Random Walk(by 方军) - 思维的乐趣BLOG

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Random Walk
By [ 方军 ] 2007-8-31 20:37:37

看一本书《Secrets of Greatness》，《财富》杂志去年一组特刊的合集。序言是Andy Grove写的，看了最开始两段，就决定先停下来，把这两段录入到blog里面来：

A Random Walk: One man's evolution into leadership
by Andy Grove

As I read through this collection of varied and rich stories of management and managers. I reflected on my own development as a manager. Try as I might, I could not get away from the thought that it took place by a process often called a random walk. Random walk is a mathematical term, often illustrated by the description of an inebriated person walking in the forest, bumping into a tree and setting out again until the next bump. I became a manager bump to bump. Sometimes the bump was so strong I staggered afterwards, but each time my stride got more confident and my direction more steady.

The first of these bumps had to do with my role in saving a good employee from being laid off a few days after I was named supervisor, at a company called Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1960s. The person in question did not work for me, and when I appealed on behalf of this individual, my boss made me a simple proposal. "You can save him, and have him, if you lay off one of the members of the department." I gritted my teeth and did just that. This was two days after I had been named a boss. The reality hit: as a boss, I would be called upon to make decisions affecting the lives of other people. No one told me that when they congratulated on my promotion. Dealing with this horrible choice tore me up, as did many similar choices I would have to make in a career spanning forty-some years.

Comments [2] | 3182 views

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覃里雯说：

说得好啊。
晋升感觉就像是成人礼，你必须开始做抉择，必须为影响他人的一小部分命运负责。因此，这个抉择做出来，背后必须有足够的思考，在时间不够的时候，直觉和力量，以及事后的总结。这些东西，对一个天生缺乏权力欲的人来说，其实痛苦得很。但是它确实增加你的内在力量，逼迫你去思考。

at 2007-9-1 14:53:08

邓铮说：

Random walk, so does the long-term stock index
movement. Actually nobody can precisely predict it.

Anyway, it reminds me what I read yesterday, "To focus
only on structure is to be a determinist: 'if X is the
condition, Y is the outcome.' Yet to be a determinist is to
settle for a limited view of the world. Causality might be
more complicated than initially believed, as the
followers of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud discovered.
Human behavior is uncertain. This uncertainty muddies
the causal effects of structure. .....best practice requires
that we augment the deterministic focus on structure
with a probabilistic focus on conduct....."

at 2007-9-1 0:52:51

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