Industries are in flux. Google’s driverless cars are waiting at the intersection of internal combustion and search engines. Payment companies such as M-Pesa, Stripe and PayPal are testing the locks on banks’ safe deposit boxes. Samsung, Apple and Google’s Android have put BlackBerry and Nokia on hold. If you are the chief executive of a carmaker, financial institution or mobile phone maker and you are not yet worrying about the blurred edges of what was once a clearly demarcated border between sectors, you are lost.

各个行业正处于不断变迁之中。谷歌(Google)的无人驾驶汽车正在内燃引擎与搜索引擎的交叉路口等候。M-Pesa,、Stripe和PayPal等支付公司正在考验银行保险箱的安全锁。三星(Samsung)、苹果(Apple)以及谷歌的Android已经让黑莓(BlackBerry)和诺基亚(Nokia)靠边站了。如果你是一家汽车制造商、一家金融机构或一家手机制造商的首席执行官，而你还没有开始担心行业间曾经分明的界限已变得模糊的话，那么你就太糊涂了。

Yet corporate cavemen still trigger the smugness alarm with statements such as “I don’t want any surprises” or “don’t bring me a problem unless you’ve got a solution”.

然而，企业界那些固步自封的人却仍在发表诸如“我不想看到任何意外”或“在你找到解决方案之前，不要跟我提出问题”这样的言论。这种现象提醒人们，企业界存在着一些自满情绪。

Rita Gunther McGrath, of Columbia Business School, says such comments are characteristic of leaders who think they have found a “competitive advantage” – the holy grail of strategists since Michael Porter defined it in 1985, in his book of the same name.

哥伦比亚商学院(Columbia Business School)的丽塔·冈瑟·麦格拉思(Rita Gunther McGrath)说，发表上面那种言论是那些自认为已找到“竞争优势”的企业高管的特点。而“竞争优势”是自迈克尔·波特(Michael Porter)于1985年在同名著作中定义该词以来的企业战略“圣杯”。

You question the solidity of Prof Porter’s work at your peril. When I asked him in 2011 whether the greatest economic and financial crisis in 75 years had shaken his theories, he was adamant they were “more and more and more fundamentally important and visible”. But Prof McGrath’s new book – provocatively entitled The End of Competitive Advantage – is a battering ram aimed straight at the door of Prof Porter’s Harvard-based Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.

如果你质疑波特教授研究成果的有效性，那么后果自负。2011年，我曾问他这场75年来最严重的经济和金融危机是否动摇了他的理论，他坚定地表示，“从根本上说，这些理论的重要性和显著性变得越来越强了。”但麦格拉思教授的新书《竞争优势的终结》（The End of Competitive Advantage，这个书名起得很有挑衅性），像攻城锤一样径直撞向波特教授位于哈佛大学(Harvard)的战略与竞争力研究所(Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness)的大门。

As she told me last week, chief executives who cling to the illusion of competitive advantage are “resisting the reality” of 21st-century corporate existence: fluctuating competition (and competitors), short-lived opportunities, constant challenge.

正如她近期告诉我的那样，死抱着竞争优势这一幻觉不放的首席执行官，是在“抗拒”21世纪企业生存形态的“现实”，即不断变化的竞争（以及竞争者）、短暂的机遇以及持续的挑战。

The danger with tearing down the Porter pillars is that companies will be left sitting in the rubble, without landmarks to help them find a new path. But Prof McGrath offers a guide through the volatility that includes a policy of constant, systematic early-stage innovation Peter Sands, Standard Chartered’s chief executive, summed up the approach well in the FT yesterday, when he outlined the threat to risk-averse, regulation-bound banks from nimbler competitors and a solution that involves “generating more ideas, implementing them more swiftly, [and] being quicker to discard the ones that do not work”.

推倒波特教授理论支柱的危险在于，企业将因此身陷一片废墟之中，周围没有路标来帮他们找到一条新路。但麦格拉思教授给出了一个走出动荡的指引，包括确立一项政策，持续不断地、系统性地展开早期阶段创新。渣打(Standard Chartered)行政总裁冼博德(Peter Sands)近日在英国《金融时报》对这一做法做了很好的总结，他概述了更灵活竞争对手对厌恶风险且受监管束缚的银行构成的威胁，并提出了一种解决方案，包括“想出更多点子，更加迅速地将它们付诸实施，（以及）更加迅速地抛弃那些行不通的点子”。

For many large companies that still think of innovation as a series of large projects based on expensive research and development, this goes against the grain.

很多大企业依然认为，创新是一系列以成本高昂的研发为基础的大型项目。对这些企业来说，上述做法有违它们的惯例。

But the traditional and modern approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, a combination is essential. Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge’s Judge Business School points to Bangladesh-based Brac, the world’s largest development organisation and a pioneer in the fight against poverty. Its success is founded, he says, on scrupulous accounting, paranoia about fraud and a culture of “thinking hard about testing programmes [in the field] and then evaluating them”. By contrast, a structured R&D process used on its own can produce “something that is technically beautiful, but useless in the market”.

但传统做法和现代做法并非互相排斥。实际上，将二者结合起来非常重要。剑桥大学(University of Cambridge)贾奇管理学院(Judge Business School)的贾伊迪普·普拉布(Jaideep Prabhu)提到了全球最大的发展组织、抗击贫困的先锋——孟加拉国农村发展委员会(BRAC)。他表示，该组织成功的基础是：严谨的会计制度，极力防范欺诈，以及一种“努力思考（该领域）实验项目、然后对其进行评估”的文化。相比之下，如果只依靠系统性的研发过程，那只能创造出“技术上美妙但在市场上无用的东西”。

Some areas are off-limits for experimentation. I don’t want nuclear power plants to indulge in rapid prototyping and I would adopt the brace position if the captain announced he was planning to try out some new ideas in-flight.

有些领域是实验的禁区。我可不想看到核电厂沉浸于快速成型(Rapid prototyping)；如果机长宣布他打算在飞行中尝试一些新的点子，我会马上采用防冲击姿势。

But most other organisations have already entered the era of the perpetual pilot project, what Prof Prabhu calls “permanent beta”. An attitude of experimentation should liberate companies such as banks or phone service providers to try out Brac-style innovations in the user experience, which can be tested and evaluated cheaply and efficiently. As Prof McGrath says, product features can be copied easily but service advances are harder to replicate.

但大多数其他组织已进入永久性试点项目时代，普拉布教授称这种项目为“永久性的测试版”。采取实验的态度应该会使银行或手机服务供应商等企业摆脱束缚，去尝试BRAC式的用户体验创新——这些创新能以廉价而高效的方式得到测试和评估。如麦格拉思教授所言，产品特征容易克隆，服务进步却较难复制。

Prof Porter has added to his portfolio and reputation since the 1980s, exploring useful concepts such as “shared value”. His twin pillars of competitive strategy and competitive advantage are also still valid for more stable industries, such as mining, food retail or aircraft manufacture. I don’t expect him ever to admit the validity of his original theories has diminished, but he ought to be satisfied with their durability. The competitive advantage of “competitive advantage” kept rival theories at bay for nearly 30 years. By the standards of the latest corporate innovations, that’s an exceptionally good run.

上世纪80年代以来，波特教授丰富了自己的理论并提高了自己的声誉，探讨了“共同价值观”(shared value)等有用的概念。此外，他的两个理论支柱——竞争战略与竞争优势——仍然适用于那些较为稳定的行业，如采矿业、食品零售业或飞机制造业。我并不指望他会承认自己原始理论的有效性已经减弱，但他应对这些理论的耐久性感到满意。“竞争优势”的竞争优势，将与之抗衡的理论压制了将近30年。以最新企业创新的标准来衡量，这算得上是一个极为卓越的成就。