Why only lock down the city? What is the essence of Chinese-style epidemic prevention from the perspective of management｜Micro-management｜Let’s talk about Marley

It has been a month since Shanghai was closed, and the various farces, tragedies, and tragedies that occurred during this period have constantly refreshed our values. Many people are analyzing the reasons why Shanghai has become like this, such as changes in government and regulations, the lack of reuse of professionals, and the game of power between the central and local governments. Recently, there has been a lot of confusion in Beijing, requiring the command system at all levels to maintain 24-hour operation, and urban officials to pack films and go to the front line for epidemic prevention. It was disclosed that the mayor of Chaoyang District took his team to the streets of the closed area. All officials went to the streets, all street officials went to the community. Looking at Shanghai's face, there is a feeling of a strong man breaking his wrist and not looking back. Some netizens said that the epidemic in Beijing this time can be used as an observation node. If Beijing can control it, it means that Shanghai is a problem of methods and capabilities; if Beijing cannot prevent it, it shows that there is really no need to continue to prevent this matter. Apart from the attributes and ideology of the virus itself, what is the essence of this Chinese-style epidemic prevention? Will the Beijing and Shanghai models be fundamentally different? Today we will talk about this topic from the perspective of management.

Hello everyone, I'm Marley, this is a small channel that advocates thinking and tearing fifty cents by hand. In each issue, we will combine a political and economic case to discuss the reasons behind it and different thinking dimensions.

Before talking about this question, let's tell a story first. A talented young man founded a company (Company A). This young man is smart, capable, and has ideas. He almost made his own products by himself. Sweep the market with great success. Just when his career was in full swing, a competitor (Company B) appeared, and the competitor adopted an open industrial chain strategy, which instantly attracted countless upstream and downstream manufacturers to cooperate, making the entire industrial environment undergo a huge change. However, the young people of company A believed that their product strategy was fine and insisted on fighting hard against company B. As a result, company A suffered a severe failure in revenue and was finally kicked out of the company he founded by the board of directors. At this point, you should already know who I am talking about. That's right, this young man is Apple's leader Steve Jobs, and everyone should know the story behind it. However, some details are not known to everyone, so let's talk about it, because this is the focus of this time!

As we all know, Gang Master Qiao is a person who insists on his ideas to the point of perversion, and he was kicked out by Apple because of his stubbornness and uncompromising. He would never agree to turn Apple computers into open products like PCs. As we all know, after he left Apple, he founded Next Computer Company in a fit of rage. The goal is to fight against Apple. Jobs' enthusiasm for his new products has never diminished. From the position of a screw, to the shape of the circuit board, to the layout of the exhibition hall, he All hands-on. One time the agent came to visit and waited for him for more than 20 minutes because he was instructing the gardener on where to place the outdoor faucet. Officially, due to his omnipotent style of personal deployment and directing, the positioning of Next Computer could not meet the mass market. During the period from 1992 to 1993, 7 of the 9 executives left, and the cost was ridiculously high. 50,000 units were sold and half of the employees left, forcing Next to make a living by selling software. I also know that due to the not-so-successful entrepreneurial experience this time, coupled with the deteriorating predicament of the old club, Jobs took his next and finally returned to Apple, creating a business miracle that everyone is familiar with.

We can't deny that Jobs was a genius product manager and business wizard, and his Apple product line was a huge success and took the world by storm. His dedication to products and hands-on spirit are even worshipped and studied like the Bible in Chinese IT circles and Internet circles. However, is Jobs's almighty craftsmanship and his style of deploying and directing himself a case study? As a manager, is he really qualified?

Richard Branson , founder of Virgin Group, who is considered to be the equal of Jobs, said: "I admire Jobs, but he is two completely different people from me. He used to yell at employees who made mistakes, many things I don't want to let it go. He broke all the principles I believed in. It's been a long time to be successful with him. He believes that learning to appoint and delegate is the key to business success. You have to be willing to let other people do it. Succeed, but also tolerate their mistakes.

The famous streaming media Netfilx specifically emphasized in its own corporate culture, "We do not agree with the concept of some famous senior leaders, they create amazing products or services by paying attention to details. The legend of Steve Jobs is that he made the iPhone become an iPhone through micro-management. A great product. But others have gone to new extremes, proudly calling themselves nanomasters. The heads of major TV networks and studios sometimes make many decisions in the creation of content. We will not follow this top management model because we believe that we are the most efficient and innovative company only when people across the company can make decisions and have a voice.”

These two can be said to be a model of calling and slapping Jobs in the face. The implication is that your company is really good! But we don't approve of the way you do things, and we've noticed that there's a concept in Netflix culture -- micromanagement. The so-called "micro-management", as the name implies, is that the manager makes the manager achieve the work designated by the manager through close observation and control of the manager (employee). Generally, they monitor and review every step. Simply put, it belongs to the kind of manager and management model that has to manage everything. In the modern enterprise management mode, micro-management has been proved to be a very bad and inefficient management mode. One is that the manager makes himself very tired because of the details, and the second is that the enthusiasm and creativity of the manager are not effectively exerted, and he can only become the boss's tool. rate becomes very high.

At this point, everyone should be able to understand what I want to express. When I talked about why no country copied China's homework in a previous issue, I once proposed the concept of limited government and omnipotent government. Most national governments are functions of a limited government, and they can only or are only allowed to exercise certain powers. Therefore, even in a public health event such as the fight against the epidemic, they can only play a limited role, and the remaining functions will be provided by the government. Civil and social groups to undertake. China, on the other hand, plays the role of an all-powerful government. The power and functions of the government are very defined. Therefore, when dealing with emergencies, it often implements policies in the name of absolute authority. Can it be done well? How to do it? There is a huge risk. The management mode of the so-called omnipotent government is often implemented only through micro-management. For a short-term goal, micro-management may be able to reflect strong mobilization and execution capabilities, and generate instant benefits. But for a medium-to-long-term goal or national governance, micro-management can be said to be harmful and not beneficial. In addition to the inefficiency we mentioned at the beginning, micro-management will also cause the executors to have chaotic goals, blind or radical Understand the leadership's intentions, have no sense of responsibility, and throw the blame, take the blame and other chaos, this Shanghai incident is a typical example.

So what are the main reasons for this micromanagement? Let's look at two examples first.

UC Riverside conducted two experiments. The first experiment, in an executive-like MBA training program, tested participants' self-perceptions of authority, such as asking them if they agreed with "in my relationship with my employees, I can make them obey" or something like that statement. They were also tested on their comfort level with delegated work, such as disagreeing with the management philosophy "employees are not trustworthy". As a result, the less powerful bosses feel, the less they trust their employees. In the second experiment, 100 subjects were asked to recall an experience in which they felt powerful or powerless, and then they were asked if they agreed with the authoritarian leadership style described in the first experiment. It turns out that the more powerless people feel, the harder they work to maintain their authority.

From these two experiments, it is not difficult to find that the poorer the leadership, the more like to show their authority and manage every detail. One of the underlying reasons here is that they have low self-esteem, and they are afraid that their abilities will be surpassed by others. Psychologists point out that such people often feel powerless due to certain childhood experiences and shadows, so they like to dominate others when they are in power. They tend to project their sense of incompetence onto employees, especially capable employees, who they feel are a threat to their own worth. In the Chinese workplace black school, there is an unspoken rule for leaders that the employee with the strongest work ability must be killed first. This is the truth.

The second reason is that some managers become more and more obsessed with understanding some meaningless little details as they move up the ranks and get farther and farther from the front-line work, and expect to do frequent instructions and audits. This behavior can help them gain some control over what they missed. As we said at the beginning, control is a stress response, and when managers become stressed, they increase their controlling behavior as a way to relieve their anxiety.

The third reason is the top-down organizational structure or hierarchy. This kind of system is the easiest for micromanagement to spread like a virus. The most obvious manifestation is the intricate nesting of goals and responsibilities (commonly known as nesting dolls). What your employees deliver will affect your delivery. Ensuring that everyone can pass will cause pressure at every level to be everywhere, and you will face the risk of being fired when you encounter an unfinished task, which will eventually drive people to a dead end.

The Wall Street Journal once wrote an article devoted to analyzing the micromanagement policies of great leaders. There are many examples in it. If you are interested, you can read it, so that you can better understand the content of this video (I will put the link in below the screen). For China, in order to prove the omnipotence of leaders and the advantages of the system, they can only deploy and direct themselves. Every time they encounter something, they can only set a goal from top to bottom, and conduct assessments at every level. The goal is unscrupulous. The so-called united will, the whole country is of one mind, is not how cohesive people are, but just being united under the pressure of layers, which will inevitably lead to chaos in the implementation process. The so-called policies above are all good, but the logic of the people below implementing crooked logic will naturally fail.

Going back to our first example, many Chinese regard Steve Jobs as a god, thinking that the success of Steve Jobs and Apple lies in his persistence and persistence, but few people pay attention to his violent temper, authoritarian side, and his screwed up a lot of products.

Finally, let's wrap up this issue with a quote from Netflix's corporate culture that I love.

We tell our employees not to try to please their boss, but to work hard for the business. You can disagree with the manager's decision, but nothing should be withheld. You can say to your manager, "I know you disagree, but I'm taking X because I think it's a better solution. Let me know if you want to overturn my decision." We don't want employees to speculate Manager's mind, and then go and execute that guess. A poem by Exupéry, author of "The Little Prince," mentions: " If you want to build a ship , don't keep rushing people to pick wood , to assign tasks and give orders. yearning for the sea.