2019年翻译资格笔译高级考试模拟试题：宝洁创新机器的内情

　　汉译英

　　宝洁创新机器的内情

　　宝洁首席执行官A.G.雷富礼给宝洁的创新过程添加了创造力和严谨。

　　在过去的两年中，保洁公司把它的新产品命中率从70%提高到90%。这在宝洁所属的行业中非常了不起，据一家名为“信息资源“的市场调查公司的研究，这个行业一半的新产品的寿命还不到一年。“我关注宝洁18年了，” 德意志银行的分析员安德鲁·肖说，“它现在的业绩前所未有的好。”

　　内生增长，即企业不依靠并购，而是靠自身核心业务的扩大而获得的增长，是宝洁转变的根基。根据雷富礼的观点，内生增长加强了企业的创新能力。

　　大型企业普遍致力于创新，不断发展其品牌，可口可乐，卡夫和联合利华就是个例子。据波士顿咨询公司最近对若干公司高管进行的一项调查，超过三分之二的企业高管优先考虑创新，但57%的高管对创新的投资回报感到不满意。

　　拉夫雷有一个大公司创新模型：

　　1. 保洁公司首席营销官吉姆斯坦格尔已经不像过去那样一来焦点小组访谈这样的传统消费者调查手段了。

　　他说：“你无法从中得到任何有真实见解的意见。”他还说，宝洁和它的对手们已经满足了消费者较为明显的需求，现在的机会仅在于满足消费者们尚无法表述清楚的需求。

　　所以，他要求营销人员多花些时间在消费者家里，看看他们如何穿衣，如何清洁地板，了解他们的习惯和令他们沮丧的事情。

　　2. 保洁公司共有7500名研发人员，分布在9个国家。为了从如此广大的地域手机反馈信息，公司鼓励员工把自己想到的问题贴到公司内部网站上。

　　拉夫雷对员工们在网站上分享的意见上进行评估，并在每个业务单位的为期半天的年度“创新回顾”会议上公开他自己的研究结果。

　　3. 拉夫雷说，他的目标是让宝洁一半的创新来自公司外部，现在的比例已从四年前的20%上升到今天的35%。他解释说：“发明家在人口中是平均分布的，因此不仅可以在我们的实验室里得到发明，在车库里也同样可以得到。

　　4. 宝洁从不未经市场测试就推出新产品。但消费者试用非常耗时，这种时间上的奢侈，对于宝洁高管们来说是越来越少了。

　　宝洁选美皇后苏珊·阿诺德说：“我们没有时间做到事无巨细。这个行业的根基是潮流和时尚，必须靠直觉。”

　　通过削减市场测试时间，宝洁把从实验室研发到大批量投放市场的新品开发周期从原先的3年缩短到18个月。

　　5. 拉夫雷认为宝洁需要推销的不仅是产品本身，而且是消费者对产品的体验，包括产品的外形，气味和使用时的感受。

　　三年前，他在公司设了一个设计主管岗位，由资深女员工克劳迪娅·考奇卡担任，直接接受他的领导。原先，她手下的设计师仅仅设计标识和包装，工作辛苦但默默无闻。

　　而现在，他们参与产品开发的各个方面。公司开发玉兰油新生护肤系列产品时，他们就协助研制了配方和香型。

　　6. 为激励增长，有些公司为创新者提供丰厚的奖金或从公司聘请明星。雷富礼从没做过这样的事。他说，他没必要改变薪酬体系，无法和别人分享观点的管理人员根本得不到提升。

　　他也采用适度的奖励手段激励基层员工，比如他会给提出创造性的想法的员工50股的股票期权，并且在宝洁内部的网站上为创新者庆祝。

　　参考译文

　　A.G. Lafley, the CEO of Procter and Gamble, has brought a lot of creativity and rigor to P&G’s innovation process.

　　During the past 2years P&G has raised its new-product hit rate from 70% to 90%. That’s terrific in an industry where half of new products fail within 12 months, according to market research firm Information Resources. ‘In the 18 years that I’ve followed Procter,’ says Deutsche Bank analyst Andrew Shore, ‘I have never seen the company this good.’

　　Organic growth – meaning growth from core businesses, excluding gains from acquisitions – is at the root of P&G’s transformation. According to Lafley, organic growth strengthens a company’s ability to innovate.

　　Coke, Kraft and Unilever are just a few of the giants that are struggling to innovate and build the brands they already have. According to a recent Boston Consulting Group survey of senior executives, more than two-thirds say innovation is a priority, but 57% are dissatisfied with the returns on their innovation investments.

　　Lafley has a model for innovating in a big company:

　　Jim Stengel, Procter’s Chief Marketing Officer, has cut his reliance on focus groups – the conventional method for studying consumers.

　　‘You don’t really learn anything insightful,’ he says, contending that P&G and its rivals have already met consumers’ obvious needs and that today’s opportunities lie in meeting needs that consumers may not articulate.

　　So he has urged the marketers to spend lots of time with consumers in their homes, watching the ways they wear their clothes, clean their floors, and asking them about their habits and frustrations.

　　Procter and Gamble has 7500 R&D people located in nine countries. In order to collect feedback over this vast area, the company encourages employees to post problems on an internal website.

　　Lafley evaluates the ideas that have been shared between employees. Each year he presents his finding in half-day innovation reviews’ for each business unit.

　　Lafley says that his goal is to get half of P&G’s invention from external sources, up from 20% four years ago and about 35% today. ‘Inventors are evenly distributed in the population, and we’re as likely to find invention in a garage as in our labs,’ he explains.

　　It’s not the P&G way to put out a product without test-marketing it. But consumer testing takes time – a luxury that P&G executives increasingly don’t have.

　　Says Susan Arnold, P&G’s beauty queen: ‘We don’t have time to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s. This business is trend-based and fashion-based. You have to be intuitive.’

　　By cutting down on test marketing, P&G has reduced product launch time from laboratory to roll-out from three years to eighteen months company-wide.

　　Lafley believes that P&G needs to market not just the product itself but the consumer’s experience of the product- how it looks, smells and feels.

　　Three years ago he added a head of design at P&G, a company veteran named Claudia Kotchka, who reports directly to him. Her designers used to labour in anonymity on logos and packaging.

　　But they are now deeply involved in all aspects of product development. For Olay Regenerist, they helped with the formulation and the fragrance too.

　　In an attempt to encourage growth, some companies offer fat bonuses for innovation or hire stars from outside. Lafley hasn’t done either of those things. He doesn’t need to revamp pay schemes, he says, noting that managers who fail to share ideas simply do not get promoted.

　　He does motivate the rank and file by giving out modest rewards, such as giving 50 stock options, for creative ideas and by celebrating innovators on P&G’s internal website.