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This book does not tell you what you should do to become a good manager, but it does share with you what you must not do.

The ten things mentioned in the book are absolutely not to be done. As long as any one of these ten occurs, it may bring disaster to the company.

When everything at Coca-Cola was running normally, I felt uncomfortable all over. I would walk around the company and ask the executives: Tell me, why is everything going smoothly? Is there nothing to worry about?

Drucker said that an important task shouldered by management is to use the company's existing resources to take prudent risks to ensure the company's sustainable operations in the future.

If you are in a comfortable situation, then you will have a strong urge to give up taking risks. This urge is sometimes so powerful that it is difficult to resist. Once this happens, failure is not far away.

A truly stubborn person is not risk-averse. Not only are they unwilling to take risks to make changes or innovations, they are also insistent on their own methods, convinced that they have the key to success, and feel that they will never need to Let’s explore other ways to succeed.

"When two companies compete, if they want to defeat each other, the most important thing is to find their own unchangeable advantages to attack him effectively."

When Pepsi-Cola attacks with larger packaging When Coca-Cola entered the market, Coca-Cola’s reaction was that they were rigid in thinking, had their own way of doing things, and were unwilling to change. As a result, PepsiCo seized the opportunity to catch up.

"The Innovator's Dilemma" mentioned that almost all disruptive innovations are not launched by the top three in the industry. It is difficult for the top three in the industry to subvert an industry. Because the top three in the industry can easily fall into rigid thinking and have a lot of sunk costs and path dependencies (having done so many things), they cannot easily change.

If you want to invite failure, then be stubborn!

Flexibility and adaptability are important components of leadership, a talent that goes beyond simple management, operational and technical abilities. I believe that flexible people have the ability to habitually assess situations and think. Once the environment changes, they will quickly adapt to the new environment.

There was once a CEO who built himself a "Taj Mahal" at his company's headquarters. Can you imagine that a middle-level manager was going to report to the Taj Mahal, and he was too scared to speak just by looking at the furnishings? Once a person falls into a self-created mirage, he is no longer willing to "go downstairs". He will only sit in other people's mirages.

Unfortunately, a common characteristic of the most successful business elites in history is their ability to relate to employees at all levels. When Cessna Aircraft Company founder Dwayne Wallace walked into a production floor, he could not only name more than 3,000 employees, but also know some of their family affairs.

If you only spend time with a few confidants or executives every day, their job becomes to please you and give you an illusory sense of success.

During World War II, Churchill set up a special office whose only job was to report bad news to him. Hitler, on the contrary, only listened to good news and always believed that the German army had the upper hand.

Being arrogant or intimidating is a major reason for isolating yourself.

If employees don't want to come to you, you have to find a way to get to them, or you're going to make a stupid mistake.

When a CEO makes a mistake, he has two options. One is to admit that he made a mistake and correct it; the other is to not admit it and then cover it up and use many ways to package it up and say that the leader did not make a mistake but just performed the right thing. There is a problem, or the upper management is not at fault but the people below are at fault.

The annual reports of many companies can be summed up in one sentence: Don’t admit that you have made a mistake. If the situation is not good, cover it up if you can. Wait until the crisis breaks out, then look for the reasons from the external environment, and then cover up the mistakes. The blame is placed on some scapegoat.

Every CEO makes mistakes, the key is to admit them quickly and make amends.

I once intuitively rejected a proposal to invest US$500 million in East Germany to develop the market. Unexpectedly, the head of the German business had to resign. It turned out that he thought I didn't understand the size of the resurgent market in East Germany. We went to East Germany, and when we came back I decided to increase our investment to $1 billion.

Managers may make wrong decisions, and what they fear most is that there is no error correction mechanism. The most important thing in a system is the error correction mechanism. As the boss of a company, you must consider that you will sometimes make mistakes. If you make a mistake, admit it calmly.

If you want to increase your probability of failure, then you can deny the fact that your judgment is not 100% accurate, and you can be arrogant and think that others don't understand anything.

Therefore, if you want to fail, be an arrogant leader who loves to show off.

Ultimately, the last lifeblood of any company is trust.

Customers must believe that the company's products are as good as promised, investors must believe that the company's management is capable, and employees must believe that the management can fulfill its promises.

The reason why many companies disguise themselves is to please Wall Street. The capital market inspires people's greed and they like to make quick money through the capital market too much, leading to more corruption and deception.

If you only seek numerical changes and ignore the importance of business ethics or ethics to the enterprise, it will be a huge mistake if you make a mistake.

Another reason for the problem is the desire of company executives to become celebrities. They ignore the operation of the company itself and are willing to make their appearance more glamorous. Often, a lot of moral issues will appear at this time. Problem, because you need to disguise a lot of information in order to always maintain a good public image. This is also a common problem in modern society.

Please remember Drucker’s point of view:

In fact, there is no business ethics, there is only morality, and there is no gap in all aspects of your life and work. If you have different standards of morality in different situations, then you are not a businessman.

Mark Twain: "What really gets us into trouble is not the things we don't understand at all, but the things we have a partial understanding of."

We are tired of communicating with others, so we just Like robots, they constantly emit stream-of-consciousness waves, causing more and more data to flow, but we no longer analyze it. Few people will close the door, turn off all noisy equipment, sit upright, and reflect quietly. Analyze the problem carefully.

If you consume a large amount of information without thinking, there will be three main problems:

1) Information shock syndrome, your brain will reach the limit of fatigue;

2) Undigested data will conceal the facts (you misread the data without going to the site to see it);

3) Not spending time to think is extremely stupid. , and sometimes it can be dangerous (think carefully before making decisions).

When I was learning to buy cattle as a kid, Uncle Harmon told me, "The key is to look at the cattle, not the people." This sentence is burned into my mind, and now I deal with investment banks and buy and sell companies. , I did the same thing.

You have no in-depth judgment on the project itself, you just think this person is pretty good.

This was the case when we decided to launch New Coke. A large number of experts demonstrated the extraordinary charm of New Coke, but no one seemed to dare to pour cold water on New Coke. We decided to promote New Coke in a big way, which resulted in complaints and even demonstrations across the country, and I became the target of ridicule.

Sometimes the advice given by experts may not be really feasible, so don’t just listen to experts without knowing it yourself.

Experts are very dangerous animals. You have to be extremely careful when encountering experts who want to quantify human behavior, because management is always a people thing.

When I first went to work at Coca-Cola headquarters, the secretary cried because she couldn’t get a few pencils.

It turns out that if you want to get these pencils, you need to fill out a form and go through a process, and the person who filled out the form is on vacation again. The same thing happened to the stapler, bookshelf, and copy machine. She broke down and I realized how deep the bureaucracy was.

If you want to hinder progress, let administrative processes dominate and worship bureaucracy. Because bureaucrats not only do nothing themselves, but they also prevent others from doing their jobs. They will go to great lengths to protect their own territory, prevent the effective communication of information, and mess up things that could have been accomplished, so that their position is consolidated.

The person who can stand up and speak out most in the company should be the person who creates value for the company, not the person who manages everyone. The person who manages everyone serves everyone.

Most of the departures of outstanding employees are related to bureaucracy, and the cost of recruiting and training a mid-level cadre is at least twice his annual salary.

In 2007, Berkshire Hathaway owned 76 companies, employed more than 232,000 people, and had annual revenue of more than 18 billion U.S. dollars, but the company headquarters only had 19 employees. Even so, Warren Buffett complained about too much bureaucracy in the company as the number of employees jumped from 16 to 19.

Many people in the enterprise have no concept of money, it is just a series of zero numbers. If this string of numbers was lost, he didn't feel how much of a loss it was.

Vague numbers and vague information will make employees think they can make money no matter what they do.

In Las Vegas, if a casino manager sees a gaming table with $50 in cash on it and no one clears it for more than a minute to make the cash disappear, then he is responsible for the situation. The casino manager would be fired because the casino manager doesn't want gamblers to think of real money when gambling, and without cash, the gambler doesn't think it's $50, but a small chip.

If the pass is not received, the responsibility should be on the person who passed the ball, because there is a communication problem between him and his teammates.

Therefore, there must be a clear and accurate information transmission mechanism within the team, and everyone must have a feel for our costs and money, and know what negative consequences such decisions will bring. .

Many people think Malthus is the originator of demography, but I think he is the originator of modern pessimism.

The author of "The Population Explosion" predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die from famine in the 1970s, and the Club of Rome wrote "The Limits to Growth" to describe the depletion of human resources. So far, these have Without showing up, we lived through one "doomsday" after another.

Many people will have a very gray understanding of the future, and it is difficult for these people to become leaders.

The problem with pessimism is that it always focuses on failure, and the media plays a big role in this. Because the media likes to report bad news, and the media doesn't like to report positive news. Therefore, when people are pursuing safety, they like to look for excitement in the news (looking for bad news), which ultimately leads to a large number of people feeling gloomy and always looking at the negative side.

In my opinion, any time is a good time to start a company. If you want to reach a leadership position in your company, you just need to be an optimist. If you want to fail, then be afraid of the future!

We should not be full of fear about the future, but should treat it with optimism.

My neighbor Warren Buffett said:

I tap dance to work every day. I have the same mentality towards work. To unite everyone is not to tell everyone to have fun, but to make everyone work harder. If they perform better, the employees themselves will get greater benefits. of satisfaction.

When you can always be passionate about your work and always make your employees feel that it is interesting to fight with you, not just to get changes in the book numbers, You will be more capable of leadership, and your management will be more effective.

If you want to fail, then you don't have to do anything with passion, just say to yourself: "It's good enough", "That's none of my business", "I don't care" ” or “I’m almost retired. ”

If you want to succeed, you have to keep telling yourself: This world is so interesting and there are so many things to explore.

Even if a person without passion lives a good life, he is just a loser.

A rational person can adapt to the world, while an irrational person strives to make the world adapt to him. Therefore, all progress depends on these irrational people.