What is life cycle theory?

Life cycle is a very useful tool. According to the standard life cycle analysis, the market goes through several stages: development, growth, maturity and decline. The real situation is much more subtle, which provides more opportunities for enterprises that really understand this process, and at the same time can better avoid possible crises in the future.

Life cycle theory was first put forward by A.K.Karman in 1966, and later developed by Hersey and B 1anchard in 1976. It is based on quadgraph theory and absorbs argyris' immature-mature theory.

Argyris advocates that effective leaders should help people change from immature or dependent state to mature state. He thinks that there will be seven changes in a person's process from immaturity to maturity, as shown in the following table. He believes that these changes are continuous and ordinary people will move from immaturity to maturity. Everyone will mature with age, but only a few people can reach full maturity.

At the same time, he also found that poor leadership style will affect people's maturity. In the traditional leadership style, adults are treated as children, which limits their ability to control the environment. Workers are assigned to specific, simplistic and repetitive jobs, which are completely passive and highly dependent, and cannot give full play to their initiative, thus hindering people's maturity.

On this basis, the life cycle theory puts forward that the type of leader should adapt to the maturity of organizational members. When the leader tends to be mature, the behavior of the leader should also be adjusted accordingly, so as to achieve effective leadership.

This theory holds that "double high" leaders with high organization and high attention to people may not always be effective; "Double-low" leaders with low organization and low attention to people may not always be ineffective, which depends on the maturity of organizational members. Hesse divides the growth process of leaders into four stages: the first stage is "no confidence, no ability"; The second stage is "self-confidence and incompetence"; The third stage is "not sure and capable"; The fourth stage is "confident and capable".

When employees first entered the company, their working status was basically "no confidence, no ability". With the encouragement of the leader, he can be brought into the second stage of "confident but incompetent"; When employees gradually become competent and have certain abilities, leaders should empower them more, because this employee will gradually get rid of the shelter of leaders and often make decisions by himself, which will lead to lack of confidence, so he enters the third stage of "uncertainty and ability"; Finally, the employee gradually matures, and after the leader determines that he has reached the fourth stage of "confidence and ability", he can fully empower the employee.

Compared with the four stages of being led from immaturity to maturity, leaders should also adopt four different leadership modes in turn, namely, high work and low attention, high work and high attention, low work and low attention, namely:

When employees are in the first stage, leaders should guide and guide employees by "informing"; When employees are in the second stage, leaders should explain their work by "selling" and convince employees; When employees are in the third stage, leaders should adopt the way of "participation" to motivate employees and help them solve problems; If the employee reaches the fourth stage, the leader should hand over the work to the employee with "authorization", and the leader only needs to supervise and inspect the work.

Life cycle theory is not profound, but for leaders, the difficulty lies in not knowing how to judge the stage of employees through their words and deeds. If they make mistakes, they will bring trouble. For example, when an employee reaches the second stage, the leader will still lead by "informing", so the employee will not stay in this company for long, because he will feel that he has no chance to grow.

Life cycle theory and method

There are mainly two life cycle methods in life cycle theory-one is the traditional and rather mechanical market development view (product life cycle/industry life cycle); The other is more challenging, observing how different products and technologies can meet customers' needs in a period of time (demand life cycle).

Product/industry life cycle is a very useful method, which can help enterprises to formulate appropriate strategies according to whether the industry is in growth, maturity, recession or other States.

This method assumes that the competitive situation of enterprises in each stage of their life cycle (development, growth, maturity and decline) is different. For example, developed products/services are purchased by those "early adopters". They are not sensitive to price, so their profits will be high. On the other hand, a lot of investment is needed to develop products with better quality and more popular prices, which will erode profits.

In this method, it is assumed that things inevitably follow a fixed life cycle model, which may lead to predictable rather than creative and innovative strategies.

The more constructive application of the concept of life cycle is the demand life cycle theory. This theory assumes that customers (individuals, private or public enterprises) have certain needs (entertainment, education, transportation, socialization, information exchange, etc.). ) They want to be satisfied. At different times, there will be different products to meet these needs.

With the development of technology, the demographic characteristics of the population change with time, the political environment swings between different power groups, and the preferences of consumers will also change. Instead of fighting to defend a specific product, it is better to fight to ensure that you can continue to meet the needs of customers.

Many TV manufacturers see that they are in a mature TV market, but they don't see that they are still in a growing home entertainment market. So they gave up this market and watched it explode with video recorders, home computers and future HDTV.