巨无霸vs赤膊大厨

Mystery: why is it that some of the biggest IT consulting companies in the world do the worst work?

神秘事件：为什么一些世界上最大的IT顾问公司，做出的事情却是最差的。

Why is it that the cool upstart consulting companies start out with a string of spectacular successes, meteoric growth, and rapidly degenerate into mediocrity?

为什么那个很酷的初创顾问公司，起步特别成功，增长也异常迅速，但是却很快地退化成平庸。

I've been thinking about this, and thinking about how Fog Creek Software (my own company) should grow. And the best lessons I can find come from McDonald's. Yes, I mean the awful hamburger chain.

我一直在思考这些问题，思考FogCreek软件公司应该如何增长。然后发现最好的经验教训都来自麦当劳。是的，说的就是那个汉堡连锁餐饮企业。

The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way. If you're willing to live with not-very-goodness, you can have a Big Mac with absolutely no chance of being surprised in the slightest.

巨无霸汉堡的秘密就在于他们不是非常好，但是每一个不好的地方都完全一样。如果你愿意接受这种程度的不好，那么无论如何你都吃不出意外。

The other secret of Big Macs is that you can have an IQ that hovers somewhere between "idiot" and "moron" (to use the technical terms) and you'll still be able to produce Big Macs that are exactly as unsurprising as all the other Big Macs in the world. That's because McDonald's real secret sauce is its huge operations manual, describing in stunning detail the exact procedure that every franchisee must follow in creating a Big Mac. If a Big Mac hamburger is fried for 37 seconds in Anchorage, Alaska, it will be fried for 37 seconds in Singapore - not 36, not 38. To make a Big Mac you just follow the damn rules.

巨无霸的另一个秘密就在于：哪怕智商介于白痴和傻瓜之间（技术用语），你仍然可以制作出和其他地方完全一样巨无霸，绝对不出任何意外。因为麦当劳的真正秘密来自于他的巨大的操作手册，细致入微地描述了每家连锁店制作巨无霸汉堡必须遵循的完整过程。如果在阿拉斯加Anchorage做汉堡要油炸37秒的话，那么在新加坡油炸时间也是37秒，不是36秒也不是38秒。做一个巨无霸汉堡就必须遵守这些该死的规定。

The rules have been carefully designed by reasonably intelligent people (back at McDonald's Hamburger University) so that dumdums can follow them just as well as smart people. In fact the rules include all kinds of failsafes, like bells that go off if you keep the fries in the oil too long, which were created to compensate for more than a little human frailty. There are stopwatches and timing systems everywhere. There is a system to make sure that the janitor checks if the bathrooms are clean every half hour. (Hint: they're not.)

而这些规定则是由那些相对聪明的人（譬如在麦当劳的汉堡大学的人精心设计出来的）这样那些瓜瓜们就可以像聪明人一样去遵循这些规则。实际上这些规则包含了各种各样的意外情况处理。比如：如果把薯条放在油里面炸的时间太长，警铃就会响。这些设计完全就是为了弥补人类的一些弱点。秒表和计时系统随处可见，他们甚至有一个系统确保厕所每半个小时会清理一遍（当然没有）。

The system basically assumes that everybody will make a bunch of mistakes, but the burgers that come out will be, um, consistent, and you'll always be asked if you want fries with that.

这套系统，基本上假设每个人都会犯各种各样的错误，但是做出来的汉堡，是一如既往的标准。并且还会很标准的问你：“要不要来些薯条？”

Just for the sake of amusement, let's compare a McDonald's cook, who is following a set of rules exactly and doesn't know anything about food, to a genius like The Naked Chef, the British cutie Jamie Oliver. (If you chose to leave this site now and follow that link to watch the MTV-like videos of The Naked Chef making basil aioli, you have my blessing. Go in good health.) Anyway, comparing McDonald's to a gourmet chef is completely absurd, but please suspend disbelief for a moment, because there's something to be learned here.

纯粹娱乐起见，让我们来比较一下麦当劳的厨师（那些只会严格遵守一些规则，但是对食物一无所知的人）和一个天才赤膊大厨 - 英国的Jammie Oliver （如果你现在选择点击那个超链接离开这个站点，然后去看那个视频，关于大厨教你如何制作basil aloili。深深的祝福你身体健康）

Now, the Naked Chef doesn't follow no stinkin' Operations Manual. He doesn't measure anything. While he's cooking, you see a flurry of food tossed around willy-nilly. "We'll just put a bit of extra rosemary in there, that won't hurt, and give it a good old shake," he says. " Mash it up. Perfect. Just chuck it all over the place." (Yes, it really looks like he's just chucking it all over the place. Sorry, but if I tried to chuck it all over the place, it wouldn't work.) It takes about 14 seconds and he's basically improvised a complete gourmet meal with roasted slashed fillet of sea-bass stuffed with herbs, baked on mushroom potatoes with a salsa-verde. Yum.

然而，赤膊大出当然不会遵守什么操作手册。 他什么都不会测量， 做菜的时候，你能看见各种菜肴在锅铲见翻滚。 “这儿放点儿蒜末，无伤大雅，使劲儿摇一摇” 他会说 “ 搅拌均匀， 简直完美。 只要随便摇摆摇摆就行了。” （是啊，看起来似乎他真的也就是拿着锅铲摇摆摇摆而已，不过要是换我去摇摆摇摆， 估计不行） 仅仅14秒，他已经完成了一道完整的香煎鲈鱼片， 一碗蘑菇土豆汤， 美味。

Well, I think it's pretty obvious that The Naked Chef's food is better than you get at McDonald's. Even if it sounds like a stupid question, it's worth a minute to ask why. It's not such a stupid question. Why can't a big company with zillions of resources, incredible scale, access to the best food designers money can buy, and infinite cash flow produce a nice meal?

很明显，赤膊大厨做的食物比你在麦当劳买到的要好得多。老实说这个问题听起来有点蠢，但是却值得你花点时间理解为什么？其实这是个好问题：为什么一个公司有着无尽资源，覆盖范围广，赚钱无数，又能够雇到世界上最好的食品加工设计师，却做不出一顿可口的饭菜呢？

Imagine that The Naked Chef gets bored doing "telly" and opens a restaurant. Of course, he's a brilliant chef, the food would be incredible, so the place is hopping with customers and shockingly profitable.

想象一下赤裸大厨开始厌烦了做‘Telly’然后开了一家餐馆。当然他是一个聪明的大厨，食物绝对十分美味。所以这个餐馆绝对有希望获得大量的顾客并且绝对超级赚钱。

When you have a shockingly profitable restaurant, you quickly realize that even if you fill up every night, and even if you charge $19 for an appetizer and $3.95 for a coke, your profits reach a natural limit, because one chef can only make so much food. So you hire another chef, and maybe open some more branches, maybe in other cities.

当你有一家超级赚钱的餐馆的时候。你很快就会意识到：哪怕你每天晚上都加班加点，开胃菜都19刀，咖啡3.95美元，利润还是很快就会达到一个上限。一个厨师只能做这么多菜。所以你就得雇另外一个厨师，并且可能在其他城市开更多的连锁店。

Now a problem starts to develop: what we in the technical fields call the scalability problem. When you try to clone a restaurant, you have to decide between hiring another great chef of your caliber (in which case, that chef will probably want and expect to keep most of the extra profits that he created, so why bother), or else you'll hire a cheaper, younger chef who's not quite as good, but pretty soon your patrons will figure that out and they won't go to the clone restaurant.

然后一个问题就产生了，这个问题我们在技术领域称作扩放性问题。当你尝试要克隆一个餐馆的时候，你得决定是雇一个跟你一样出色的伟大厨师呢？（在这种情况下，这个厨师大概会想着把他所创造的大部分额外利润都归为己有，所以何必费此心思）还是你会雇一个更便宜更年轻的厨师，可能没有你那么好。但是这样很快你的食客们就会发现这一点，然后再也不去你开的那家克隆餐厅了。

The common way of dealing with the scalability problem is to hire cheap chefs who don't know anything, and give them such precise rules about how to create every dish that they "can't" screw it up. Just follow these here rules, and you'll make great gourmet food!

处理扩放性问题的最普通方法就是去雇那些一无所知的便宜厨师，然后给他们制定一些精确的规则，告诉他们如何来制作每一道菜。这样他们就不会搞砸这些菜。只要遵循这些规则，你就能做出美味的饭菜。

Problem: it doesn't work exactly right. There are a million things that a good chef does that have to do with improvisation. A good chef sees some awesome mangos in the farmer's market and improvises a mango-cilantro salsa for the fish of the day. A good chef deals with a temporary shortage of potatoes by creating some taro chip thing. An automaton chef who is merely following instructions might be able to produce a given dish when everything is working perfectly, but without real talent and skill, will not be able to improvise, which is why you never see jicama at McDonald's.

问题是：这并不完全行之有效。一个好的厨师做菜的时候可能会自发的想起上百万件事情。比如：一个好厨师可能会在农产品市场看见绝妙的芒果。然后就会想起在今天的鱼片沙拉里可能要加一些芒果布丁；一个好的大厨可能会临时制作一些芋头条来应对临时的土豆短缺。而一个自动厨师只会死板的遵循规则，在一切顺利的情况下能够制作出一道既定的菜肴。但是如果没有真正的天分和技能，就没有办法升华食物。这就是为什么你在麦当劳不可能看到像豆薯这样的高级菜肴。

McDonald's requires a very particular variety of potato, which they grow all over the world, and which they pre-cut and freeze in massive quantities to survive shortages. The precutting and freezing means that the french-fries are not as good as they could be, but they are certainly consistent and require no chef-skills. In fact, McDonald's does hundreds of things to make sure that their product can be produced with consistent quality, by any moron you can get in the kitchen, even if the quality is "a bit" lower.

麦当劳需要特定类别的马铃薯，于是他们会在全世界种植这种马铃薯。他们预先收割并且冷冻大量的马铃薯来应付潜在的短缺。这种预先收割意味着制作出来的法式薯条肯定不可能最好，但是他们绝对是标准的，而且不需要任何初始技能。实际上麦当劳采取了成千上百的措施来保证生产的产品的质量都是标准的一致的。不管你找来什么样的傻瓜。都不可能在厨房里做出质量哪怕低一丁点儿的产品。

Summary, so far:

1 . Some things need talent to do really well.

2 . It's hard to scale talent.

3 . One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules for the untalented to follow.

4 . The quality of the resulting product is very low.

总结一下，到目前为止的结论：

1 .有些事情需要天分才能做得很好。

2 .很难扩放才能。

3 .扩放才能的一种方式就是让聪明的人来制定一些规则让那些不聪明的人去遵守。

4 .这样做出来的产品的质量非常的低

You can see the exact same story playing out in IT consulting. How many times have you heard this story?

你会发现同样的事情在我们的IT顾问界上演。你听过这样的故事多少遍了？

Mike was unhappy. He had hired a huge company of IT consultants to build The System. The IT consultants he hired were incompetents who kept talking about "The Methodology" and who spent millions of dollars and had failed to produce a single thing.

迈克很不高兴。因为他雇用了一个很大的IT顾问公司来构建他的系统。那些他雇来的顾问只会不停的讨论方法学，在花掉了上百万美元后还是啥都做不出来。

Luckily, Mike found a youthful programmer who was really smart and talented. The youthful programmer built his whole system in one day for $20 and pizza. Mike was overjoyed. He recommended the youthful programmer to all his friends.

幸运的是麦克找到了一个年轻的程序员，他非常聪明而且很有才能。这个年轻的程序员，只花了一天，二十美元和一张披萨就搭建了整个系统。迈克高兴坏了，他向他所有的朋友推荐了这个年轻的程序员。

Youthful Programmer starts raking in the money. Soon, he has more work than he can handle, so he hires a bunch of people to help him. The good people want too many stock options, so he decides to hire even younger programmers right out of college and "train them" with a 6 week course.

这个年轻的程序员然后就开始“数”钱了，马上他就没办法应付所有工作了。于是他雇来一堆人来帮自己，好的人想要太多的股票期权，所以他决定雇一些刚大学毕业更年轻的程序员，通过六个月的课程培训他们。

The trouble is that the "training" doesn't really produce consistent results, so Youthful Programmer starts creating rules and procedures that are meant to make more consistent results. Over the years, the rule book grows and grows. Soon it's a six-volume manual called The Methodology.

问题在于培训并不能够真正的产生标准一致的结果。所以这个年轻程序员就开始制定一些规则。希望能获得更加一致的结果。年复一年，这些手册越积越多，很快这些规则就形成了一个六卷本的手册叫做方法学。

After a few dozen years, Youthful Programmer is now a Huge Incompetent IT Consultant with a capital-M-methodology and a lot of people who blindly obey the Methodology, even when it doesn't seem to be working, because they have no bloody idea whatsoever what else to do, and they're not really talented programmers -- they're just well-meaning Poli Sci majors who attended the six-week course.

过了几十年之后。那个年轻的程序员现在是一个巨大但是不胜任的IT公司顾问。他懂得这一套资本-M-方法学。然后有一大堆人盲目的遵循着他的方法学，哪怕这些规则已经不再适用，因为他们根本也不知道能够做什么其他事情。他们并不是那些有天分的程序员，他们也许只是金融专业，然后参加了6个星期的培训课程而已。

And Newly Huge Incompetent IT Consultant starts messing up. Their customers are unhappy. And another upstart talented programmer comes and takes away all their business, and the cycle begins anew.

这个新兴的巨大的顾问公司开始搞砸事情了，顾客们不开心了。一个新兴的天才程序员接手并抢走了他们的生意，然后这个循环又开始了。

I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozen times. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow faster than they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layers of rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not very brilliant work.

我不需要列举些什么名字，这个循环已经发生了几十次了。IT服务公司都变得贪婪，扩张的速度比招人的速度更快。然后他们积累了一层又一层的规则和制度来帮助他们即使做不出聪明的产品也能做出更加一致标准的产品。

But the rules and procedures only work when nothing goes wrong. Various "data-backed Web site" consulting companies sprouted up in the last couple of years and filled their ranks by teaching rank amateurs the fourteen things you need to know to create a data-backed Web site ("here's a select statement, kid, build a Web site"). But now that dotcoms are imploding and there's suddenly demand for high-end GUI programming, C++ skills, and real computer science, the kids who only have select statements in their arsenal just have too steep a learning curve and can't catch up. But they still keep trying, following the rules in chapter 17 about normalizing databases, which mysteriously don't apply to The New World. The brilliant founders of these companies could certainly adjust to the new world: they are talented computer scientists who can learn anything, but the company they built can't adjust because it has substituted a rulebook for talent, and rulebooks don't adjust to new times.

但是规则和过程只有在任何事情都不出错的情况下才能够生效。在过去的几十年当中 数据支持的网站顾问公司 雨后春笋般的出现。他们通过招聘业余人员然后教他们如何通过十四步来搭建一个”数据支持“的网络站点（这就是那个选择语句。用它来搭建那个数据站点吧）。但是现在.COM正在爆发式的发展，突然出现了高端要求的界面编程，要求C++技能。这可是是真正的计算机科学。这些对于只会查询语句的他们来说学习曲线都太陡了，他们没办法跟上，但是他们还是在很努力的尝试。他们还在遵循第十七章的那些规则，关于如何规范化数据库设计，但是这个规则却神秘地不适用于这个新世界了。公司的那些聪明的创始人当然能够很快的适应这个新世界，因为他们是聪明的计算机科学家，几乎能够学习任何东西。但他们创建的这个公司并不能很快的适应。因为这个世界已经要求有一个更新的规则手册了，而现有的规则手册并不能适应这个新时代的要求。

What's the moral of the story? Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them. It's pretty obvious to me that a talented chef is not going to be happy making burgers at McDonald's, precisely because of McDonald's rules. So why do IT consultants brag so much about their methodologies? (Beats me.)

这个故事的重点在于：小心方法学，虽然那种程度的表现还算凑活，但是它们很容易把每一个人都搞得很失望。与此同时，他也积聚了一群更有才能的人，来挑战那些施加在他们身上的限制。我觉得明显：一个有才能的厨师不会高兴在麦当劳做汉堡，这完全是因为麦当劳的那些规则。那么为什么那些it顾问会那么唠唠叨叨关于他们的方法学呢？（打我啊。）

What does this mean for Fog Creek? Well, our goal has never been to become a huge consulting company. We started out doing consulting as a means to an end -- the long-term goal was to be a software company that is always profitable, and we achieved that by doing some consulting work to supplement our software income. After a couple of years in business our software revenues grew to the point where consulting was just a low-margin distraction, so now we only do consulting engagements that directly support our software. Software, as you know, scales incredibly well. When one new person buysFogBUGZ, we make more money without spending any more money.

这些对FogCreek都意味着什么呢？我们的目标从来就不是要成为一个大的顾问公司。虽然我们一开始的时候也是做咨询起家，但是长期的目标是要成为一个持续盈利的公司。我们通过做一些顾问工作来弥补软件产品收入。经过若干年的发展。我们的软件收入已经达到了一个平衡点。顾问工作已经成为低边际收益的小份额收入了。所以现在我们只会为自己的软件产品做顾问工作，就像你了解的那样，软件产品扩放性是出奇的好，当一个新顾客购买FogBUGZ产品的时候，我不需要花很多钱却能够挣更多的钱。

More important is our obsession with hiring the best... we are perfectly happy to stay small if we can't find enough good people (although with six weeks annual vacation, finding people doesn't seem to pose a problem). And we refuse to grow until the people we already hired have learned enough to become teachers and mentors of the new crowd.

更重要的是我们对雇佣最好人才的执着。如果我们不能找到足够好的人的话那么我们很高兴保持现在这种娇小的状态。FogCreek一年有六个礼拜的假期。但是找人似乎从来不是一个问题。而且我们拒绝增长，直到新雇的那些人也学到足够的知识来成为那些未来新手的老师和师傅。