Tao Te Ching and Wuwei Management

Chapter 33 4 "Going to Thailand": Submissiveness——division for simplification, reorganization of resources

When making decisions and not accepting chaos, leaders must be decisive.

Therefore, the sage goes to extremes, to extravagance, to Thailand.

—— "Tao Te Ching" Chapter 29
The sage should remove extremes, extravagance, and excess measures, and this is also the principle that entrepreneurs should keep in mind. "Supple" means gentle and gentle, without bloated burden - this is a necessary condition and prerequisite for the rapid development of enterprises.Modern society regards being strong as beauty, not being fat.Therefore, enterprises need to reduce swelling and travel lightly.

Jack Welch said: "As a leader, you must have the confidence to express clearly and accurately, and believe that everyone in the organization can understand the goals of the cause. However, it is not easy to achieve organizational simplification. People are often afraid of simplification. They often Worrying that if they simplify things, they will be seen as simple-minded. In fact, the opposite is true, only the clear-headed and strong-willed people are the most simplified.”

From the perspective of human resources, resource optimization is to use the least number of people to complete the most tasks, and use the best people to complete the most important tasks.Microsoft's N-1 mechanism is to insist on hiring relatively few people to complete tasks beyond the workload.If the number of employees really needed is the same as N, he will hire N-1 people.

One of the biggest problems facing modern enterprises is the increase in human resource management costs, overstaffed organizations and overstaffed personnel, resulting in inability to act flexibly.Many excellent companies advocate small business-style management.Because of the flexible and agile characteristics of small enterprises, it is very conducive to operation and management.Why act like a small business?The reason is small business simplicity.

From a management point of view, simplifying management levels is the core of optimizing management.Generally speaking, the larger the scale of the enterprise, the more management levels; in a certain business situation, the more management levels, the more personnel required, and the higher the operating costs of the enterprise.Therefore, on the premise that the enterprise can perform its management functions normally, the fewer management levels the better, and the simplification of management is conducive to improving efficiency.Jack Welch famously said, "Management efficiency comes from simplicity." His view is backed up by research.After researching the organizational structure of excellent companies, management experts came up with a "rule of one hundred people": it is not necessary for a large company to have more than 100 core leaders.

McGowan, the former president of MCI Telecom, held a meeting with newly hired managers every six months. At the meeting, he would always say: "I know some of you have graduated from business school and have begun to map out organizational charts. Also wrote instruction manuals for various work procedures. As soon as I found out who did it, I fired him immediately."

In every meeting, McGowan will clearly express such a point of view: every employee, including senior management, should not create more work for each other for the sake of work.Quite the contrary, he would encourage everyone to question every job and every level of management to see if it really needed to be created.For example, can the two management levels be merged?Does the value of each job exceed its cost?Is the existence of this position creating unwanted work rather than being productive?If the answer is yes, then consolidate or streamline it.

McGowan deeply understands the truth that every time the company adds a management team, it actually artificially separates the communication between the people at the bottom and the people at the top. Therefore, MCI strives to Avoid this situation.Due to the simplification of the management level, the communication between the top and bottom of the MCI company is smooth and effective, and everyone is working hard to do the most valuable work, so the whole company becomes full of vitality and enthusiasm, and the company's efficiency is greatly improved.

In fact, not only MCI, but also other well-managed and highly efficient excellent companies have also worked hard for this. Most of them are characterized by capable personnel and few management levels.For example, the annual turnover of Emerson Corporation, Schellenberg Corporation, and Dana Corporation is between USD 3 million and USD 6 million, and each company headquarters has no more than 100 employees.General Motors later put forward that "the body of a big company, the soul of a small company, and the management will be slimmed down", which is a powerful measure to solve the complex and inefficient organizational management.These companies understand that five levels of management are certainly better than 5 levels, as long as they are arranged properly.

If an enterprise wants to enter the fast lane of healthy development, it must allocate limited operating resources in important strategic positions, so that the limited resources can be used to the maximum and the maximum efficiency can be obtained.Only in this way can a reasonable layout be formed so that the enterprise has a strong physique without being too bloated and unresponsive to the market.This is the connotation of "submissiveness" - division and simplification, resource reorganization, slimming and fitness, and light travel.

(End of this chapter)