A profession is more than a job -- it is a community and a culture. Professions serve society by pooling knowledge among their members and creating incentives to synthesize new knowledge. They also help their members to build networks, find jobs, recruit staff, find collaborators, and organize around the issues that affect them. In a world without change or innovation, professions would not be so necessary. But in a world where change and innovation are ever more intense, every occupation needs more of the institutions and culture of traditional professions such as law, medicine, engineering, education, librarianship, public administration, business, and architecture.
专业人士比工作包含更多的意义——它是一种团体和文化。专家们在聚集同行的知识并创造综合新知识的动力方面体现着他们的社会价值。他们还帮助他们同行建立合作网络，吸收新从业者，寻找合作者，并且针对问题积极发挥行业影响从而服务社会。在没有改变和创新的世界里专家将不会如此重要。但是在创新和变革变得越来越激烈的的世界里，每一个行业都需要更多传统专业的惯例和文化，比如法律，医药，机械，教育，图书管理，公共管理，商业以及建筑。
Every profession has leaders. In a formal sense, the elected officers of a professional society are the leaders of that profession. Because a profession is fundamentally about knowledge, however, the true leaders of a profession are the thought leaders: the individuals who synthesize the thinking of the profession's members and articulate directions for the future. Sometimes a profession will elect its thought leaders to official positions. But often the thought leaders prefer to lead through writing and speaking, cutting-edge projects, conference organizing, and dialogue. Leadership means both talking and listening, both vision and consensus. A leader builds a web of relationships within the profession and articulates the themes that are emerging in the thinking of the profession as a whole.
每一个专业都有领袖。在正式意义上，一个行业协会选出的主管是这个专业的领袖。但因为专业根本上是关于知识，所以一个专业的真正领袖是思想的旗手：一个综合同行思想，并且明确未来方向的人。有时候一个行业把他们的思想领袖选为官方主管。但通常思想领袖更愿意由撰文或演讲，着手前沿项目，组织会议，或者对话来带领行业前进。一个领袖建立专业人士的关系网，把出现在专家们思维中的设想清晰的从总体上表达。
In a knowledge-intensive world of ceaseless innovation and change, I assert, every professional must be a leader. This is not a universally popular idea. Some people say, "leadership is fine for others, but I just want a job". I want to argue that it doesn't work that way. The skills that the leader exercises in building a critical mass of opinion around emerging issues are the same skills that every professional needs to stay employed at all. In the old days the leadership-averse could hide out in bureaucracies. But as institutions are turned inside out by technology, globalization, and rising public and client expectations of every sort, the refuges are disappearing. Every professional's job is now the front lines, and the skills of leadership must become central to everyone's conception of themselves as a professional.
在一个知识密集，创新和机会层出的世界，我断言，每个专业人士都要是领袖。这并不是普遍流行的观点。有些人说：“对于其他人，做领导很妙，但是我只想做一份工作。”我认为这是行不通的。领导在针对问题提出大量批评意见的技能和每个专业人士为了能有工作而要有的技能其实一样。以往反对领导可以在官僚体系下隐藏。但是当机构内部也被曝露在技术，国际化，以及公众和客户对每一个细节越来越高的期望之下时，抗拒是没有作用的。每个专业职位都是前线，领导技能必须成为每个人自己职业概念的中心。
But how? It is well-known that simply declaring yourself a leader will not cause anyone to follow you. The process of becoming a leader doesn't happen overnight, but it is perfectly methodical. Here is a six-step recipe. Things aren't really this rigid in practice, but you'll have no trouble varying the recipe once you get used to it.
如何做到呢？显然自称领袖是没有人会跟随的。成为领袖不是一夜之间的事，但这完全是有技巧的。这是一个六步攻略，并不一定完全严格按顺序作，你习惯以后完全不必担心对其作出变化。
(1) Pick an issue. You need an issue that the profession as a whole is not really thinking about, but which is going to be the center of attention in five years. The issue could be technical, strategic, managerial, policy-related, or all of the above. It could be a problem or an opportunity or both. It could be a new method or a whole new area of practice. It should be fairly specific, though, and should directly address the day-to-day work of people in some segment of the profession. The word "technology", for example, is too big to be a workable issue. You can find an issue in several ways:
选一个关键问题。你需要一个整个行业都没有真正思考过的问题，但是在五年后将成为关注的中心。这个问题可能是技术上的，策略上的，管理上的，公共关系的，或者是以上所有。这可能是个麻烦或是一个机会，或者是两者。它可能是一个新方法甚至是一个全新的领域。他可能相当特殊，或而直接落实在行业某个部门日常的工作中。但比如说“技术”这个词，作为一个可着手的问题来说太宽泛了。
(a) Talk to dynamic practitioners and notice a pattern in what they are saying.
和从业者交流，注意他们都怎么说的。
(b) Talk to people at your school. One purpose of a professional school is to be the early-warning system for the profession -- the surveillance center where emerging issues are articulated, researched, and taught. Many issues that you take for granted as lecture and paper topics in your classes actually represent the farthest horizon so far as most practitioners are concerned. Who to talk to? Start with the people who are excited. They are excited because they have located a high-quality opportunity to do well by doing good.
和你学校的人交流。专业学校的一个目的是成为专家的预警系统——关键问题的监督中心，在这里这些前沿问题被表达，研究，思考。很多关键问题被你仅仅看作班级的演讲和考试题目，实际上描绘了很多从业者最关心的问题。跟谁说呢？从那个最激动的开始。他们如此兴奋是因为他们立足于 机会来做到最好。
(c) Talk to people in other professions to find issues that are going to be important for your profession. This could mean simply asking them what issues are important right now, or it could mean explaining the situation in your profession to them in detail and asking them to instruct you. For example, the people who first applied ideas from statistics to computer science became leaders, as did the people who first applied economic analysis to law. Alternatively, identify distinctive intellectual resources that you already bring with you, or that you are highly motivated to learn, and that people aren't really applying in your profession yet. Ransack your field to identify issues that you can transform by thinking about them in that way.
和其他行业的人交谈以获得即将对你行业变得重要的问题。这可能只需要问他们什么问题对他们来说重要，或者向他们仔细解释你的行业状况并征询他们的意见。比如，第一个有把计算机科学运用于统计的人成为这一领域的领袖，或是第一个把金融分析运用于法律。换言之，认识自身的优秀的知识资源，或者有强烈学习欲望的知识资源，或者那些人们还没有真正运用到你专业中来的知识资源。仔细搜索你的领域以发现那些你能转化而运用于你的专业的关键问题。
(d) Pick a topic within your profession that you would really hope to be working on someday, and read books and articles about that topic from a variety of other fields, professional and nonprofessional, even if they use different language for it. Be weirded out by the completely different coordinate systems that different fields use. Shake yourself loose from the accreted layers of presuppositions and assumptions that your profession has built up around the topic. Then set an agenda for reinventing that topic using language that people in your profession can understand.
着手一个专业内你希望为之工作的题目，阅读其他领域相关书籍和论文，专业的和非专业的，即使它们是用不同的语言写就。从其他领域用的另外一个坐标系来审视本行业。把自己从本专业对此所建立的厚厚预设和假定中解放出来。设定一个重构此题目的日程表，用行业内人士能理解的语言来表述。
(e) Redescribe one of your profession's existing functions in an abstract way, and then identify several other activities to which the same abstraction could be applied -- including activities that are currently performed by other professions. For example, library cataloguers are really specialists in "metadata services", and many other professions (e.g., publishing) are doing a bad job of things because they lack a serious professional understanding of metadata.
用一种抽象的方法重新描述一个专业内已经存在的原理，然后找出这种抽象可以运用的大量其他活动，——包括那些在其他专业已经运转的活动。比如，图书馆分类已经专精于“共有数据服务”，而很多其他专业（例如出版业）由于在这方面专业理解的缺乏还在做无谓的工作。
(f) Talk to the people who use your profession's products and services. And talk especially to the ones who are leaders in their own field, so that their situation helps you to predict the future of that field in general. How are their needs changing? What new needs will they have in five years? What are their values and long-term goals? What would it be like for your profession to be dramatically more useful to them? Is your profession really gearing up to maintain and expand its relevance? Now talk to them again. This time, tell them some of the surprising new ways in which your profession might be able to help them in the future, and invite them to think with you about how their own field might be improved as a result.
和使用你所在专业产品和服务的人交流。特别是和那些在它们本身领域内是领导的人，这样他们的处境能帮你大体预料那个领域的前景。他们需要什么改变？在五年后他们将有什么新的需求？他们的价值和长期目标是什么？你的专业中什么将变得对其非常有用？你的专业真的具有并将保持这种重要性么？现在再次和他们交谈，这一次，告诉他们，你的专业在将来或许能用令人惊奇的方法来帮助他们，请他们和你一起思考他们的领域如何改进。
(g) Learn the arguments that your field's current leaders employ at budget time. Then devise some new arguments that the people with the money will understand. Use these arguments to start conversations with knowledgeable colleagues about what arguments the relevant people can in fact understand. Try to identify elements of their thinking that you hadn't previously known about. Then convert what is valid in their thinking into issues for the field. Once you stop thinking of the money people as opaque authorities, you will more readily notice opportunities to expand your profession.
了解你领域里现在的领导做预算时用到的依据。发现一些财务人员能理解的新依据。讲给那些有财务知识的同事谈谈这些新依据，讨论一下什么依据能让相关人士真正理解。尝试着找出在他们思考问题时用到的你事先并不了解的要素。当你不再把财务人员当成不可捉摸的专家，你将更容易的发现扩展专业的机会。
(h) Assemble a group of ten other change-minded students in your school and spend two hours brainstorming at least a hundred new ways that your profession could provide people with useful products and services. Assume the technology of ten years from now. All of your ideas should be clear departures from past practice. Doing this in a group is useful because everyone's surprising ideas can help everyone else to think in original directions. Then whittle down your list to the few that are both radical and plausible.
集合学校里十几个其他头脑灵活的同学，花两个小时来做一个头脑风暴，找出至少一百种用你的专业给人们提供易用的产品和服务的方法。假定十年后的科技都由你所用。也许你的所有想法都离经叛道。在一个小组中进行这种活动，这样每个人的奇思妙想都能激发其他人的思维火花。然后从中找出那些既不同于时又貌似可行的。
(i) Draw on your own experience, values, and intellect to articulate an issue that nobody else is talking about. Maybe you are simply anticipating concerns that everybody else will be discovering independently in a few years, or maybe you are building something new that wouldn't have happened without you. In either case, if the issue is going to be important to your profession in five years, you'll be doing a public service by getting out in front of it.
运用你的经验，价值和智慧来阐明一个没有人谈论的问题。也许你只是预计到每个人每个人将在不久的将来都会独自发现它，或者也许你将建立某些新的东西，而你是不可或缺的。另外，如果这个问题在五年内在你的专业内变得重要，（你就正在做一个前瞻的社会性服务。）
(j) Cultivate your powers of being interested in things. Every time you succeed in becoming interested in something new, do three things: Google it, type it into the article indexes for your profession at the library Web site and read a few articles about it, and then have a conversation with someone who knows about it. A good way to convene such a conversation is, "I'd like you ask your advice". Do this for a year. Note that you are now interested in several important things that nobody else is thinking about. Assume that others in your generation will find them interesting once you explain them.
培养你对事物的兴趣。每次你成功的对某事发生兴趣，做三件事：google它，把它输入你专业论文列表，读几篇关于它的文章，和几个了解它的人谈谈它。一个很好的方法是“我喜欢你，所以征求你的意见。”坚持一年，你会发现你现在已经对很多重要的东西感兴趣，而很少有人思考过它们。假定你的同代人会对你所说的事物感兴趣。
(k) Looking at your profession as it stands today, and perhaps by talking to some of its newer and more iconoclastic members, identify an aspect of current practice that is archaic. Pose the question of what the ideal reform would be.
看看你的专业的现状，也许在和新人或者那些不因循守旧的人谈谈会发现当前实践中那些过时的东西。提出一些如何改造他们的问题来讨论。
(l) Write down all the difficulties that seem to recur in your experience of practicing your profession -- anything, however small, that often seems to go wrong. Or else become an anthropologist for a day, and hang out with some people -- students, immigrants, new customers, etc -- who are dealing with your profession for the first time. Experience consternation at the difficulties they run into. Collect a dozen difficulties. Then start making theories of what causes those difficulties. Big, pretentious theories are best, especially if they exaggerate how important the difficulties you've listed really are. Elaborate your theories in your notebook for a few more months until they are really grandiose. Then use the theories to start generating ideas for innovation and change in your profession. Many of your ideas will have advantages aside from fixing the difficulty that inspired them. Consult with dynamic people to determine which of these ideas (not the theories, obviously, but the ideas) might be plausible as issues for the long haul.
记下所有在你专业实践中开起来会再次遇到的困难——任何事，也许是小地方，但是总是会出错，或者某一天成为一个人类学家，成天和某些人混在一起，——大学生，移民，新房客，不一而足。——这些都是首先接触你专业的人。经历那些他们遇到的令人惊奇的困难。收集一打这样的困难。然后做一个理论解释这些困难是如何产生的。大的理论最好，特别是如果他们一再强调这些你听到的困难是多么重要。在你的笔记本里记录下他们，直到它们真的是那么重要。然后开始用理论产生创新，找到解决困难的点子。你的很多主意将有助于解决那些他们关注的难题。请教那些动态人士，评估哪些主意（不是理论，显然，而是那些主意。）会对长期发展更有帮助。
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