你怎么将连续性的依赖关系转化成平行的任务?作为CEO，我把自己安插在一个过程的不同点来给工作大大提速。比如说，如果我们需要做一个通过，时间宝贵的情况下，我会横插进去，自己写要发表的博客。不是说我的团队做不了。我只是知道既然我是那个挑毛拣刺的人，我自己做会更快些。作为领导者，你的职责是认识到这些依赖关系和非依赖关系，根据事务的关键程度和最后期限采取行动。

　　Ten times a day I’ll find myself sitting in a meeting saying, “We don’t need to wait for that thing, we can do this now.” That thought is so common. It’s just that people need to say it out loud more often.

　　每天我发现我说在会议里说上十次“我们不用等其他事情完成，我们现在就可以做这件事情。”这种思路很平常。只是需要人们更经常地大声说出来。

　　Eliminate cognitive overhead

　　减少认知的复杂程度

　　Remember when you used to download lots of songs on iTunes? It was so painfully slow if you wanted to buy a whole album at once. You’d have to wait for one to finish downloading so they could all speed up. Projects are like this. Sometimes a project is so complicated that it feels like you’re downloading six albums at once so everything else grinds to a halt too.

　　还记得你以前在iTunes里下载很多歌曲的画面?如果你要下载整张专辑，速度简直慢得要命。你必须等到一首歌下完，其他的下载速度才会提上来。项目也是这样。有时项目的复杂程度让你觉得你在一气儿下载六个专辑所以其他事情都被挤压到没速度。

　　I can’t even count the number of meetings I had at Google related to enterprise app identities versus normal consumer Google IDs. We launched a project to fix this, but it was so complicated that the first 30 minutes of every meeting were dedicated to restating what had happened in the last meeting. The cognitive overhead was mind boggling.

　　This is how I learned that if you can knock out big chunks of a project early, you can reduce the overhead of the remaining parts by 90%. You should always be on the lookout for these opportunities.

　　我都数不清我在谷歌开了多少公司应用身份对一般谷歌身份的会了。我们专门开启了一个项目来修复这个问题，但是问题复杂到每次会议的前30分钟我们都用来重述上一次会议的内容。这种认知的过度复杂让人没办法理清思路。不过我学会了如何早早地把项目中的大块头解决掉，这样接下来部分的复杂程度就减少了90%。你应该经常寻找这样的机会。

　　Often, it will be one tiny element of a project that’s adding all of the complexity. For example, our business at Upstart has to comply with a lot of regulations. There’s not a lot we can do until we know we’ll have legal approval, so we used to spend a lot of time dancing around whether something was going to be legal or not. Then we thought, why don’t we just get a brain dump from our lawyers saying, “Do this, this and this and not this, and you’ll be fine.” Having that type of simple understanding of the problem drastically reduced the cognitive overhead of every decision we made.

　　通常是项目中一个小小的因素引起所有的复杂关系。比如，我们在Upstart的生意必须符合许多规范。除非我们知道我们拿到了法律许可，否则我们做不了什么，所以我们过去花很多时间去搞清楚某件事是否会符合法律程序。然后我们想，我们干嘛不根据律师讲的话把我们的大脑清干净，“这样、这样、这样做，不要那样做，你就能通过。”有了这种简单的思维方式，我们在做决策的时候大大减少了认知上的复杂程度。

　　If you can assess, pull out, and stomp on the complicating pieces of the puzzle, everyone’s life gets easier. The one I see the most—and this includes at Google too—is that people hem and haw over what the founder or CEO will think every step of the way. Just get their input first. Don’t get your work reversed later on. What a founder might think is classic cognitive overhead.

　　如果你能找到拼图中过去复杂难懂的那些，扔出去，在上面狠狠踩上几脚，那么每个人的工作会轻松很多。我最经常看到的——包括在谷歌——是人们在每一步上都反复揣摩创始人或者CEO会怎么想。先问问他们不就得了。不要让你的工作功亏一篑。“创始人会怎么想”，这是典型的自找麻烦。

　　Use competition the right way

　　正确使用竞争的力量

　　Talking about your competition is a good way to add urgency. But you have to be careful. As a leader, your role is to determine whether your team is going fast because they’re panicked, or if they don’t seem to be paranoid enough. Based on the answer, competition is a helpful tool.

　　谈论你的竞争对手是个增加紧急感的好方法。但是你必须要谨慎。作为领导者，你需要决定你的团队动作迅速是因为他们恐慌了，还是他们不够恐慌。根据答案的不同，竞争可能是个好帮手。

　　At Upstart, we constantly say that while we’re working hard on this one thing, our competitors are probably working just as hard on something we don’t even know about. So we have to be vigilant. A lot of people say you should ignore competition, but by acknowledging it, you’re incentivizing yourself to set the pace in your market.

　　在Upstart，我们经常说我们在拼命做一件事的时候，我们的竞争对手可能在同样拼命地做一件我们都不知道是什么的东西。所以我们必须保持晶体。很多人说你不应该关心竞争对手怎样，但是如果我们能认识到竞争，你在鞭策自己引领你的市场领域。

　　You can either set the pace of the market or be the one to react.

　　你如果不是在市场中领跑的人，就是被领跑的人。

　　You can either set the pace of the market or be the one to react. Whoever is fastest out of the gate is the one everyone else has to react to.

　　你如果不是在市场中领跑的人，就是被领跑的人。谁跑的最快，其他人就必须跟在后面被牵着鼻子走。

　　When we were launching Google Apps, we were coming out against Microsoft Office, which had this dominant, monopolistic ownership of the business. We thought about what we could do differently and better, and the simplicity of our pricing was part of it. We offered one price of $50 per employee per year—compared to the wacky 20-page price list Microsoft would drop on you. We didn’t agonize over whether it should be $45, $50, or $55—I think we decided that in a half hour. We just wanted to be able to tell people, “We may not be free, but we’ll be the simplest decision you ever made.” That was us re-setting the bar for the market and pushing it hard so everyone else would have to react to it.

　　我们发行谷歌应用的时候，我们开始和微软办公软件竞争，他们占据了这个领域的垄断地位。我们思考如何能做得与众不同或者更好，其中产品价格的直截了当就是其中的一个策略。我们的价格是每个员工每年$50——而微软给出的是长达20页纸的价格目录。我们不去纠结到底应该是$45，$50，还是$55——我记得我们只花了半个小时就做出来这个决定。我们只想告诉用户：“我们不是免费的，但是我们会是你们做出的最简单的决定。”这就是我们在领跑市场，并且领跑的很多，这样其他人必须做出反应。

　　Rally support for decisions

　　为决策寻求支持

　　Almost nothing in tech can be done in a vacuum. Basically, once you’ve made a decision, you’ll need to convince others that you’re right and get them to prioritize what you need from them over the other things on their plate.

　　科技界没有什么东西可以在真空中做出来。所以，一旦你做出一个决定，你就必须说服其他人你是对的，并且让他们将你需要他们做的事情排到他们自己需要做的事情之前。

　　Influencing a decision starts with recognizing that you’re really just dealing with other people. Even if it’s a vendor or another company you need to rally, it boils down to one person first. Given this view, you need to make a point of understanding this person, what their job is, how their success is measured, what they care about, what all of their other priorities are, etc. Then ask: “How can you help them get what they want while helping you get what you want?”

　　将你的决定推而广之，首先要认识到你其实只是在和其他人打交道。即使你要说服的一个卖主或者是另外一个公司，最终负责的还是一个人。用这种方法，你需要理解这个人、他们的工作范畴、对他们而言什么是成功、他们关心什么、他们还有什么其他重要的事情要做等等。然后问自己：“我怎样在他们帮助我达成我要的东西的同时帮助他们做成他们想要的。”

　　I’ve seen this done by appealing to people’s pride. Maybe you tell them that you used to work with a competitor who was quite speedy so that they have incentive to go even faster. I’ve also seen this done by appealing to human decency and being honest. You might say something like, “Hey we’re really betting heavily on this, and we really need you guys to deliver.”

　　让对方感觉到自己的重要性是一种方法。也许你可以告诉他们以前你和一个他们的竞争对手合作，动作非常迅速，他们会有动力做得更迅速。我还见过以得体和诚实赢得他们的合作。你可以说：“嗨我们在这儿上面真的是下了大赌注，我们很需要你们能做出来。”

　　Whichever route you choose, you want to back up your argument with logic. You should gently seek to understand what’s happening. I tend to ask a lot of questions like: “Can you help me understand why something would take so long? Is there any way we can help or make it go faster?” Really try to get to the heart of the actions they’re taking and the time they’ve carved out to do it. And if this works, be sure to commend them to their boss.

　　不管你选择哪种方法，你想让你的论点有清楚的调理。你应该温和地试图理解事情的进展。我经常会文很多这样的问题：“你能帮我理解为什么这个东西要花这么长时间吗?我们可以做点什么或者让它加快速度吗?”努力试图理解他们的行为和付出的时间背后的核心意义。如果他们做到了你想做的，一定要向他们的老板称赞他们。

　　How can you make other people look good?

　　如何让其他人脸面有光?

　　I highly recommend this over a brute force method of escalating things to the person’s manager or throwing competition in their face. That doesn’t serve them, and they’ll be much less likely to serve you as a result.

　　我很不推荐用联系某人的经历或者将竞争对手甩到这人脸上的粗鲁方式来达到加快速度的目的。这种方法不会管用，最后的结果很可能是他们不愿意配合你。

　　How can you make other people look good? How can you make meeting your needs a win for them inside their company?

　　如果让其他人脸面有光?如何将满足你的需求变成他们内部的一种成功?

　　All of this comes back to making things go as fast and smoothly as possible. When you feel things start to slow down, you have to keep asking questions. Questions are your best weapon against inertia.

　　所有这些又回归到如何让事情以最快的速度和最圆滑的方式进行。如果你感觉到速度开始变慢，你就应该不停地问问题。提问是你对抗懒惰的最佳武器。

　　To keep things moving along at Upstart, I ask a lot of hard questions very quickly, and most of them are time related. I know that we execute well and are generally working on the right things at the right time, but I will always challenge why something takes a certain amount of time. Are we working as smartly as we can?

　　为了让Upstart的事务运转起来，我会迅速地跑出几个核心问题，大部分是有时间敏感性的。我知道我们的执行很好，一般都是在正确的时间表上做着正确的事情，但是我总是会质疑为什么一个东西要花特定长的时间去做。我们真的在以最聪明的方式工作吗?

　　Too many people believe that speed is the enemy of quality. To an extent they’re right—you can’t force innovation and sometimes genius needs time and freedom to bloom. But in my experience, that’s the rare case. There’s not always a stark tradeoff between something done fast and done well. Don’t let you or your organization use that as a false shield or excuse to lose momentum. The moment you do, you lose your competitive advantage.

　　很多人以为高速和质量是敌对的。在一定程度上是这样——你不可能强迫发明创造，天才们有时也需要一些时间和空间才能绽放异彩。但是根据我的经验，这是少数。在快速完成某事和高质量地完成某事之间没有必然的牺牲其中之一的关系。不要让你自己或者是你的企业运用这个错误的方程，或者借故丧失动力。如果你这样做，你会立刻失去竞争优势。

　　(英文原文请见 A former Google exec on how to make tough decisions quickly)

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（编辑：何莹莹）