Shake the fulcrum of school reform! Li Xigui recommended: 10 management books that principals must read.

As managers, reading some books about structural transformation can help us find the "fulcrum to shake the earth".

—— Li Xigui, Principal of Eleventh School

Master the management of human nature

Management should make everyone feel important.

A sentence in the book Management of Human Nature deeply inspired me: "Everyone is eager to be an important person, and the success of management lies in making everyone feel important." She said: "Whenever I stand in front of an employee, friend or customer, I imagine him wearing a badge on his chest with a sentence written on it-which makes me feel important." .

When I was the principal of Gaomi No.4 Middle School, the school was short of funds, and I had to borrow money from neighboring friendly units every month to pay teachers' salaries, let alone encourage them. What shall we do? I will make the teacher feel important by spending no money or less.

There is a chemistry teacher in the school, who was an excellent teacher at first, but after graduating from technical secondary school, with the deepening of knowledge, he can only become a chemistry experiment teacher. Slowly, he was a little neglected at school. Sometimes he had a bad temper and bad attitude, and others didn't respect him enough.

Later, we thought of a way. On Teacher's Day, I invited a calligrapher friend to write a banner for him-"the elder of the Three Dynasties". In other words, this teacher has experienced three principals in school and is a veteran figure. He has made brilliant achievements in the past. At first, he hung this banner in his office. After the winter vacation, he rolled it up and hung it at home. At the beginning of school, he rolled it up and took it to school.

This banner also caused people to question his status as a "veteran". Gradually, everyone understood his past, especially some young teachers who didn't understand the past, respected him more and more, and he began to adjust himself. This is the effect of 30 yuan for a banner.

We have no money to encourage other teachers who have made outstanding contributions to the school, so how can we make them feel important? I asked my calligrapher friend to write an inscription. 1994 I wrote "Four Heroes" for more than a dozen teachers, and then pulled a piece of cloth to make a plaque. All the teachers hang the plaque in the most conspicuous position in their homes.

In No.11 Middle School, we also changed the methods that make teachers feel important. Every month, we will select "people of the month" and make posters of their deeds and post them on campus. From ordinary teachers to logistics personnel, everyone has the opportunity to become a "person of the month", which is an recognition for them.

The reason why I have done many similar things in the school of management is inseparable from the influence of the book Management of Human Nature.

Structure and change in economic history

To solve a new problem, we must prevent path dependence.

There is an important principle in economics: to solve a thing, we will rely on the past path, but sometimes relying on the past will become an obstacle to progress. When existing experience meets new problems, the first thing we think of is the past solution. If someone breaks through this path, it is called innovation.

In a famous university, the dean of a college wanted to arrange accommodation for students of different majors, that is, to arrange students of different majors in the same dormitory, but the school refused. Because the school feels that it can't control students, students are easy to contact and make trouble. Is it necessary to contact in a dormitory now? We have WeChat, Fetion and Weibo! But the school relies on this path to solve new problems.

In the eleventh school, we don't have administrative classes. How can we organize large-scale activities? For example, a teacher asked me which teachers would attend the flag-raising ceremony. In the past, a teacher stood behind a group of students. I said, why does a teacher have to stand behind a group of students? They said, because it used to be like this. Was this right before? If there were no teachers standing, and the flag-raising ceremony was still well done, we would have succeeded.

After class, students have many self-study classes. Where can they go for self-study classes? We have path dependence-at first some teachers wanted to concentrate these self-study students in fixed classrooms. I have a question: Some students want to read Chinese extracurricular books. Why did you let them go to the physics classroom? Some students like to do chemical experiments. Why did you let them go to the biology classroom? Students must be allowed to choose their own self-study classrooms.

Another example is to assign students a locker in the corridor. In the past, when there were administrative classes, they were all assigned according to classes. How to allocate without classes? Stroke by surname or in pinyin order? Or by boys and girls? It's confusing. Why? Path dependence is still the traditional distribution idea. Why not let students choose? Students can choose the cabinets they want. If many students want to choose the same cabinet, then negotiate by themselves. The negotiation process is an education.

Huxley said: "A person's experience does not mean what he has experienced, but his method and attitude in dealing with the situation." This means that experience is a way of thinking formed after experience. Will this way of thinking become your bottleneck? In an organization, managers often become the bottleneck of development. Why? Because we have formed too many fixed ways of thinking.

Zhang Xiaolong, the father of WeChat, was able to develop WeChat because he didn't fight for self-esteem. At first, Tencent set up a team to try to develop new products, but for a long time there was no result. Why? They can't deny themselves. Later, an independent company was established and WeChat was born. If you have self-esteem and want to protect yourself and products in the past, then you can't innovate.

leadership

Maslow's humanistic philosophy

Should we use "mechanism" or "need" to incite the development of the school?

Mechanism is a word that easily fascinates and even superstitions managers, especially in a country that has just moved from rule of man to rule of law, people tend to be more superstitious about mechanism. But what is the purpose of the mechanism? We have to ask.

There is a classic case in management science, which is called "The Story of Divided Porridge". There are seven people living together and eating a pot of porridge every day. Because there are too many people and too little porridge, everyone is fighting for it and the order is chaotic. They will also blame each other and have bad feelings. So they thought of different ways to solve the problem of eating every day-how to share a pot of porridge fairly and reasonably.

The first four methods are not satisfactory in the implementation process. The fifth method is to divide the porridge in turn, but the person who divides the porridge can't take the last bowl left until everyone else has chosen it. This finally created the fairness of porridge. Everyone's porridge is the same and fair, which is the result of the mechanism.

But is fairness the average? Do we use a mechanism to pursue an average result? Such as performance pay, is this mechanism fair? Teachers are more or less ignored, and we must ask what this mechanism is for. I think we must let our mechanism shake the core values of the school-what do you want.

When McDonald's expanded its chain stores in large numbers, there was an important mechanism-managers who did not train successors would not be promoted because they needed more managers. McDonald's was founded in 1952, and expanded to more than 20,000 chain stores around the world in 50 years. Why is it expanding at such a speed? Because it has such a mechanism, it is this mechanism that brings McDonald's expansion strategy. Chain stores cannot occupy the market unless they reach a certain scale. At the same time, with scale, there will be room for profit. Therefore, this mechanism in the expansion period has shaken the core value of McDonald's.

sight

leadership

Learn to be a leader, not a manager.

The transition from management to leadership is due to Hoover's foresight and James's leadership. Leaders have three realms: one is to have the managed, and the other is to have followers, but this is not the highest level leader. The highest-level leader is to turn your followers into leaders and let them all become leaders in a certain field.

Mott, former president of the University of Maryland in the United States, described his status as president: "Being a president is like being a cemetery manager. Although there are many people below, no one listens to you. " A friend happened to be with me when I told this joke. He said, "Yes, when I was training at the University of Maryland, he was the principal. His prestige among teachers and students is too high. " But he thinks that the headmaster can't care so much, and the headmaster can't break his word. As Lao Tzu said, "unattainable". Once the top leader reaches the highest level, the employees below him don't even know his existence.

Every manager should not think highly of himself. He must know that he is a layman in many fields, and many of our employees can become our teachers and even leaders. If you can think like this, you should set up the stage and provide help as your important task, and the protagonist in the play is played by different people according to different plots. After a long time, a large number of outstanding leaders will be trained.

I appreciate a sentence by Jack Welch, who said, "Before you become a leader, success is related to your own growth;" After you become a leader, success is only related to the growth of others. "

Effective manager

The essence of management work

Without changing the structure, the system will not work.

Traditional thinking and feudal consciousness make it easy for our managers to avoid the change of organizational structure, not only because we are accustomed to the inherent tradition in our hearts, but also because our superiors authorize or interfere with us, and even more because we are afraid of the difficulty of organizational structure change. Therefore, most of our managers often try to complete their management tasks through a large number of meetings, while better managers pin their hopes on the system.

Drucker, the author of Effective Manager, and mintzberg, the author of Management Essence, tell us through their discussions that if we want to fundamentally reform the nature of an organization, especially if we want to adjust its major strategy, we must start with reforming the organizational structure, and the system will not work without changing the structure.

In No.11 Middle School, it is the transition from a "tall and long" pyramid management structure to a "flat" structure that makes it easy for us to implement "teaching-centered and student-based".

It is the management framework of "distributed leadership" that makes the work in various fields more scientific, pragmatic and efficient, and avoids a lot of bureaucracy and blind command. It is precisely because of the "federalism" mode of decentralization and responsibility between the school and all grades that everyone is in his place and every cell in the school is likely to be full of vitality.

As managers, reading some books about structural transformation can help us find the "fulcrum to shake the earth".

Six sigma management

Key performance indicators

Strategy is very important, but strategy decomposition is as important as solving problems.

Six Sigma is a technology to improve enterprise quality process management. It starts with finding and solving problems, and with the perfect commercial pursuit of "zero defect", it drives the quality cost to be greatly reduced, and finally realizes the improvement of financial efficiency and the breakthrough of enterprise competitiveness. What influenced me the most was Liusima's philosophy of finding problems. They emphasize the customer's feelings and the real problems in the process to a surprising extent.

At all levels of the school, we have also carried out activities to find our own customers. This activity made us understand, don't say that ordinary employees don't know their real customers, even managers who seem to be very capable don't really know. Of course, with a clear customer, how to cultivate customer awareness, we also found the subject of evaluation.

Every organization has its own strategy, but it is not necessarily clear how to achieve it.

Parment key performance indicators can help us. The eight key success factors of the 11th school formed in 2007, each factor has a specific decomposition, and each factor must be an operational indicator, which should be quantified as much as possible. Of course, the key performance indicators will be adjusted every three years, and the new elements after adjustment must be refined and decomposed simultaneously in order to point to the strategy in the implementation of every detail.