Anxiety, Loneliness and Talent Dilemma of "Big Boss"

In this era of great change, many enterprises, especially the bosses of private enterprises in traditional enterprises, are often very anxious and lonely. It can even be said that the bigger the plate of private enterprises, the more anxious and lonely entrepreneurs (bosses) are.

Their biggest anxiety is the anxiety of enterprise transformation, and their biggest loneliness is the loneliness abandoned by the times. Especially under the attack of dimensionality reduction and powerful reshuffle of the network upstarts, there is often a painful and unbearable "scorching sun" in the deep heart.

On the one hand, they don't know how to make money, or they don't want to make money by traditional and hard methods. These proud traditional entrepreneurs (bosses) have sufficient resources and strength, and especially envy the art of war and gameplay of the upstart Internet.

On the other hand, people don't know what to do, or don't have enough confidence to talk about their management mode or "employing people".

They can't avoid the increasingly acute operational difficulties and practical problems, and can't dispel the bureaucratic rigidity and military instability in the internal organizational structure. Therefore, they have an unusual desire to change and embrace internet plus for enterprise transformation, with the natural purpose of making more money and standing longer.

In the past two years, O2O has been fired into the sky. Its internal commercial motivation is the impulse test of these traditional entrepreneurs who are unconvinced and unwilling. What is particularly embarrassing is that these two years have also been the most failed year for the O2O experiment. In particular, none of the traditional (private) enterprises has successfully completed the "counterattack", and few have embarked on the correct transformation track.

The reason is not the mode problem, not the market problem, but the management lag and talent shortage of traditional (private) enterprises, and all this comes down to the personal problems of entrepreneurs (bosses).

An interesting phenomenon is that enterprises in China, especially private enterprises, are often branded as "number one". In other words, the management of private enterprises depends on the boss's personal ability and knowledge. Once, this careless and heroic way of conquering the world made a group of outstanding private entrepreneurs, but it also restricted them to a great extent. These private entrepreneurs (bosses) are often "seriously overestimated and deified" because of their internal management atmosphere and external propaganda routines, and these artificial auras in turn blind or spoil their self-awareness and judgment ability.

For enterprise transformation or organizational change, private entrepreneurs (bosses) often like to wave proudly and take it for granted in a person's world.

Perhaps influenced by the culture of the times, they like it very much, or attach great importance to the demonstration effect of the "number one" individual. However, under the background of technological change, organizational innovation and business model, the once-tried management routines or employment methods suddenly failed. After a period of follow-up or tossing, enterprises often inevitably fall into the "three noes" management dilemma of "no one is available, no way out and no feasibility".

Those star private enterprises that have been successful, brilliant and even become benchmarks often fall into the business trap that only private entrepreneurs (bosses) can decide the future fate and success of enterprises by their own efforts. This is certainly not the original intention of private entrepreneurs (bosses), but it is a bleak fact that they must face up to and a key problem that must be effectively solved.

For these private entrepreneurs (bosses), the biggest embarrassment of enterprise reform or transformation is tossing and turning, as if they were tossing and turning, reflecting and reflecting, as if they were alone. What is particularly embarrassing is that even if there is a terrible systematic collapse and failure mode of the enterprise, there is almost no other voice of reflection within the enterprise system except that the private entrepreneurs (bosses) understate or symbolically make some reflections and apologies.

In these enterprises, the upper level is conservative, the middle level is arrogant and the lower level is numb. People often accept those almost shameful "failures" with a clear conscience. Maybe everyone can detect the problem, but it's definitely not their own problem anyway. Everyone just keeps a high degree of vigilance of "talking less" or "not talking", and is glad or even complacent for his sophistication, "cleverness" and shrewdness and "low-key". At this level, such a corporate culture is pathetic, and so is the lonely boss.

For these private entrepreneurs (bosses), their intelligence is undeniable, and they are also very sincere and ambitious for the innovative growth and business breakthrough of enterprises. Sesame brother believes that these private entrepreneurs (bosses) should have the ability and insight to capture every window or outlet of the Internet, but what is embarrassing is that they can't catch it and watch one opportunity after another slip away.

To put it mildly, we can say that the implementation effect of these strategic transformation projects is not ideal, but to put it cruelly, the failure (or decline) of traditional private enterprises has just begun.

The talent dilemma of "big boss"

In Mr. Sesame's impression, many private entrepreneurs, especially traditional private entrepreneurs (bosses), like to say that the most troublesome problem of enterprise management is "lack of talents".

To put it bluntly, "talent shortage" is only said by unsuccessful companies. Do you think that companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft will talk about talent shortage? Will companies like Huawei, Tencent and Ali talk about talent shortage? Moreover, entrepreneurs find that the disease of "talent shortage" is not necessarily brilliant or meaningful. In fact, what they should reflect on most is why enterprises are "short of talents".

In Sesame Brother's view, the "talent shortage" of many enterprises is a structural crisis and systematic failure, and the most fundamental reason is often inseparable from the three major mistakes of private entrepreneurs (bosses) in talent strategy.

1, role imbalance problem

For private enterprises, especially those with a certain scale, entrepreneurs should have sorted out their priorities and tried to play a triple role: the first role is the boss, trying to gather talents by all means; The second role is the chairman of the board, doing a good job in the strategic layout and key decisions of the enterprise; The third role is CEO, who personally controls the progress and rhythm of the core (innovative) business of the enterprise.

Unfortunately, these three roles of private entrepreneurs (bosses) often can't distinguish priorities and can't control them. In particular, some private entrepreneurs (bosses) like to grab their eyebrows and beards, and spend most of their time and energy on daily management affairs and communication and coordination among multiple departments, which makes the energy input and distribution of the first two roles seriously insufficient, or even almost none.

As Lei Jun said, "Finding someone is the most difficult thing in the world", and of course it is also the most energy-consuming thing. Regrettably, many private entrepreneurs have invested heavily in this area and paid the least attention.

In fact, the most critical factor in business competition is people, and the potential lies in people. Invictus, the biggest variable is people. If the right person is not selected, or the right person is not carefully selected, all systematic failures and structural crises of enterprises are inevitable.

2. the problem of knowing people and discussing the world.

In the past two or three decades, many successful private entrepreneurs have been riding the east wind of the times, enabling enterprises to achieve rapid growth and super-scale development. In this process, recruiting and selecting talents is also a compulsory course for them. Because of my rich experience (in their words, no one has ever seen it), I have always been confident and accumulated a lot of experience in knowing people and employing people.

In all fairness, many private entrepreneurs have experienced the baptism of time and money, and their attitudes towards people are often very good, and their salaries are generally generous. Therefore, every successful private entrepreneur has United a group of capable people and made great contributions to the success and development of enterprises.

However, how many people you manage does not mean that you can manage good people, and once effective management (routines) does not mean that it will always be effective. Take the express delivery industry as an example. The outside world is often amazed at how to manage tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of express employees. I always feel that private entrepreneurs who can control so many people must be very powerful.

In fact, as far as the essence of management is concerned, there is nothing secret or magical about this "management miracle". After all, express delivery is a relatively simple industry. As long as the strategic direction is focused, the organizational structure is reasonable (bureaucracy+militarization), the technical means are in place (such as the use of guns by leaders, GPS, automatic sorting line, WMS warehouse management system, etc.), and the financial system is more rigorous, the incentives for the team are more generous, and the control will not be too complicated.

Unfortunately, the inertia thinking of employing people based on these successful experiences often limits the talent vision and employment pattern of private entrepreneurs to a great extent. Especially in the context of "great change, great integration and great transformation", traditional private entrepreneurs also understand the importance and urgency of change and transformation, and understand the shortcomings of internal teams and the importance of "external blood transfusion", but many practices are very debatable.

Many private entrepreneurs (bosses) often adopt a talent speculation view that looks smart but is actually a chicken thief, that is, it is easy, or they like to treat foreign senior talents as "dog skin plasters". Often enterprises have any problems and will help by recruiting or recommending some "new talents" as soon as possible. It will be torn off and replaced after a while. In exchange, the disease was not cured, but the conclusion was that the external use of "talent plaster" was invalid.

Of course, it is also true that some "plasters" are ineffective. For example, O2O, which is popular in recent years, many traditional enterprises especially like to recruit some middle and small-level people from e-commerce platforms such as BAT to "change blood" or "supplement calcium" at the beginning of transformation to make up for the shortcomings of enterprises' Internet capabilities. As a result, in practice, the two are not convinced and do not blend with each other. All kinds of ideas are in chaos, and the outside can't penetrate and the inside can't melt in. Finally, they are often confused.

These failed lessons, in turn, strengthen the arrogant closed culture within the enterprise, and always feel that outsiders can't. As a result, the most critical positions often only use one's own people. If they make mistakes again and again, it will not only lead to higher and higher "exchange costs", but also further solidify the talent echelon of the enterprise. The visibility of the internal top management is getting smaller and smaller, and there are fewer and fewer talents to choose from.

In this regard, traditional private entrepreneurs (bosses) must profoundly reflect on three issues:

1. What kind of senior talents do enterprises need in the transition period?

Second, how to find and attract first-class talents to join?

Third, who is the most suitable senior management talent and strategic partner, and how to judge?

3, the principle of choose and employ persons

Many people in traditional private enterprises often make three major principled mistakes. First, the people they trust most are incapable of taking responsibility. Second, the most responsible person is not trusted; The third is to take it for granted to reuse people who should not be reused. Of course, the most trusted and reused entrepreneurs are the old ministers who worked hard with him. To some extent, these loyal veterans have stood the test of time and practice. Their relationship has been running in for more than ten years, and they have been trained in many positions. In addition, they are in the prime of life (at present, the middle and high-level backbones of traditional enterprises are generally not old), so they should naturally be the most reliable "ministers" of entrepreneurs.

Regrettably, these old ministers are often "loyal but not heavy" and will disappoint private entrepreneurs (bosses) to varying degrees. Many ambitious and ambitious private entrepreneurs are also worried about this. They often overestimate their brothers' learning ability and enterprising ambition. They think they are hardworking, studious, enterprising and restless, and their brothers should follow suit. But in fact, many old ministers do not think so. One is that you can't learn (limited ability), the other is that you have no motivation to learn (your position in the enterprise system can't be higher), and the third is that everyone has their own interests and may not want to toss.

In the tide of traditional enterprise O2O transformation in the past two years, there are few successful cases. In Sesame Brother's view, the biggest problem is that the talent structure of the e-commerce team is unreasonable. It is often the layman who guides the expert. Many e-commerce talents' keen market sense and "active genes" against traditional (routine) management are often stifled by the class consciousness and bureaucratic thinking of "insiders (bosses)", and the prevailing traditional enterprise internal mountain culture and corporate politics can never form an effective synergy. As a result, most of the teams were separated for no reason, and the elites were strangled in order. Finally, the soldiers were exhausted and the people were distracted, and the whole project collapsed.

Those young talents on the internet who should be responsible for change are not trusted for some reason and are inexplicably marginalized. Anyway, enthusiasm and dignity have been ravaged almost, so I have no choice but to leave one by one.

There is also a very interesting phenomenon, that is, many private entrepreneurs often have a little unreliable literary feelings, and sometimes it is easy to be whimsical, which arouses the whimsy and decision-making impulse of "choosing talents without sticking to one pattern". They are often easily fooled by some big names or by some scammers. As a result, some foreign monks and mysterious masters are often promoted at will.

In fact, in this era when everything is possible, it is almost normal not to take the usual path. Not afraid of wild ways, afraid of unprincipled. Especially in personnel, what kind of general talents to choose must have basic rules and regulations, and you can't take it for granted by your own opinions and feelings, and you can't judge key candidates by the prejudice of people around you.

The ancients said: "If you want to rule the army, you must first choose the generals." . The business world is like a battlefield. If the general who led the troops chose the wrong one, it would be strange not to be convinced. If you don't screw up, you don't know what to do. It would be strange not to be defeated.

Corporate Culture and Talent Dignity

Many entrepreneurs (bosses) of traditional private enterprises especially love to talk about the construction of corporate culture, and are also particularly obsessed with refining and instilling corporate values. And those "corporate cultures" with flowery words and neat antithesis often degenerate into a kind of exquisite formalism, which has little practical significance and influence except sticking them on the wall.

Especially in this era, with the replacement of management subjects from generation to generation and the gradual infiltration of internet culture, most of the new generation of employees are born in the 1980s and 1990s, and they simply can't accept this pretentious "corporate culture". To put it bluntly, the corporate culture of most enterprises has become a terrible "zombie culture". Regardless of the management mechanism, evaluation system, personnel training and organizational structure, it is basically one thing written on paper (clear rules), and the actual operation is another thing (hidden rules).

These hidden rules are not necessarily brilliant, but mostly a primitive, cruel and cold corporate political routine. All the work, plans and services of an enterprise are actually carried out around three goals:

One is to speculate on the imperial edict and figure out how to satisfy the boss;

Second, flattery, how to satisfy the competent leaders;

The third is to play with indicators and how to make (KPI) data beautiful.

This bureaucratic closed but self-contained ecological management orientation not only makes the boss farther and farther away from the truth of the enterprise, but also makes the employees of the enterprise gradually lose their passion for innovation and vitality for struggle. "Goodness" and "forbearance" often become the first survival rule of many private enterprises. Since we can only be good people, the boss advocates that "everyone should strive to be the leading bird" can only be a joke. After all, being a "shrinking bird" and keeping your job is the first survival essence of most people.

It is frustrating that this seemingly glamorous but useless (even harmful) "corporate culture" construction is very popular in China, and many traditional Internet companies and even young entrepreneurial teams have been seriously infected. This is also the biggest reason why many benchmark Internet companies are becoming less and less cute.

In other words, most enterprises in China simply don't know how to manage, or don't know how to manage on a human scale. Under the gorgeous vocabulary, the system management that we are proud of, and the personnel rules that we believe in, from top to bottom, from inside to outside, are actually permeated with feudal stale overlord breath and arrogant bandits.

Maybe you think this judgment is a little extreme, but you can calm down and think about it. Compared with big foreign companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook, how big is our gap! How many questions do we have! Apart from knowledge and ability, the biggest gap between domestic entrepreneurs is probably that they don't know how to build an advanced corporate culture and how to organize an efficient top talent team.

In addition to learning some superficial fur innovations, such as putting some toys and snacks in the office, it is actually much worse. Times have really changed. A new generation of young people can no longer be "good". They can't stand it for a little salary. They care more about equality, dignity and happiness in life.

From this point of view, our private entrepreneurs should really spend more time and energy to study and think about the pursuit and demand of a new generation of talents from the perspective of human nature, in addition to the passion and lofty sentiments of change.

After all, talent is the most precious enterprise wealth and a sharp weapon for change.