Fortune.com selects the most compelling short essays, anecdotes, and author interviews from "250 Words," a site developed by Simon & Schuster to explore the best new business books—wherever they may be published.

    For this installment, 250 Words' Sam McNerney sits down with Faisal Hoque, former GE executive, serial entrepreneur and co-author of the new book Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill Education). Combining the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies with insights from Leonardo da Vinci, Hoque reveals how businesses can succeed in the long run. Sam talks to the author about mindfulness, "deep level" diversity, and what it really means to be creative.

    McNerney: At the beginning of Everything Connects you write that, "Being prosocial…is one of the most probusiness things you can do…being holistic and humanistic is key to doing great work." Could you explain what you mean?

    财富网(Fortune.com)定期从网站“250字”(250 Words)挑选最引人入胜的短文、趣闻轶事和作者访谈。美国西蒙与舒斯国际出版公司(Simon & Schuster)开发该网站，旨在探讨世界各地最新出版的商业佳作。

    为撰写本期专栏，“250字”的山姆•麦克纳尼与前通用电气公司(GE)高管，连续创业家费萨尔•霍克坐在了一起。霍克最近与他人合写了一本新书：《万物相连：在创意、创新和可持续发展的时代如何变革和领导》(Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability)【麦格劳-希尔教育出版公司(McGraw-Hill Education)出版发行】。在这部著作中，霍克把拥有2,500年历史的东方哲学智慧与达芬奇的见解结合在一起，深度揭示了企业如何才能永立潮头的奥秘。山姆与作者讨论了正念(mindfulness)、“深层次”多样性，以及究竟何为创新等话题。

    麦克纳尼：在《万物相连》的开始部分，你写道，“亲社会是你能够做的对企业最有利的事情之一，全面和人性化是成就伟业的关键所在。”你能解释一下这些观点的意思吗？

    Hoque: First we need to understand what the ends of business are, what constitutes great work. I'm not the first to say that we live in an era of disruption—co-author Drake Baer and I talk in the book about how Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted it—but since we live in a time where whole industries are displaced by other industries, staying ahead requires not just making the same thing a little bit cheaper, but making an entirely different product that delivers better value (Blockbuster vs. Netflix for example). Peter Drucker also talked about the long view regarding disruption, and that the implicit and explicit responsibility of business is to make a social impact. Thus, we can begin to understand why being prosocial, holistic, and humanistic makes so much sense: it is through the security that these approaches provide that teams can finally create dangerous ideas. Being prosocial creates an emotional connection to the marketplace.

    You weave Eastern philosophies into a book on innovation and creativity. At first, this relationship seems unlikely, but it turns out that mindfulness can help us see past long-held tendencies and patterns that might prevent us from making novel insights. What does it mean to be "mindful?"

    Being mindful is to know what you're doing. While that sounds easy, it's actually a conversation we need to have with our deepest selves and the situations we find ourselves in: being mindful of your breath is knowing that you're breathing; being mindful of your words is knowing what you're saying. Crucially, another component of mindfulness is to not unquestioningly accept whatever "wisdom" has been passed down to you—Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, said to test his teachings like gold in the marketplace. Innovation and disruption is about upsetting inherited norms. Mindfulness, as explained in the book, trains us to spot those unproductive inheritances.

    霍克：首先，我们需要了解企业的目标是什么，什么样的成就才称得上伟业。我并不是第一个宣称我们正生活在一个破坏时代的人。我和另一位作者德雷克•贝尔在书中谈到过美籍奥地利经济学家约瑟夫•熊彼特得出这项预言的经过。由于在我们这个时代，“整个产业”完全被其他产业取代。要想保持领先地位，仅凭稍稍降低生产同一种产品的成本是不够的，企业还需要推出一种完全不同、能够提供更大价值的产品【比如，百视达公司(Blockbuster )与奈飞公司(Netflix )的影音租赁市场之争】。彼得•德鲁克也谈到，企业需要以长远的眼光看待破坏；企业的隐性和显性责任在于产生社会影响。如此一来，我们就可以逐渐明白，为什么亲社会、全面和人性化具有这么重要的意义：正是通过这些措施带来的安全感，团队才能最终产生危险的创意。对待社会的友善态度建立起一条连接市场的情感纽带。

    你把东方哲学编织到了一本以创新和创造力为主题的著作之中。乍一看，两者似乎风马牛不相及。但事实证明，正念有助于开阔视野，使我们不再拘泥于我们长期持有、却可能妨碍我们产生新奇见解的倾向和模式。那么，保持“正念”究竟是什么意思？

    保持正念就是清楚自己正在干什么。虽然听起来很容易，但其实并非如此。它需要我们与最深处的自我以及我们所处的环境进行一场对话：留意你的呼吸就是知道你正在呼吸；留意你的言语就是知道你正在说什么。正念的另一个重要组成部分是，不要不假思索地接受一切传递给你的“智慧”——据说，佛祖悉达多•乔达摩曾经像测试金子那样，在集市上测试自己的教义。创新与破坏的真谛在于推翻继承下来的规范。正如本书所解释的，正念有助于训练我们，发现那些不利于生产的遗留影响。

    You write about Lauren Rivera's research on how employers tend to define merit myopically, which prevents them from hiring diverse talent. What can we do to avoid homophily—"love of the same"—when we look for candidates and build teams?

    We can search for deep level diversity rather than demographic diversity. You may have a mosaic of ethnicities and sexual orientations among your team, but if they all grew up in the same three zip codes and attended the same six schools, then you don't actually have diversity—you have brochure-ready homogony. To avoid that, we can recruit people from a true variety of backgrounds with a variety of talents. Designers tend to think like designers, programmers like programmers, salespeople like salespeople. Rather than keeping these disciplines separate, there is a range of ways to bring them together.

    You talk a lot of what you and your co-author term clusters—visioning clusters, ecological clusters, implementation clusters. Could you explain clusters and how people should work within them?

    A cluster is a team that stays together for the length of a given project. They are beneficial because they fit the situations businesses find themselves in: dealing with massive problems in short amounts of time across a variety of contexts. So rather than setting up an organizational structure where people work together ad infinitum—and all the stagnation that promotes—clusters allow people to rotate as their skills are most needed.

    你在书中谈到劳伦•里维拉的研究。这项研究称，雇主在确定一个人的价值时往往缺乏远见，进而导致他们雇用不到多样化的人才。筛选求职者、组建团队时，我们应该怎样避免同质性，也就是你所称的“喜欢与自己类似的人”(love of the same)？

    我们应该搜寻深层次的多样性，而不只是人口学层面的多样性。你可以拼凑一个种族和性取向多样化的团队，但如果他们都是在相同的三个邮区长大，上相同的六所学校，那么你的团队其实并不具备多样性——引用一个植物学术语，这叫“花蕊同长”。为了避免这种情况，我们可以招募一些背景迥异，拥有不同本领的人才。设计师、程序员和销售人员的思维方式迥然不同，往往具有浓厚的专业色彩。我们不应让这些学科保持独立，而应该采取一系列步骤把它们集合在一起。

    你们在书中多次使用“集群”这一术语，比如憧憬集群、生态集群和执行集群。你能解释一下这些集群吗？集群中的人们应该怎样工作？

    所谓集群是指一个在给定项目的时间长度内聚集在一起的团队。集群对企业有利，因为它们吻合企业所处的情势：在瞬息万变的背景下，用很短的时间处理各种大问题。因此，集群的真谛并不是打造一个组织结构，让人们永无止境地一起工作（这样做往往会造成各种各样的停滞），而是允许人们交替工作，根据实际需要发挥各自的技能特长。

    You advocate that we should "cultivate our curiosity." How would you respond to someone who says, "I'm not a creative type?"

    First, I'd ask them to acknowledge that the binary between 'creative' and 'analytical' is false: any kind of solution is creative. Look at the history of the word. Taken in its Middle English meaning, to create is to form out of nothing. Any time we come up with a solution—be it via spreadsheet, presentation, or experiment—we are creating.

    你主张我们应该“培养好奇心。”如果有个人说，“我不是创新型人才？”你会如何回应？

    首先，我会要求他们承认“创新型”和“分析型”的二元对立其实是个伪命题：任何解决方案都是一种创新。回顾一下这个词的历史。根据它在中古英语时期的含义，所谓“创新”就是“无中生有”。每当我们构想出一套解决方案（无论是通过电子表格，演示文稿，还是实验）的时候，我们就是在创新。

    Could you explain Daniel Kahneman's suggestion about mapping our decision-making process and other methods for making informed decisions about strategy?

    Kahneman's recommendation is to map out the inputs of a decision, including the way we felt about a decision. This is crucial because we're often oblivious about all the forces that inform a given decision: people are more pensive in the winter months, more creative when it's dark outside, more assertive when they take a broad posture. Our behaviors are mysteries even to ourselves. Mapping all of these inputs allows us to gather data on how we really make decisions, so we may be less unintentionally shortsighted in the future.

    Besides Everything Connects, do you have book suggestions for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders?

    While it's not a "business" book, Daring Greatly by the sociologist Brené Brown is stirring. It's all about vulnerability and how that promotes boldness. Adam Grant recently wrote an incredible book about the pro-business outcomes of prosocial behavior called Give and Take. Lastly, two books that can help you to take the long view we so espouse in Everything Connects are Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's Sādhanā: The Realization of Life, and Clay Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? Both live up to their titles.

    丹尼尔•卡尼曼建议企业映射决策过程，说只有这样才能做出明智的战略决策。你能解释一下吗？

    卡尼曼的建议是，描绘某项决策的各项投入，包括我们在制定决策时的具体“感受”。这一点很重要，因为我们经常无法意识到渗透在一项特定决策中的所有力量：在冬季月份，人们往往更加忧郁。户外漆黑一片时，人们往往更有创意，心境开阔时更加自信。我们的行为神秘莫测，就连我们自己也无法理解。映射所有这些投入可以让我们收集数据，了解我们“事实上”的决策情形。这样的话，我们或许能够减少未来的短视行为。

    除了《万物相连》，请你给那些怀抱雄心的创业者和商界领袖再推荐几本书。

    社会学家布勒内•布朗的著作《真正的勇气》(Daring Greatly)极具震撼力，尽管它并不属于“商业”范畴。它整本书都在讲述人类的脆弱性，以及这种脆弱性如何提升气魄。亚当•格兰特最近撰写的《平等交换》(Give and Take)一书精彩之至，主题是亲社会的行为能够产生对企业有利的结果。最后，为了帮助大家获得我们在《万物相连》中推崇备至的长远眼光，我还想推荐另外两本佳作，一本是诺贝尔文学奖得主泰戈尔的著作《生命的实现》(Sadhana: the realization of life)，另一本是克雷•克里斯坦森的《人生的尺度》(How Will You Measure Your Life?)。这两本书都名符其实。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒