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关于大家说的那篇halo effect 的文章，曾在二年前看见过。但不确认是不是就是这篇。但ＭＳ。所以贴上原来。请考过的Ｇ友们确认一下。回忆原文和原题。 文章有点长 1. Many studies of company performance are undermined by a problem known as the halo effect. First identified by US psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, it describes the tendency to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression. How does the halo effect manifest itself in the business world? Imagine a company that is doing well, with rising sales, high profits, and a sharply increasing stock price. The tendency is to infer that the company has a sound strategy, a visionary leader, motivated employees, an excellent customer orientation, a vibrant culture, and so on. But when that same company suffers a decline—if sales fall and profits shrink—many people are quick to conclude that the company’s strategy went wrong, its people became complacent, it neglected its customers, its culture became stodgy, and more. In fact, these things may not have changed much, if at all. Rather, company performance, good or bad, creates an overall impression—a halo—that shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, employees, culture, and other elements. 2. The case has never been stronger for US boards of directors to focus their attention where it belongs: on corporate strategy. When the storms of governance scandals began whipping across the corporate landscape, boards—good, bad, and ugly—turned inward to deal with their companies' problems and to digest the new accounting compliance rules of the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Now, by and large, boards have come to terms with the new governance rules, and it's time to move on. Linking a board's human capital to the long-term strategy crafted by management to create more value for shareholders should be the next wave of governance reform. Boards may approve strategy, but, sadly, they have only minimal involvement in shaping and developing it. Now that innovation and growth increasingly drive the top executive's agenda and major business trends emerge in the blink of an eye, strategically minded boards that forge close partnerships with management will prove to be the crucial difference between companies that create superior shareholder value and those that don't. 3. As we have noted, any role in addressing public issues can be motivated by business as well as personal reasons and can be undertaken in a business as well as a private capacity. Therefore, in ranking the significance of particular issues, it is interesting to contrast the respondents’ views on which issues have the greatest effect on shareholder value against which are most important to them personally. From both the professional and private perspectives, respondents rate national and global issues as more important than local issues. However, some notable differences emerge when we ask about specific issues. Respondents rate the health of the US economy, federal regulations, and the supply and price of energy as being substantially more important to shareholder value than to themselves personally. By contrast, they rank the US health care system, foreign policy, and education as more important to them personally than to the shareholder value of their companies (Exhibit 6). Education is of particular concern to executives who say they play a leadership role in addressing public issues. These respondents assign significantly higher personal importance to education on the local and national levels than does the average respondent. 4. We found that private equity firms at the top of their game exert ownership control over management and in this way create levels of sustainable above-average performance that set them apart from public companies, as well as from their rivals in the private equity industry itself. All these firms conduct deep research into their target companies prior to acquisition. Once an acquisition is completed, the contrast in governance style between the good and the great can be striking. It’s even more striking when measured against the practices of traditional public companies, which typically diffuse shareholder bases, powerful CEOs, and nonexecutive directors (who have no research staff, no budgets to hire external support, and access only to data that management supplies). Top private equity firms seem more committed to effective oversight of their investments. True, they use high levels of compensation to align managers’ interests with their own. But in addition they not only commit their own time to make the board more effective but also conduct research to develop personal views about the direction a company should take, using their block vote to speed up decision making. Among the 60 deals we reviewed in depth, active private equity partners devoted half of their time to the company (usually at its premises) during the first three months after the deal. Less active and less successful deal partners spent only about 15 percent of their time in this way. 5. Health care systems around the world struggle to reconcile three competing objectives: equitable access, high quality, and low cost. The trade-offs among these goals are inherently political. Should governments, for example, ration capacity in order to lower costs, even if doing so creates longer waiting times for care? Should they provide coverage to all citizens? Mandate quality standards? As political and local as such choices may seem, many of the challenges reformers face are common to almost every health care system: for instance, increased supply creates additional demand for care and often fails to generate commensurately better outcomes, such as longer life expectancy. In many countries, higher spending does not correlate with higher-quality health care as perceived by consumers. The universal features of health care systems across the developed world suggest that today’s reformers, who tend to be piecemeal in their interventions, would benefit from a more holistic approach: one that recognizes the strong interdependency of seemingly autonomous actions. Reformers need a comprehensive perspective lest their remedies for one aspect of a health care system generate unintended—and potentially negative and costly—implications for another part. | 
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发表于 2009-10-22 19:37:00
