管理层要为金融危机负责

We may never know who really wrote that internal Lehman Brothers memo of June 8 this year, but it certainly asked the right question. “Why did we allow ourselves to be so exposed?” it demanded.	也许，我们永远都不会知道雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers) 6月8日那份内部备忘录作者究竟是谁，但他的确提对了问题。“为什么我们允许自己暴露在如此高的风险敞口之下？”
By early June it was too late to start worrying about all that. And in theory it should never have been necessary to do so. When Dick Fuld, Lehman’s former chief executive, was interviewed by Euromoney magazine in July 2005, he explained why.	到6月初，才开始担心这些问题已经太迟了。而且从理论上来说，本来应该完全没有担心的必要。雷曼前首席执行官迪克•富尔德(Dick Fuld)在2005年7月接受《欧洲货币》(Euromoney)杂志采访时解释了原因所在。
“I expect everyone at the firm to be a risk manager,” Mr Fuld declared. “All 12 of us [on the executive committee] are focused on all parts of the business. It’s all about risk management. If it’s just me then we’re in trouble.”	“我希望公司的每个人都成为风险管理者，”他宣称。“(执行委员会中)我们12个人都在关注每个业务部门。风险管理是最重要的。如果只有我在关注，那么我们就有麻烦了。”
No wonder, if that statement was true, that Mr Fuld displayed such an air of pained bewilderment at his congressional committee hearing last week. His expression of regret at the collapse of his bank should be included in every MBA syllabus.	如果此言属实，难怪富尔德上周在国会委员会听证会上表现出一种痛苦的困惑。富尔德对雷曼倒闭的懊恼之情，应该被收入所有MBA教程。
“I wake up every single night thinking, ‘What could I have done differently? What could I have said? What should I have done?’ And I have searched myself every single night . . . I made those decisions with the information I had . . . This is a pain that will stay with me the rest of my life.”	“每天夜里，我醒来总是在想，‘我还能怎么做？我还能怎么说？我(当时)应该怎么做？’每天夜里，我都在责问自己……当初我是依据所知信息做出那些决定的……这将是我一辈子难以摆脱之痛。”
There has been much outrage, some of it real, over the money earned by Mr Fuld in his years at the head of Lehman Brothers – as much as $350m between 2000 and 2008. We didn’t hear many complaints when the economy was healthy and both he and his investment bank were winning awards. But it is not the cash that bothers me most. It is the competence – or lack of it.	富尔德在掌管雷曼兄弟期间的收入——2000年至2008年总计约3.5亿美元——引发了极大的愤怒，其中一些怒气是有道理的。当经济健康发展，富尔德和雷曼频频获奖的时候，我们可没有听到什么抱怨之辞。最让我担心的不是钱，而是能力——或者说是缺乏能力。
It cannot just be greed, or stupidity, that has led so many financial institutions astray. Management itself has failed in its most basic supervisory task. There has been a lack of control and understanding. And an unwillingness to heed warnings that came from impeccable sources.	单凭贪婪或愚蠢，不可能导致这么多金融机构坠入迷途。在最为基本的监管任务上，管理层失职了；他们对风险缺乏管控和认识，并且无意理会勿容置疑的警告。
In a well-publicised speech in February 2005, Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said: “Circumstances seem to be as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that there should be so little willingness or capacity to do anything about it.”	在2005年2月一篇广为人知的讲话中，美联储(Fed)前主席保罗•沃尔克(Paul Volcker)说道：“情况似乎和我记得的任何一次（危机）同样危险和棘手，而我能记得的情况有很多。真正令我忧虑的是，对于眼下这种情况（管理层）却没有多少意愿和能力来做些什么。”
What has gone wrong with management? We seem to have moved far away from the highly successful approach described by the business historian Alfred Chandler in his book The Visible Hand – The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). “In making administrative decisions, career managers preferred policies that favoured the long-term stability and growth of their enterprises to those that maximised short-term profits,” Chandler wrote.	管理层究竟出了什么问题？我们似乎远远偏离了商业历史学家艾尔弗雷德•钱德勒(Alfred Chandler) 所说的那种极其成功之道。钱德勒在1977年出版的《看得见的手——美国商业界的管理革命》(The Visible Hand – The Managerial Revolution in American Business)一书中写道：“在进行管理决策时，职业经理人会选择那些有益于企业长期稳定和增长的决策，而不是那些使短期利益最大化的决策。”
It was this approach that built the great businesses of the 20th century such as IBM, General Electric and Procter & Gamble. In these businesses, as Will and Kenneth Hopper point out in their essential book The Puritan Gift, the main tasks of the CEO were to determine strategy, appoint divisional heads and supervise their work.	正是这种管理决策建构了IBM、通用电气(GE)和宝洁(P&G)等20世纪最伟大的企业。正如威尔•霍珀(Will Hopper)和肯尼思•霍珀(Kenneth Hopper)在最重要的著作《清教徒的礼物》(The Puritan Gift)中指出的那样，在这些企业中，首席执行官的主要任务是决定策略，任命部门主管，并监督他们的工作。
“[The CEO] could perform these roles well because he had grown up in the business and knew more about its problems, opportunities and people than anyone else. He had lived it – to the point where he would often know almost intuitively what decisions to make.”	“(首席执行官)能够很好地扮演这些角色，因为他是在企业中成长起来的，比其他任何人都更加了解企业的问题、机遇和员工。他经历了企业的成长——以至于他常常仅凭直觉就知道应该做出哪些决策。”
According to this analysis, appointing the lawyer Chuck Prince to run Citigroup, a bank, does not make much sense. But Mr Fuld was a Lehmans lifer. Surely he knew what his business was all about? Ah, but finance is a particularly slippery domain, the Hoppers argue: “An understanding of finance [tells] people how to fund activities, not which activities to fund.” Several bank bosses got giddy on the dancefloor.	根据上述分析，任命查克•普林斯(Chuck Prince)这样一位律师来掌管花旗集团(Citigroup)这样一家银行，是没有什么道理的。可富尔德是雷曼人，他在雷曼度过了整个职业生涯。他必定十分了解自己的企业吧？啊，但是金融业是一个特别难以捉摸的领域，威尔•霍珀和肯尼思•霍珀认为：“金融知识告诉人们如何为活动融资，而不是应该为哪些活动融资。”一些银行老板在舞池中转晕了。