Research shows that once the growth of a company stagnates or declines for various reasons, the possibility of resuming the original growth is only 7%, and about two-thirds of the stagnant companies will be doomed to merger or bankruptcy. This reality is cruel, but it keeps happening. Then, how to break through the growth obstacles of enterprises and make them enter the next round of growth before stagnation or recession? There is only one answer, to truly and effectively implement the core senior management functions of enterprises.
Limited by space, we focus on three core functions of enterprise top management: grasping development direction, organizational capacity building and talent development. Almost without exception, the stagnation and decline of all enterprises stem from the failure to perform one or more functions in these three aspects.
Talent development reserve
Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Lenovo's board of directors, once specifically mentioned his management? Secret? Yes: birds of a feather flock together, and people flock together. ? No matter how good the opportunity is, if there is no suitable person to do it, it cannot be transformed into tangible benefits, let alone support the long-term sustainable development of enterprises. Therefore, establishing and maintaining the human resources of enterprises, attracting and training employees, especially the echelon of key talents, has become an important high-level management function that top managers of enterprises must attach great importance to, deeply participate in and even do it themselves.
However, with the continuous development, maturity and scale of enterprises, challenges and uncertainties are less and less, and rules, systems and processes gradually replace individual self-exertion, and gradually form a solid enterprise structure and management level. This mature management structure and management system is often difficult to attract and retain those entrepreneurial and innovative employees who are passionate and willing to face more challenges, and their passion, wisdom and experience are precisely to promote enterprises to create new businesses and realize them. Therefore, when executives develop and reserve talents for the future, they should first pay attention to the construction of the talent growth environment of enterprises. The most common and effective way is to provide a relatively independent development platform for innovative business and innovative talents, and assign a decision-making executive to participate in leading this cause. The most successful cases in this respect are Sohu's sogou business and Tencent's WeChat business.
As an enterprise executive, in terms of talent development and training, in addition to paying attention to the construction of environment and platform, there are two points that need special attention: first, executives should learn to help talents acquire correct values, help them get full exercise, test and gain correct experience before taking on heavy responsibilities, and truly prepare talents for the future of enterprises; The other is that we must pay attention to the shaping of talents' personality and behavior habits by individual behavior. For example, as an executive, if you just like it? Obedient subordinates? If you only ask your subordinates to obey and implement unconditionally, it will be difficult for you to attract and cultivate core talents with independent spirit, independent consciousness, unique ability and the ability to promote the enterprise.
Grasp the development direction.
Drucker said that the time for the company to live according to the old routine is getting shorter and shorter, and the company's top management needs to at least understand the prospects in the next five years and take action. He said,? New technologies especially need managers to create new markets. Managers can no longer be satisfied with the existing market, and must create customers and markets through conscious and systematic efforts. ?
However, the beautiful performance of enterprises in the past often masks the huge potential threat, which often makes leaders still focus on the improvement of existing core business. Therefore, when a crisis comes, it is often too late to take hasty action. An enterprise investigated by the author is the industry leader in the era of hand crank products. The top management of the enterprise shrugged off the computers that had appeared but were not yet mature, and decided to acquire them all on a large scale, build their own production bases and expand the production scale of hand cranks. As a result, two years later, when the market no longer accepted hand-cranked machines and only needed computer machines, the enterprise not only failed to reserve any corresponding talents, technology and market resources, but also all the possessions it had saved before became the inventory of finished or semi-finished products that nobody cared about, as well as idle or barren excess capacity, and the only way out for the enterprise was to be merged.
Therefore, in order to avoid falling into this trap, enterprises need to regard strategic planning as two different processes when grasping the development direction. One process is to develop the existing core business, and the other process is to find and use the next growth opportunity. In addition, in order to ensure the full and effective performance of this function, enterprises need to institutionalize and mechanize it in the construction of corporate governance and operation control system.
From the perspective of corporate governance, grasping the development direction requires the establishment of the board of directors first, so that the board of directors and its professional committees (especially the strategy and development Committee) can really operate effectively. It is necessary to effectively guide the senior management of the enterprise to make correct analysis and judgment on the operating conditions of the enterprise; Effectively and closely supervise the performance of duties; Always remind them to combine the short-term development with the long-term development of enterprises. Make sure the top management thinks about the future of the enterprise, right? Linear? , not blind superstition? Grow up? ; It is necessary to question whether the senior management's consideration and research on the essence of things and the preconditions for business development are deep enough, serious enough and meticulous enough, and whether they are sensitive enough to changes in trends and pay full attention to them; What needs to be questioned is whether the top management has clear ideas, reliable strategies and well-thought-out business plans for the development of enterprises.
From the perspective of operation management and control system, in order to grasp the development direction, it is also necessary to effectively separate and organically connect the management of current business plan with the grasp of future development opportunities in the design of operation process. For example, in Emerson, in order to ensure that leaders can keep one eye on the current development and one eye on the future opportunities. They set up two interrelated but independent control links in their own operation control system: one is? Subsidiary growth meeting? Based on the current development, it is used to check the quality of research and analysis of current business development, question the management team of subsidiaries, discuss the most important action measures, and spur the management to face difficulties; One is? Strategic evaluation of subsidiaries? Based on the capture of future development opportunities, various potential opportunities are evaluated, selected and chosen to ensure correct investment and effective use of resources.
Organizational capacity building.
All organizational capabilities are rooted in a certain market environment and a certain product, and the market demand is always changing. Therefore, the organizational ability that once had a competitive advantage will gradually fall behind. Therefore, the sustainable prosperity of enterprises needs the organizational ability of sustainable development and evolution.
The core competence of an organization consists of three parts: system, mechanism, structure and process competence; Ability of culture, ideas and values; The leader of the leadership echelon (especially the top leadership). Among these three components, what is most easily overlooked is what culture, ideas and values represent? Soft power? . Peter. Sheng Ji once pointed out in his masterpiece The Fifth Discipline? A truly excellent enterprise is an organization that can make people from all walks of life devote themselves wholeheartedly and have the ability to keep learning. ? The former managing director of Sony, Shiro Tanaka, also pointed out that the key to Sony's decline is tireless and conscientious innovation? Passion group? The disappearance of, that don't rely on external stimuli and work for fun, spontaneous and voluntary pursuit of better? Challenge spirit? The disappearance of, and that kind of boss regards subordinates as people with feelings, not all people? Indicator theory? , use? An evaluative eye? Investigating subordinates? Team spirit? The disappearance of.
However, the construction of this kind of organizational soft power is highly dependent on the leadership of the organization, especially the top leadership. As reflected by Dai Lang? Whether employees can be enthusiastic depends on the attitude of the top leaders. What did Sony get in the past? Myth? Performance is due to Masaji Inoue. ? And Sony's decline is precisely because? Ibuka's business philosophy is not systematic and has no inheritance. ?
And our research on outstanding performance enterprises also found that their biggest similarity is that they are all very concerned about the construction, inheritance and evolution of corporate leadership. These enterprises invest huge energy in training, selecting and evaluating CEO, not only for the needs of successors, but more importantly, to evolve the senior leadership ability of enterprises, and then to evolve the organizational ability of enterprises. For this reason, in the former CEO of General Electric, Jack? In Welch's view, his greatest success is not only to increase profits six times in just 20 years, but more importantly, to cultivate an excellent senior management team for GE.
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