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There is some heartening news for British chief executives toiling over their annual letter to shareholders. A senior academic may be analysing your words for tell-tale signs of your psychological state — and to predict when you might have to quit.
对于正在绞尽脑汁撰写年度致股东信的英国首席执行官们(CEO)来说，有一些令人振奋的消息。一位资深学者可能会通过分析信中言辞来发现你的心理状态的蛛丝马迹，进而预测你何时将不得不离职。
By burrowing into your emotions, he will try to assess whether you are about to be fired, or are feeling under pressure to leave voluntarily. He claims a 73 per cent success rate in correctly predicting CEO exits.
通过揣摩你的情绪，他将试图评估你是否即将被炒鱿鱼或者迫于压力而自愿离职。他宣称，通过这种方式预测CEO离职的准确率达到73%。
Your impending sacking — or your permanent move to golf course or garden — will supposedly be given away by two key indicators: an ominous lack of future-focus in your writing; a surfeit of negative emotion; or both.
从两个关键指标中有可能发现你即将离职（或者长期去打高尔夫或侍弄花园）的端倪：一个是字里行间缺少对未来的关注，这透露出不祥的迹象；另一个是过多的负面情绪，或者两者兼而有之。
The academic behind the research is Dr Qingan Huang, senior lecturer in strategic management at the University of East London’s School of Business and Law.
该研究是由东伦敦大学法商学院(University of East London’s School of Business and Law)的战略管理学高级讲师黄庆安博士开展的。
Dr Huang is a native of Guangzhou, China, who adopted the name Angus in Glasgow while doing one of five university degrees. He gained his initial psychology qualification in China and the rest from UK universities.
黄庆安是中国广州人，英文名字是安格斯(Angus)，他获得了5个大学学位，其中一个是在格拉斯哥大学(Glasgow)获得的。他最初在中国获得了心理学学位，后来又在英国大学获得了其他学位。
His work on CEO sackings won him a PhD last year from London’s Cass Business School, and is under review for publication in the Chicago-based Strategic Management Journal.
凭借预测CEO离职的研究成果，黄庆安于去年获得了伦敦卡斯商学院(Cass Business School)的博士学位。如今该论文正在接受审稿，以便发表在芝加哥的《战略管理期刊》(Strategic Management Journal)上。
He examined shareholder letters from most of the 600-plus companies listed on the FTSE All-Share index, over six years from 2002. The decoding and analysing work was aided by software called Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, developed at the University of Texas.
他查阅了富时全类股指数(FTSE All Share)成分股中的大部分公司在2002年起的6年时间里发表的致股东信。富时全类股指数总共包含600多家公司。这项解读和分析工作借助于德克萨斯大学(University of Texas)开发的一款名为“语言探索与字词计数”(LIWC)的软件。
The psycholinguistic variables thrown up by LIWC back in London were then analysed using the popular Stata statistical software package to match CEO turnover type (dismissal or voluntary step down) with future focus and negative phrasing.
黄庆安随后使用流行的Stata统计软件包对LIWC生成的心理语言学变量进行分析，将CEO离职类型（被解雇或者自愿离职）与对未来的关注和负面词语相匹配。
It was after this number-crunching that the 73 per cent-accurate link emerged between 268 CEO exits examined and the language the executive used. Typically, according to his research, departures followed within a year of the shareholder letter in question.
他通过这种数据分析发现，268名CEO离职与他们所用措辞的关联存在73%的准确率。他的研究显示，CEO们通常在发出有问题的致股东信的一年内离职。
“Emotion takes an important role in CEOs’ decision making. Even taking into account irony, sarcasm and unusual sentence structure in texts, LIWC is a reliable method of gauging the emotional expression and cognition of the writers,” Dr Huang said when I spoke to him recently at his office, close to London’s Olympic Park.
我最近在黄庆安靠近伦敦奥林匹克公园的办公室里采访了他。黄庆安表示：“情绪在CEO的决策中扮演着重要角色。即便考虑到信中的反语、嘲讽和异常的句子结构，LIWC也是评估写信者情绪表达和认知的可靠方法。”
The software’s negative emotion dictionary comprises 345 words, such as “hate”, “worthless”, “enemy”, “fear”, “unfair”, “anger” and “sadness”, that reflect the intensity of CEOs’ negative feelings and emotion. And it hunts for the good stuff — future-focused emotion — by seeking 48 words including “will”, “might” and “shall”.
该软件的负面情绪词典包含345个词语，比如“憎恨”、“毫无价值”、“敌人”、“担心”、“不公平”、“愤怒”和“难过”，这些反映出CEO消极情绪和心态的程度。它通过寻找包括“将要”、“可能”和“将会”在内的48个词语来搜寻积极情绪（着眼于未来的心态）。
For evidence of CEOs getting things emotionally right and wrong in their shareholder letters, Dr Huang cites two examples.
关于CEO们在致股东信中正确与错误表达情绪的情况，黄庆安举了两个例子。
The first is the final shareholder communication from Ray Webster, CEO of easyJet from 1996 to 2005, who Dr Huang says demonstrated strong future focus and subsequently stepped down at a time of his choosing.
第一个例子是从1996年至2005年担任easyJet CEO的雷?韦伯斯特(Ray Webster)发表的最后一封致股东信。黄庆安表示，这封信透露出对未来的强烈关注，但韦伯斯特随后选择了辞职。
He had grown easyJet’s revenues by showing shareholders that he was thinking about the next step, according to Dr Huang, with a statement that exemplified his future focus: “Despite the tangible progress, there is still more to do to provide an improvement to the underlying performance,” wrote Mr Webster.
黄庆安表示，韦伯斯特带领easyJet实现收入增长，并向股东们宣称正考虑下一步举措，他在声明中展示了对未来的关注：“尽管取得了实实在在的进步，但我们仍需采取更多举措来提高基础业绩。”
By contrast, Brendan O’Neill, CEO of ICI from 1999 until a profit warning in 2003 prompted his departure, ended his last letter to shareholders with the statement: “When the tide turns, I know we will be ready” — a case of what Dr Huang calls “optimism without strategy”.
相比之下，从1999年起担任英国帝国化工公司(ICI)的CEO、直至2003年发布盈利预警时辞职的布伦丹?奥尼尔(Brendan O’Neill)在最后一封致股东信中这样表示：“当潮流转变的时候，我知道我们将会做好准备。”——这个例子被黄庆安称为“缺乏战略的乐观”。
Dr Huang’s study is the only one I have found into the emotions of CEOs, and is relatively small scale as data-mining exercises go.
据我所知，黄庆安所做的研究是唯一一项针对CEO情绪展开的研究，而且由于其中涉及的数据挖掘工作，他的研究规模相对较小。
But it is part of an increasing vogue for using scientific method to assess, exploit and perhaps ultimately engineer emotion for commercial benefit.
但这符合一股日渐兴起的潮流，即利用科学方法评估、利用、或许最终还能管理情绪，从而为商业利益服务。
In December, I wrote about CrowdEmotion, a London start-up that supplies facial expression-reading technology to clients such as Honda, the BBC and Harvard Medical School. Among the emotion-tracking technologies on offer from others are voice analysis, and bio-sensors.
去年12月我写过伦敦初创企业CrowdEmotion，该公司为本田(Honda)、英国广播公司(BBC)和哈佛医学院(Harvard Medical School)等客户提供面部识别技术。还有些公司提供语音分析、生物传感器等其他情绪追踪技术。
Company HR departments have been known to sense from employees’ sick day patterns when they are close to quitting their jobs. Retailers, meanwhile, use big data analytics to work out what is happening in customers’ lives based on their purchases.
众所周知，企业人力资源部门能够从员工病假模式猜出他们何时会辞职。零售商通过客户的购买情况，利用大数据分析工具来了解他们的生活状况。
All this is fascinating. Thinkers from Aristotle have tried to rationalise emotion. But the result in the big data age is either too creepy and intrusive — or an over-complex attempt to systematise what Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”.
所有这些都令人着迷。自亚里士多德(Aristotle)以来，思想家们一直试图对情绪进行合理解释。但在大数据时代这么做要么令人感到毛骨悚然，觉得隐私受到侵犯，要么是一种过于复杂的尝试，试图将或许会被贝塞尔?弗尔蒂(Basil Fawlty)称为“不言自明”的现象系统化。
Now the cat is out of Dr Huang’s bag, would sensible CEOs not simply dodge bullets by checking their writing for the wrong kinds of words? He says they could avoid the sack by improving their language skills — the corporate equivalent, perhaps, of faking an orgasm.
既然明白了黄庆安这套预测名堂，明智的CEO不会通过检查行文中的不当词语来躲开枪口吗？他说，他们可以通过提高语言技巧来避免被撤职——或许假装极度兴奋。
But then my reaction was probably a prime case of mistaking emotion for expertise. For while current thinking by Dr Huang and other researchers holds that raw emotions are a superb data point, the evidence suggests that they are not always the best basis for action.
但我的反应或许是错将情绪当作专业能力的上好案例。尽管黄庆安和其他研究员目前认为，原始情绪是极佳的数据点，但有证据表明，它们并不总是行动的最佳基础。
