Bad words about the company

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's best friend, has a set of methodology, which is reverse research: if you want to study flight safety, you'd better find out how the plane crashed first. If you want to study health and longevity, you must first understand the living habits that lead to short life. Similarly, if you want to be a successful enterprise, you should find out how those failed enterprises failed and then avoid them. Chances are, your chances of success will multiply.

We especially like to hear others say how we succeeded, but few people like to hear others say how we failed. Interestingly, successful people are willing to share their successful experiences, even if they don't think they are lying (if they tell the truth, there will be countless successful people in the world), and they really do.

Although we haven't found a way to make the company successful, we have found some ways to avoid the company's failure. Today we will talk about the "bad words" of these companies.

1. Overtrust research and expert opinions.

We usually get some professional advice after market research and expert consultation. These professional opinions will tell us what direction is good and what products are liked by consumers. So if we build a product completely according to these surveys and expert opinions, will it really sell well? Of course not.

Before the smart phone is developed, the research company will definitely tell you that the shipment of non-smart phones is large, and it is necessary to vigorously develop and manufacture non-smart phones. Before developing the new coke, Coca-Cola invited many experts to taste the new coke, and they all thought it would sell well. As a result, it was not listed for three months, and it changed back to the old taste because of the strong resistance of the market.

Many business experts have failed to start their own businesses, and many surveys are full of subjectivity. There is no panacea in this world, and even if there is, it will certainly not cure your disease.

2. Asymmetric information leads to asymmetric communication.

Information equivalence is one of the elements of efficient communication between the two parties. If the information obtained by two people is not equal, the communication result can be imagined. This refers not only to business communication in the ordinary work process, but also to higher-level cognitive communication. There is a saying that "even if we can't reach an agreement, we should unify our cognition." This is a fact.

For example, employees have no concept of waste and no concept of expenditure. In fact, the reason is that managers have not conveyed the key information of "budget and expenditure" in place. The budget is a number for ordinary employees, so for him, spending hundreds of thousands is the same as spending millions. But for the boss, usually hundreds of thousands of differences can determine whether the company can survive tomorrow. The main problem is not employees, but managers and leaders. Managers and leaders didn't tell employees the key information, and didn't convey why they should save budgets and reduce expenses, why employees should have empathy, and why everyone needs Qi Xin to work together to win.

The company has to lay off employees, and it has to lay off employees with dignity. In fact, before employees know that they are going to be laid off, leaders must first ensure that they have communicated more than twice to let employees know that there are problems in their work. Even in the extreme case of company closure, as a business leader, he should communicate openly with the following employees and sincerely tell them why they made such a difficult decision, instead of leaving no comments on all the situations.

Therefore, in some cases, the outcome of a football match is basically decided before the game. The process leads to the result. If there is something wrong with the process, the result will not be much better. Never let employees guess the meaning of management, but make it clear, even if it is a white lie, tell others why.

3. Pursuing high-speed development without doing evil

Not doing evil is first and foremost the most basic requirement of a society for a company. Many things, even if they don't violate the law, will deeply hurt morality, such as Baidu's Putian advertisement, Quanjian's medical induction, etc. Another example is the e-cigarette that has been at the forefront recently. I have to say that e-cigarettes are indeed a good business (low threshold, high profit rate and high repurchase rate), but they are not unscrupulous businesses, so we should evaluate them well.

As practitioners, many of us should also consider whether we are participating in "evil". If a company is doing something that doesn't create any value, such as obtaining consumers' mobile phone numbers through improper technical means, and then sending out spam and short messages, ultra-high interest P2P loans that don't conform to national laws, and making and printing illegal advertisements based on destroying public resources. Business ethics is moral first. A company without values may be an excellent company, but it will never be an excellent company.

Pessimism pervades the company.

When watching the Internet, you should ask what the media likes to report most, of course, which star has a scandal and which company has fallen off the altar. But when these things happen to us, we don't want to be consumed by most people. The difference lies in how far the matter itself has to do with you. If it is far away from you, then you are willing to consume it. But if this matter is closely related to you, or even closely related to you, then you will not consider consuming it. Interestingly, human nature is willing to seek excitement in the negative while pursuing safety.

So it is not easy to be an optimist, but it is very easy to be a pessimist.

5. Consumers who are not in the front line

When enterprises gradually start to break away from consumers and get farther and farther away from consumers, enterprises will get closer and closer to failure.

Let's take a look at what the management of our company cares about every day, such as financing, supply chain, recruitment, inventory, profit and loss, meetings and so on. Let's take a look at what consumers care about every day, such as product quality, cost performance, after-sales service, purchase channels, safety and so on. Have you noticed that our daily concerns are different from those of consumers? Will these differences lead to your final failure?

We sit in the office every day to guess the needs of customers and think about street advertisements in front of the computer every day. Are we so confident that we can understand consumers? How many companies will arrange employees to communicate face-to-face with consumers in the sales front line, and how many managers and employees will take the initiative to follow up and pay a return visit to users? The most terrible thing is that many companies make products that employees will not buy. Don't people reflect? Before the product goes on the market, whether employees buy their own products can join the test rules. If even employees don't want to buy your products, then you have to think about whether you are really too far away from consumers.

Enterprises are similar to people. Once a man has painted himself a glass house and built a mirage, he will live a beautiful dream. Nokia didn't know why it was abandoned by consumers until its death, so that Jorma-Jaakko-Ollila said that when the company was acquired, it made him cry. We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow we lost.

6. Corporate bureaucracy prevails

The company receives a piece of office supplies, which needs to be approved by many people. You should pay attention to it. In this case, the company is trapped by various processes, and bureaucracy is exposed behind the processes. Bureaucracy leads to the directionality of resource flow, so the employees promoted by leaders are not the best, but the most obedient. KPI assessment is not to see if this person works well, but to see if this person is your faction.

In this way, the final result becomes that the whole team has become a selective report when reporting work, reporting only the parts that leaders like, while the parts that leaders don't like know but don't say. In the end, what the team does becomes important only to the leader and not to the company.

Can scientific management methods solve this problem? Not necessarily, because even scientific management methods still have "the concealment of human nature" in them. For example, we are more inclined to recruit people similar to ourselves, and alumni and fellow villagers are more likely to attract our attention. We prefer people who support themselves in the team, because the mobility of interests brings more benefits, whether psychological or material. As managers, we can set up a group that only reports bad news. The daily work of this group is to collect and sort out the bad news of the whole company, and then deal with it regularly.

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Under normal circumstances, when a company's business is booming, its internal problems will be covered up by the growth of its performance. The consequences of rapid development will lead to no time to pay attention to and deal with these problems, but these internal problems will eventually lead to serious internal friction (the result of 1+ 1 becomes far less than 2), thus hindering development.

Startups are usually more prone to this problem. Because the business is in a period of rapid development, everyone's energy and enthusiasm are usually devoted to exploring new things, and they don't pay enough attention to internal problems (such as irregular organizational systems and processes). However, once the company's business develops slowly, its surrounding problems are gradually exposed, such as bureaucracy, internal corruption, rampant egoism, imperfect management system and so on.

However, such problems will be encountered by ordinary companies. As mentioned above, as long as the business development is good enough and the growth time is long enough, it will give you a longer buffer period to deal with these problems. When we encounter problems, we should be rational and find the most suitable solution. Again, although we don't know what can make us succeed directly, we know what can make us fail directly.