Jeff Smith: Lessons in business ... from prison

80,234 views ・ 2012-12-05

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00:00
Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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翻译人员: Yi Shao 校对人员: Simon Chen
00:15
B.J. was one of many fellow inmates
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和许多囚犯一样,
00:18
who had big plans for the future.
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B.J.有着宏大的未来计划。
00:20
He had a vision. When he got out,
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他的愿望是,出狱之后
00:22
he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight,
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不再贩毒,坦荡做人
00:25
and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision.
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他正在努力将他的两项爱好融合成一项事业。
00:30
He'd spent 10,000 dollars
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他花了一万美元
00:32
to buy a website that exclusively featured women
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购买了一个网站
00:35
having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter)
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网站的主要内容是美女在奢侈跑车的上面或者里面做爱。(笑声)
00:41
It was my first week in federal prison,
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那时我进联邦监狱刚刚一周,
00:44
and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV.
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但我很快就发现那里的情形和电视上很不一样。
00:48
In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men
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事实上,监狱充满了聪明、野心勃勃的人
00:52
whose business instincts were in many cases
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六个月之前
00:55
as sharp as those of the CEOs
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作为密苏里州参议院”冉冉升起的新星“
00:57
who had wined and dined me six months earlier
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我和CEO们一起吃饭
00:59
when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate.
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进监狱之后,我感觉囚犯们的商业直觉和高管们一样敏锐。
01:03
Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with
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我的狱友中95%
01:06
had been drug dealers on the outside,
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都是因为贩毒被捕的,
01:09
but when they talked about what they did,
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他们说起自己的过去时
01:12
they talked about it in a different jargon,
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会用到独特的行话
01:15
but the business concepts that they talked about
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但他们谈到的经商理念
01:17
weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton:
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和沃顿商学院工商管理硕士的一年级课程颇为相似:
01:20
promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user,
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促销激励,新顾客可以免费试用
01:25
focus-grouping new product launches,
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针对某一顾客群体的新产品发布,
01:29
territorial expansion.
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市场拓展。
01:31
But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days.
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他们并没有整天沉浸在对过去光辉岁月的追忆之中。
01:34
For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive.
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大多数情况下,他们不过是为了生存而已。
01:37
It's a lot harder than you might think.
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这可能比你想象的要困难很多。
01:39
Contrary to what most people think,
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和大部分人所想的不同
01:42
people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life
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人民,纳税人是不支付
01:45
when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life.
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囚犯在监狱的生活费用的。你必须自己养活自己。
01:47
You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant,
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你必须付钱购买肥皂、除臭剂、
01:50
toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it.
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牙刷、牙膏等等(一切的生活必需品)。
01:52
And it's hard for a couple of reasons.
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有几个原因导致在监狱中生存颇为困难。
01:53
First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent
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首先,所有东西的价格都比
01:56
from what you'd pay on the street,
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市场价高出30%到50%,
01:57
and second, you don't make a lot of money.
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第二,你挣得钱不多。
02:00
I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job,
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我为卡车卸货。这是一份全职工作,
02:02
unloading trucks at a food warehouse,
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在一个食品仓库给卡车卸货
02:04
for $5.25, not an hour, but per month.
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一个月,不是一个小时,赚5.25美元。
02:09
So how do you survive?
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怎样才能生存呢?
02:11
Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles.
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我们必须做买卖,各种各样的买卖。
02:14
There's legal hustles.
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有合法的买卖。
02:16
You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency.
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以邮票为货币买东西。
02:18
You charge another inmate to clean his cell.
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有偿为狱友打扫牢房。
02:21
There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell.
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也有轻微违规的买卖,比如在你的牢房里开个理发店。
02:25
There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell.
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违规情节稍微严重一点的是:在牢房里开纹身店。
02:30
And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in,
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也有违规情节非常严重的买卖:从外面偷运
02:33
you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography,
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或者请人偷运毒品、色情制品、
02:37
cell phones, and just as in the outer world,
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手机,和监狱外的商业世界一样
02:41
there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise,
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监狱里存在着风险收益的平衡,所以一项生意风险越大
02:44
the more profitable it can potentially be.
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它所能带来的利润可能也越高。
02:46
You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars.
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在监狱想买一根香烟?3到5美元。
02:51
You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open
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想要翻盖的、
02:54
and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks.
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和人脑袋差不多大的手机?300美元。
02:58
You want a dirty magazine?
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想要色情杂志?
03:00
Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars.
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那可能要花1000美元。
03:04
So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects
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你可能也发现了,灵活的头脑
03:07
of prison life is ingenuity.
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在监狱生活中非常重要。
03:10
Whether it was concocting delicious meals
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无论是用从仓库偷来的废料
03:13
from stolen scraps from the warehouse,
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烹制美味的食物
03:17
sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers,
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还是用指甲钳为人做发型
03:20
or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags
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抑或是用挂在树上装满岩石的洗衣袋健身
03:26
tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less,
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囚犯们知道如何在物质条件贫乏的条件下生存
03:30
and many of them want to take this ingenuity
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很多人也希望能利用自己
03:33
that they've learned to the outside
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在监狱中培养锻炼出的灵活头脑
03:35
and start restaurants, barber shops,
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在出狱之后开餐厅、理发店
03:37
personal training businesses.
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或者搞个人健身辅导。
03:40
But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that,
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然而监狱中没有意在帮助囚犯重返社会自力更生的课程
03:43
no rehabilitation at all in prison,
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囚犯在监狱中并没有得到真正的改造。
03:46
no one to help them write a business plan,
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没有人帮助囚犯撰写商业计划,
03:48
figure out a way to translate the business concepts
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帮助他们找到把来自直觉的商业理念
03:51
they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises,
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转化为合法生意的方法,
03:54
no access to the Internet, even.
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囚犯们甚至不能上网。
03:57
And then, when they come out, most states
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随后,出狱之后,很多州
03:59
don't even have a law prohibiting employers
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没有禁止
04:02
from discriminating against people with a background.
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雇主歧视有前科的求职者的法律。
04:05
So none of us should be surprised
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所以在三分之二的囚犯出狱后
04:08
that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend
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五年之后还会再犯的事实面前
04:10
within five years.
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我们根本无需惊讶。
04:13
Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it.
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我对联邦政府撒谎,因此在联邦监狱服刑一年。
04:18
But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do
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不过,出狱之后,我发誓
04:22
whatever I could to make sure
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尽全力帮助那些
04:24
that guys like the ones I was locked up with
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和我的狱友们有相似经历的人们
04:26
didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had.
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让他们不要再继续浪费生命。
04:30
So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way.
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因此,我希望你们能够考虑伸出援手。
04:34
The best thing we can do is figure out ways
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我们的最佳选择是
04:36
to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit
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想办法扶持监狱中的创业精神
04:39
and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons,
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发掘囚犯身上隐藏的巨大潜力
04:42
because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills
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因为如果我们不这么做的话,囚犯们就无法学到
04:45
that's going to help them, and they'll be right back.
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能够帮助他们谋生的新技能,他们还会回到监狱当中。
04:48
All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles.
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而他们在监狱里所能学到的不过是新的骗术而已。
04:51
Thank you. (Applause)
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谢谢。(掌声)
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