Wu Bofan's Interpretation of "True Management" and "False Management"

Wu Bofan: What do you mean by "real management" and "false management"?

OKR is a hot management topic, and many companies are implementing or preparing to implement OKR.

However, there is an interesting phenomenon. According to my observation, many companies often end up dead after implementing OKR for a period of time.

Just like planting flowers, buying a few pots of flowers looks good, but you will die if you keep them, even if you don't know why. Many companies started OKR management. In the final analysis, this is a worship of OKR.

OKR management originated from Intel and was formed in Google. Like ByteDance, Pinduoduo and Meituan, many of the companies we talked about have achieved lightning expansion.

To achieve lightning expansion, OKR management must be implemented. This logic doesn't sound wrong. But if you look closely, you will find that there are huge loopholes here.

First, OKR needs a climate-specific management method.

Whether a management method can play a role in a company depends on the specific climate in the company, including the company's culture and the company's existing management methods. Of course, the most important thing is the values, temperament, temper, personality and so on of company leaders.

When OKR, an advanced management method, was introduced into some companies, it quickly withered because it didn't adapt to the climate here.

True management and false management

Having said that, we must distinguish between two kinds of management. To put it bluntly, there are only two kinds of management in the world, one is good management, the other is bad management, or true management and the other is false management. Bad management looks more like management, and good management doesn't look like what we are for. The management of many companies is a kind of fake management to a considerable extent.

We say OKR is real management, but in a company that has been practicing fake management, OKR management quickly degenerated into KPI management as soon as it came in.

What is false management? For an extreme example, we can imagine a coach standing outside the stadium during the game, sweating like rain, shouting, commanding, commanding and controlling every behavior of the players. Such a manager looks diligent, but he is a fake manager, just trying to show the image of the manager and play the role of the manager. But he didn't really manage it.

What is real management? This has to talk about the history of management.

It really took a lot of effort to find out what real management is. This is about Drucker. Drucker made an amazing discovery that many management are fake management. Real management is the management that really defines who is the manager.

Who is the manager? This question doesn't seem worth asking, but Drucker found with a unique eye that the real manager is a thing, not a person.

Sounds a little confusing. The simple explanation is that in a company, people are in charge of things, not people. The management we see is people managing people, not things managing people.

In an organization, management function is the goal. The most important reason why a company is in management confusion is that there is no goal to manage people.

What is the manager doing at this time? They are exercising a kind of post power, which shows that they are trying to manage, but they are all busy meaningless.

So Drucker distinguished two words, one is called manager, which is what we usually call manager. There is also a word called executive, which means execution and implementation.

Many people wonder why they used to be called general manager and later called CEO. What does CEO mean? CEO. In European enterprises, there will still be enterprises that call the biggest manager the general manager. In the United States, because Drucker repeatedly stressed that the American business community no longer uses manager, but uses executive to refer to what we usually call manager.

It's not talking. What this executor means is that he is the executor of the goal.

The so-called management behavior is not that he is managing.

If the goal is called Heaven, he is a righteous man with a goal. Therefore, CEO is called CEO. Besides him, there are many executors in the company, and these people are called executors. A department head, even an employee, can also be called an executor. He is carrying out the goal.

Drucker divided management into two types. One is to have a clear goal, really take charge of a company, and drive many executives represented by CEO to implement this goal.

The second is that there is no goal, but there are many managers, that is, supervisors and controllers, who give orders and implement so-called management.

This kind of management is all false management.

Simply put, the real management is MBO (Management by Objectives), which is managed by objectives, objects and things.

Goal-driven

Of course, we see that a company is managed by people. But in fact, people are in charge. The management of one company is completely driven by so-called managers, while the management of another company is driven by goals. What it does and how it does it depends on its goal.

When there is no goal or the goal is vague, it will become a game of position power. Grove divides the power in the company into two kinds, one is called post power and the other is called knowledge power. Responsibility and power mean that whoever is in power will listen to him. Whoever says that intelligence is reasonable and correct will listen to him.

What is right? It is conducive to the steady, sustained and rapid progress of the goal.

We might as well take ball games as an example to illustrate what OKR is and what goal-driven is.

In the game, winning is the goal and the score is KR. You scored a goal, which is a key result. However, this key result does not necessarily mean that you have achieved your goal. The other team scored three goals, you scored one, and you are still far from the goal. You scored two goals, which is far from your goal.

The number of goals itself does not mean much. If the opponent doesn't score a goal, you score a goal, and you have achieved your goal. So KR is decided by o, the winner is o and the score is KR.

However, o is also divided into big o and small o, that is, big goals and small goals. We see such things from time to time. When a team has qualified for the group, if it wins this game, it will meet a strong opponent in the next round and die. What should I do? Might as well lose the game.

Sometimes when we watch a football match, we will see such a bizarre scene, that is, both sides finally scored their own goals, because after losing, they all want to avoid meeting that powerful opponent. This is the difference between big O and small O, scoring goals is not the purpose, and even winning is not the purpose, but winning is the purpose.

From this, we understand what OKR is.

Indicators and targets

However, if we want to achieve our goal, we must always make plans, break down this goal and do some preparatory work. These preparations and conditions can be said to be necessary in many cases. Of course, sometimes it is not necessarily a necessary condition.

However, when we do management, we are often used to disassembling big goals into small goals and small goals into specific indicators, which is what managers often do. Of course, managers have to do one thing, that is, key indicators. Some indicators are not important, and 20% indicators determine 80% of the results. Therefore, you have to determine what is the key indicator, and KPI is the key performance indicator.

During the competition, coaches, spectators and commentators should look at some indicators. For example, the ball control rate, whether your overall ball control rate is above 50% or below 50%, the length of running on the court, the number of attacks on the restricted area, the number of corners, the number of penalties, the number of fouls and so on. , are called indicators.

If you want to manage the team well, or if you want to measure the status of the team, then you must break down the goals into indicators. However, goals and indicators are often not one-to-one correspondence. It seems that there are no loopholes in the indicators, and integrating these indicators is the goal, but it is not.

There is a joke that someone asks about artificial intelligence. I want to find a girlfriend. She has big eyes like Zhao Wei and a big mouth like julia roberts. She loves sports, land sports and water sports. According to these indicators, the computer gives frogs. Therefore, indicators and goals are often not one-to-one correspondence.

In other words, it is sometimes useful to break down the target into indicators, but there are often some things that make people laugh and cry. Goals are never equal to indicators. After a long time, you will stay on the index and forget the goal.

As Zhang Yong, CEO of Haidilao, said, behind every KPI system, there is a vengeance. We can also say that there is a goddess who digs a hole and sarcastically digs a hole for you, and in turn sarcastically digs you.

In order to improve user satisfaction, whenever a guest with glasses comes to eat hot pot, he should be given a piece of glasses cloth; If the drink in the cup is lower than 1/3, it is necessary to quickly add drinks to the guests; If the guest brings a mobile phone, put it on the table and cover it with a plastic bag. If you can't do it, deduct 0.05 points, which is directly reflected in salary performance.

Therefore, these shop assistants finally "harassed" customers. Customers don't want drinks, they want drinks. Customers don't like to put plastic bags on their mobile phones. But no, because the clerk will deduct points once he is found by the manager when assessing KPI; Also, in order to improve the transaction rate, as long as the customer is late, even for one minute, his order will be cancelled and others will sit at this table. As a result, the customer came over and was very disappointed, which led to a series of such problems.

Indicators are to achieve the goal, but indicators are often the enemy of the goal. Managers often break down goals into indicators. After a long time, they only know the indicators and don't know the goals. If the target is forest, then the index is wood. For a long time, I only saw trees, but I didn't see the forest. At this time, the manager who forgets what the goal is becomes a blind and busy person. Because I can't see the target, I am busy, because I am busy, I am blind.

The manager's original role is how to do things well with many managers, and finally it becomes much ado about nothing.

Nothing here is aimless, its main function is to criticize, criticize and punish.

He does not pursue the importance of things, but pursues the correctness and importance of himself as a manager.

When our goal is unclear, every direction is a direction, not a direction.

You can win every moment, but every win is meaningless.

Of course, the pursuit of countless victories will also lead to countless kinds of busyness. This kind of victory is the victory of the loser, and the victory of the loser is the blindness of the lazy.

Among many managers and executors, CEO has become the supervisor and commander in charge of life and death, just like the coach who keeps shouting outside the stadium, commanding, commanding and controlling how players play football. He has become the final examiner of various indicators, which has also become the affairs of the company. Moreover, the ultimate master of such meaningless affairs will more and more maintain his authority and his post power.

Of course, his productivity is limited, and so is his computing power. When he did this, the goal degenerated into an indicator, which was already deviating from the goal. At the same time, his ability to deal with countless indicators and data is insufficient, which has become the most stubborn blocking point of the company. Just like a city with such a stubborn traffic jam, all cars could have run off the highway, but none could. If an organization is in such a situation, lightning expansion is impossible.

In an experiment, two glass bottles with lids removed were pointed at the sun, and then a bee and a fly were put in. This bee has been flying according to the index. Because of its phototaxis, it has to fly to a place with light, that is, it has been trying to cross the bottom of the bottle. Of course, this can never be done. Flies don't look at indicators, but look at the effect, that is, how to get out and get out of trouble. So it will bump around, in the direction of the bottle mouth, and probably go out at once.

In a company, if an index system is used to manage a company, then more and more "bees" will appear in the company, and they will do things according to the guidance of this index. In fact, they didn't succeed, they were just working.

Indicators will lead to the collapse of organizational structure, organizational goals and employee behavior, that is, the dimension reduction of behavior. The best state is that Qi Xin works together, and everyone tries to solve their own problems at different points. But they are not independent, because they all have goals.

Therefore, OKR management should first create goals, then define them and adjust them.

Companies just need to be transparent. I do this, you do that, and keep pace with others at all times. Just like two tennis doubles players, they don't need a coach to shout. Players constantly adjust their behaviors according to the situation and scene at each moment to keep pace with each other.

Finally, it is to summarize and release, and constantly communicate and adjust. So in the whole company, it seems that everyone is busy with his own business. In fact, they have been constantly coordinating their own pace and achieving a goal together, rather than focusing on their own indicators.

The CEO is the one who finds the signs.

In the process of the company's growth, especially in the process of the company's rapid growth, what we are currently engaged in and planned does not represent what kind of goals we will eventually achieve. As the tree, so the fruit. Just like Tik Tok, it is gradually showing signs when it is neglected and resources are scarce.

These first-line developers, middle managers and even senior managers decided to adjust their initial goals, and then tilted their goals to Tik Tok, and finally turned a music video community into the largest short video platform in China.

The real executors are those who create value and many others. The growth rate of the company is the sum of all these people's contributions and efforts to create value.

There is a fable in India that a group of birds are trapped in a net. At this time, if every bird wants to break free, it is impossible to jack up the net. Later, these birds were smart enough to start flying, lift the net, and then they flew out.

If so, the sum of the efforts of all managers and executives is the total performance of the company, so why should the CEO do it? The CEO is very important. We can summarize it in one sentence. He is the person who finds the sign, that is, the person who finds the target in the sign.

The first is to find signs, including signs of industry, signs of technology and signs of market. In these signs, the goal is gradually generated and determined. But many people don't feel the symptoms, and even if they feel individual symptoms, they can't be generated as targets. At the same time, he also found another sign, that is, new signs appeared in the process of moving towards the goal. The products we are optimistic about are actually problematic. For those products that we are not optimistic about and have not given enough resources, when they show signs of rapid growth, you must quickly adjust your goals.

A reporter went to cover the wedding, but the wedding didn't succeed. He came back depressed. The editor-in-chief asked him why he came back, and he said that the wedding would not be held. The editor-in-chief said that not doing it is more worth interviewing.

Therefore, the CEO is the discoverer of two signs. When the company grows bigger and bigger and finds that it is no longer able and impossible to find the most subtle and important signs, he will fully authorize those who can feel the signs to make bold decisions.

But this decision must be in line with the overall goal of the company. For example, do you want to enter the short video field, do you want to enter the community group purchase, and do you want to enter the search field. Because they can hear the gunfire, in this sense, the company's decisions are adjusted and refreshed in real time from top to bottom and from bottom to top.

The symptom we are talking about is actually the edge that we have repeatedly talked about before, that is, the edge, the front end, the trend of appearing on the edge of chaos and order. The ability of CEO is actually to find this edge and find this marginal competitiveness. Most importantly, he can see the future trend in the marginal product area of the company.

This goes back to a very theoretical topic called Effective Managers, which is also the name of a book by Drucker. Its English name is Effective Executive. Now we understand the meaning of this book. An effective executor who can accomplish things does not pursue power and so-called efficiency, but only pursues short-term interests and small goals and forgets big goals. He is not so much a supervisor as a teacher or a humble prophet. His greatest ability is to find trends and adjust them. Take the train as an example. He is a dispatcher and works as a switchman at key intersections on his journey.