现在的确有大量现金收入，它“以用户订阅获得收益”的商业模式也让未来收入显得很有盼头，但在传统经济里，有的是“不会因会计准则而使利润被抹平”的订阅业务。然而，尽管如此，Salesforce.com目前的估值却已接近520亿美元。

    这种氛围不可思议，人们为之着迷，投资人也在为这些公司描绘的快速成长故事买单。这就难怪谁都想了解硅谷到底发生了什么，而且念念不忘要复制这种“神逻辑”。（财富中文网）

    译者：Pessy

    校对：詹妮

    At dinner at the Fortune Global Forum this week, I sat next to a businessman of a certain age who has spent a career managing companies that make products and profits. By the second day of our conference, he clearly had reached the breaking point over Silicon Valley’s magical thinking. “If I hear the words ‘disruption’ or ‘innovation’ one more time, I’m going to scream,” he told me.

    I feel his pain. Covering the high-growth, often no-profit darlings of the technology world can be exasperating and confusing. This is so because all the rules one learns in business—earnings matter as much as growth, for example—go out the window for a select group of companies.

    Marc Benioff, the cloud-software mogul, gave a great demonstration of the charmed existence that certain companies enjoy. During a panel about leadership I hosted, in which Benioff was joined onstage by Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, the Salesforce CEO extolled the virtues of stakeholder value over shareholder value. Of course investors are important, Benioff said, but not so important as to get in the way of the values he envisions for his company. These laudable and opinionated values include advocating for social justice and corporate philanthropy, to cite two examples.

    Moments later Benioff dropped a tiny bit of a bomb by urging the tech industry’s “unicorns,” private companies worth more than a billion dollars, to go public. Only by submitting themselves to the rigor of answering to public shareholders can they ever realize their true potential, Benioff argued.

    Putting shareholders second while advocating the benefits of having public shareholders isn’t necessarily contradictory, but it’s darn close. What makes Benioff’s cognitive dissonance more awkward, however, is that at 16 years of age, Salesforce.com still loses money. Yes, it generate oodles of cash, and its subscription revenue model pushes revenue recognition out into the future. But the non-magical economy is full of subscription businesses whose profits aren’t erased by accounting rules. Salesforce.com, by the way, is worth nearly $52 billion.

    The weather is marvelous, the people are fascinating, and investors throw money at fast-growth ideas. It’s no wonder everyone wants to learn what’s going on in Silicon Valley. They crave their piece of the magic.