When I come home from work in the evenings there is often something waiting for me on the doorstep.It is a red rubber band left there by the postman.When my elder son was little he would seize on these bands and add them to the giant rubber band ball he was making.But now I scoop them up along with the junk mail that has been pushed through the letter box and sling them into the bin.

　　当我晚上下班回家的时候，通常会在门口看到邮递员丢弃的红色橡皮筋。在我的大儿子小的时候，他会利用这些橡皮筋，把它们缠绕在自己制作的巨大橡皮筋球上。但现在我会捡起这些皮筋，然后把它们和塞进信筒里的那些垃圾邮件一起扔到垃圾桶里。

　　Last week I got an email from a reader who takes a more assertive approach to stray bands.For years he has been collecting them in a pot but when the pot overflowed recently he emptied the lot into a large jiffy bag and sent it to Moya Greene,chief executive of Royal Mail.He pointed out that the little red bands carelessly discarded by her staff were an eyesore, a waste of rubber – and of money.

　　上周，我的一位读者给我发来电子邮件，告诉了一种处理这些废弃橡皮筋的更为果断的做法。多年来，这位读者一直把收集到的橡皮筋放到一个罐子里，但当罐子最近满了的时候，他把它们全都放进一个大牛皮纸信封里，然后寄给皇家邮政(Royal Mail)的首席执行官莫亚?格林(Moya Greene)。他指出，格林的员工们随便丢弃的这些红色小皮筋令人讨厌，是在浪费橡胶和钱财。

　　He got a nice letter back saying that she was aware of the problem and had passed the matter on to his local delivery office. In due course he got a second letter sent by the local manager who confirmed that for years Royal Mail had been trying to make staff aware of the "nconvenient [sic] that the rubber bands cause our customers". It briefed "all staff regularly about the problem in our cuddles"(or did he mean "huddles"?) and discussed the issue during "Work Time Listening and Learning". The letter ended by telling the reader to contact the manager directly if he had further "issues regarding elastic bands", so that he could "tackle the person responsible right away".

　　这位读者收到了措辞友好的回信。格林在回信中称，她意识到了这些问题，并已将此事转至读者所在地的邮局处理。没过多久，他收到了第二封信，这封信是当地邮局经理寄来的。这位经理在信中强调，皇家邮政多年来一直努力让员工意识到“这些橡皮筋给我们客户带来的不便的(原文如此，用了形容词inconvenient而非名词inconvenience)”。信中写道，“所有员工定期抱在一起讨论该问题”(或者他是想说“聚在一起”?)，并在“工作时间聆听和学习”环节讨论这个问题。经理在信的末尾告诉那位读者，如果他有进一步“与橡皮筋有关的问题”，可以直接与他联系，以便他能“立即处理责任人”。

　　In some ways this wasn't a bad letter.It admitted to the existence of a problem and appeared to take some responsibility for it.Yet what it says about Royal Mail,apart from the piffling detail that its managers can neither write nor proofread, is deeply troubling.If the company can't get its staff to do something as simple as pick up litter despite years of bleating from the chief executive and line managers and despite the fact that it claims to revere sustainability,it has deeper problems than losing about ￡40m a year delivering letters.

　　某种程度上这并非一封糟糕的来信。它承认问题的存在，并表示出愿意为此承担部分责任的态度。然而，它除了暴露出经理们既不会写信、也不会检查错字这一琐碎细节以外，它对皇家邮政的揭示也令人深感不安。如果多年来该公司的首席执行官和部门经理三令五申，而且还宣称尊重可持续发展，但仍不能让其员工做到捡起橡皮筋这类简单的事情，那么它面临着比投递业务每年亏损约4000万英镑更深层次的问题。

　　Royal Mail's conversion to trendy management practices evidently isn't helping. No amount of huddles – or cuddles – will ever crack the rubber band problem. As for the "Work Time Listening and Learning", what has Royal Mail become? A nursery school?

　　皇家邮政向流行的管理方式的转变显然没有取得效果。多少次的开会或“搂抱”都不会解决橡皮筋问题。至于“工作时间聆听和学习”环节，皇家邮政变成了什么?一家幼儿园?

　　Even the manager doesn't seem to be expecting success as he falls back on a more traditional (though also flawed) way of getting people to do as they are told: find a culprit and give him a bollocking.

　　甚至那位经理似乎也没指望成功，因为他最后又诉诸更为传统(并且错误)的让人们俯首听命的方式：找到犯错者，狠批一顿。

　　My reader isn't the first to have seen red over rubber bands. The charity Keep Britain Tidy has calculated that Royal Mail has spent ￡5m buying 4bn bands in the past five years, many of which litter the streets. There have been constant calls for an answer, including the suggestion that littering postmen get fined, but all to no avail.

　　我的读者并非第一个对橡皮筋不满的。慈善机构“保持英国清洁”(Keep Britain Tidy)估算，皇家邮政在过去5年花费500万英镑购买了40亿条橡皮筋，其中许多被丢到了街道上。人们一直在呼吁解决这个问题，包括建议对丢弃皮筋的投递员罚款，但全都没有效果。

　　Fortunately I have a solution to the problem, which I've just popped into a jiffy bag and sent to Ms Greene. It's a copy of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, which argues that the best way of reviving a sick organisation is to pick on one bad habit and change it. Thus when Paul O'Neill took over at Alcoa in the late 1980s he resolved to cut accidents to zero. Shareholders were first appalled but then amazed – in the process of improving safety, communication, trust, efficiency and profits were all improved too.

　　幸运的是，我有了一个解决办法，并把它装进大牛皮纸信封里寄给了格林。它就是一本查尔斯?都希格(Charles Duhigg)所著的《习惯的力量》(The Power of Habit)，这本书指出，重振一个衰落组织的最佳方式是找出一个坏习惯，然后改正它。因此当保罗?奥尼尔(Paul O'Neill)在上世纪80年代末接管美国铝业(Alcoa)的时候，他决心将事故发生率降至零。股东们起初感到骇然，但随后感到惊奇——在改善安全的过程中，沟通、信任、效率和利润全都有所改善。

　　I wonder if rubber bands couldn't do the same for Royal Mail. To stop them disfiguring the nation's doorsteps would involve understanding why they get dropped in the first place. I suspect the reasons are complex and many. The fact you often see postmen running to do the job in time may be part of it. It may be that Royal Mail, despite its protestations, doesn't care about rubber bands because they are too cheap. But I am pretty sure that low morale, high absenteeism and above all poor management will have something to do with it too.

　　我怀疑橡皮筋是否无法为皇家邮政带来同样的契机。要想让它们不再弄脏英国家庭的门口，首先需要理解它们为何会被丢弃。我怀疑原因很复杂而且有许多。你经常看到邮递员急匆匆地赶着时间投递邮件，这可能是原因之一。另一个可能的原因是，皇家邮政尽管嘴上说得漂亮，但实际上因为橡皮筋过于廉价而并不重视。但我非常确信的是，纪律涣散、高旷工率以及管理不善(这一点最重要)也脱不了干系。

　　If Ms Greene were to declare that she had only one aim – to win the rubber band war–everyone would think she'd gone mad, especially as the company is preparing for privatisation next year. But if she kicked this one habit, she would unearth deeper problems and start to solve them too. She would also be saved from all the faux-important stuff that chief executives so often get deflected by.

　　如果格林宣布她只有一个目标——打赢橡皮筋之战，所有人都会认为她疯了，尤其是该公司准备在明年私有化。但如果她从这一积习开刀，她就会发掘出更深层次的问题，并且也会着手解决它们。她还将免受所有那些伪重要事务的困扰——首席执行官们往往被这些事务分散了精力。

　　On the organisation's website it says its aim is to "deliver a market-leading corporate responsibility agenda". All I want Royal Mail to deliver is my mail-without a rubber band.

　　皇家邮政在其官方网站上表示，其目标是“投递市场领先的企业责任”。而我只想要皇家邮政投递我的邮件——没有橡皮筋的邮件。

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（实习编辑：高奕飞）