職場雙語]如何應對職場信息過量

“命令-控制”模式並未消失，也永遠不會消失。老闆還是老闆。如果我的老闆吩咐我做件事，我會立刻起身去做。如果巴茨讓手下做什麼事，而他們沒有立刻照辦，就會有麻煩了——而這與互聯網一點兒關係也沒有。

傳統的管理方式已壽終正寢。互聯網讓“命令-控制”模式不復存在。如今，人人都可以搶在老闆之前，對他們的一舉一動加以分析和奚落，對員工頤指氣使已不再可能。

上述觀點是雅虎(Yahoo)新任CEO卡羅爾巴茨(Carol Bartz)在《經濟學人》(The Economist)的年度特刊《2010年的世界》(The World in 2010)中提出的。它聽上去十分新穎，也貌似有理，我差點兒就被哄弄住了，以為“信息洪流”或許真的.徹底改變了管理方式。但隨後我向四周張望了一下，看到許多人平靜地趴在辦公桌邊，做着自己拿錢要做的事情：工作。

“命令-控制”模式並未消失，也永遠不會消失。老闆還是老闆。如果我的老闆吩咐我做件事，我會立刻起身去做。如果巴茨讓手下做什麼事，而他們沒有立刻照辦，就會有麻煩了——而這與互聯網一點兒關係也沒有。

巴茨説的不錯，可獲得的信息量，的確改變了公司運作以及我們相互溝通的方式。但看上去唯一沒有改變的，就是老闆與下屬的溝通方式。被海量資訊歪曲和吞噬掉的，都是其它方面。

Traditional management is over. The internet has killed command and control. Now that everyone can analyse and ridicule their chief executive’s every move almost before they’ve made it, it has become impossible to order people about.

This view is put forward by Carol Bartz, the new head of Yahoo, in The Economist’s “The World in 2010”. It sounds pacey and plausible and for a second I was lulled into thinking that perhaps the “Niagara of information” really has changed management for ever. But then I looked around me. I saw lots of people at desks calmly doing what they were paid to do: working.

Command and control is not over and won’t ever be. Bosses are still bosses. If mine tells me to do something, I’m inclined to get up off my bottom and do it. If Bartz’s employees don’t get off their bottoms when she tells them to, there is a problem – and it has nothing to do with the internet.

She is right that the amount of information available does change the way companies are run and the way we communicate with each other. But it seems that the only line of communication that has not changed is between boss and underling. It is all the other lines that have become distorted and muffled by the sheer amount of stuff out there.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve come across two ways in which companies are managing this – and both of them are quite worrying.

The first comes from a friend who works in communications for a large organisation. She has noticed that her staff are responding to the information overload not by digesting too much of it, but by stopping to digest anything at all. She tells me that, in her company, the written word has lost almost all its power. No one reads e-mails any more – with the exception of those from the boss. Messages from anyone else are either d unread or given a cursory glance and then ignored. Messages on  have slightly more impact, but 140 characters seem to be too many for some, and the sheer number of these messages means many of them miss their mark.

Her answer is to bypass the written word and convey simple messages in little snatches of video instead. Watching these snippets, I wanted to laugh. Here was a woman with a first class degree from Cambridge university talking as if she were a manically smiling children’s TV presenter. The camera showed her delivering a simple, upbeat message before moving to a man who wrote the same message – “Keep it simple” – on a flip chart with a chunky felt tip marker.

Isn’t that a bit patronising? I asked. Quite possibly, she replied. But because people seemed to be listening, she didn’t care.

Other companies have decided to deal with too much information by giving up any attempt to manage it on the grounds that to do so costs too much. Since the recession began, many have closed their libraries and taken the axe to their knowledge management divisions, set up with such pride and optimism barely a decade ago. In one big consultancy, all the people who used to sort information into usable chunks have just been fired, and consultants have been told that they will have to “self-service their knowledge needs”.

This is almost certainly a mistake. Self-servicing our knowledge needs is something most of us are pretty bad at. Which is why, as Bartz points out, we need business leaders who will not only tell us what to do but help us know what to think.

Bartz argues that, in order to do this successfully, leaders must acquire two skills. First, they must listen more than before. I’m not so sure about this. The trouble with the information age is that there are so many people talking simultaneously. Leaders surely need to do not more listening but more ignoring. More than ever, the good leader surely needs to learn how to become selectively deaf.

The second skill is to find a way of dealing with the many beastly things that are written about them on the internet. It would be nice if we could expect leaders in the future to respond maturely to this wave of public criticism, but I’m not holding my breath. Because I can find no such grown-up strand in myself, I’m gloomy about finding it in others. There is plenty of horrid stuff on the internet written about me and even though I dare say I should hunt it down, read it and learn from it, I’m not going to. I’m going to stuff my fingers in my ears and carry on regardless.