The first rule: management is to be the master.
To be a master is to learn to take the company's affairs as your own, even your own. Management is the same as playing football. Attitude is everything. And the only correct attitude is the attitude of the host. From a person's words, we can see the clue of a person's attitude. If a person says "my company", "my client", "my subordinate" and "my colleague", I think he realizes his responsibility.
Here, I think it is necessary to discuss two issues. One is the difference between doing things and doing business. Most people are just doing things, not doing business. The so-called dedication means that a person takes what he does as a sacred cause, so he goes all out and works hard. In western vocabulary, the original meaning of the word "occupation" is "what God gave me". Calling in English and Beruf in German all mean this. Dedicated people do things not for the boss, but for God. I think, only those who have the attitude of ownership will be truly dedicated.
The other is the difference between working and being a boss. A person often says that this company belongs to the boss, not to me, so I can only do things, not to do business. The implication is that my company and I are just a money exchange, and a penny is worth a penny. Do more. In fact, these people don't know that the boss is also a wage earner of God and can't take the company into the coffin. Conversely, a wage earner can work as a master and boss. The biggest beneficiary of doing things with this mentality is not the boss or others, but yourself.
In fact, these two points are not difficult to understand. The difficulty lies in how to make people believe and convince these "big truths". How to do it? I recently wrote a series of articles about "Management is like this", which came from xue24.com, a management learning platform. You can read it for free on this platform if you like. One of the articles is entitled "Management is Telling Stories". It may be more acceptable to let everyone know why management is in charge by telling stories. Because whether it is for subordinates or for yourself, it is usually not a big touch brought by reason, but a very specific thing, a case or a story. Here's an example:
There are a group of railway workers repairing the railway outside. A motorcycle stopped in front of them and a man got off. The man greeted the foreman and they were very affectionate. After talking a lot, the man got on the train and left. The subordinate asked the foreman, who was that man just now? The foreman said that he is the director of our railway bureau and the biggest head of our company. The worker below asked strangely, how do you know him and know him so well? The foreman said it was simple. We joined the company together 20 years ago. The worker asked: Why did he try his best to become the director? Why are you still a small foreman? The foreman said, it's very simple. I joined this company and have been working for my salary. And this director regarded the railway as his lifelong career from the beginning.
In fact, it's as simple as that: two different attitudes, one is the master and the other is the wage earner, determine the different fates of these two people. In fact, when we think about our own experiences, it is the same. If you take one thing as your career, the company may still be your own in the end, at least in part. If you have been a part-time job, you will always be a part-time job. And almost all the bosses I know hope that more employees can work with the boss's mentality, and they will not be stingy with such employees.
Rule 2: Management means setting priorities.
Everyone has to make many decisions every day. Most decisions are sequencing, that is, determining what is important and what is urgent, which helps us spend very limited time on important things instead of trivial things. Because each of us has very limited time, we must learn to do the right thing, not just do it right. In other words, we should learn to give up. Some things are not worth doing. If they are not worth doing, we should give up. But the important things must be done and done well.
At this point, I would like to discuss with you a very popular saying-"details determine success or failure", and many friends agree with this sentence. In my opinion, we should treat it in two. First of all, it should be strategy that determines success or failure. In other words, are you doing the right thing? If you make a mistake, what you do is wrong and the direction is wrong. The finer it is done, the worse it will be, the greater the waste and the greater the loss. However, if your direction, strategy and decision are correct, then you should ask everyone to do the details well. At this time, details are the key to success. We should look at the problem dialectically, not unilaterally say that details determine success or failure.
Rule 3: Management means pointing out goals and directions.
We are bosses, bosses and department managers. What should we do? What do people expect from us? The most fundamental thing is actually very simple: one is the goal, and the other is to tell me what I can get if I accomplish the goal. A fundamental task of managers is to set goals for subordinates. Set a goal, who is responsible, set a deadline to complete the task, and then give corresponding rewards and incentives to manage 80% of the things.
Let me tell you another short story, which is also a management story published in Yiyou magazine, and it is also an article I personally selected. The son of an old entrepreneur asked his father how to manage it. The old entrepreneur took a rope and put it on the table, saying that you push the rope forward. My son pushed the rope forward from behind, but no matter how he pushed it, it bent. At this time, the old entrepreneur said, you pull this rope from the front. The son pulls the rope as soon as he pulls it. The old entrepreneur said that management is actually very simple, and you need to pull everyone up with goals. Management means pointing out goals and directions.
Rule 4: Management means continuous improvement.
There is no best, only better. This slogan is very correct. Many friends ask me, I am so busy and have so many clues, how can I manage so many things every day? My answer is: in fact, it is very simple, that is, continuous improvement, a little improvement every day, and over time, the management of a company will get better. If you solve a small problem every day, you can solve a big problem for a long time.
Some companies have a slogan, which is "progress every day 1%". If you can really do this, a person will make great progress in a year. Daily progress 1% is actually the success of many world champions. Many athletes and coaches realize their dream of winning the championship in such a simple way. We don't want to reach any level at once, it's impossible. However, it is entirely possible to increase 1% every day. For example, if you want a person to do one more push-up every day, then your physical fitness will increase, inadvertently. Over time, what a person can do may surprise him.
Here, I also want to make it clear that a person's mistake is definitely not a sin, but an opportunity for us to improve. The premise of improvement is to do things, and if you want to do things, you are likely to make mistakes. Mistakes are not terrible at all, only two things are terrible: the first is not to do things or experiments in order to avoid mistakes, which is the practice of bureaucrats and people who are not motivated. Such people and attitudes are unacceptable in enterprises. The second is not to admit mistakes and not to correct them. In management, experiment is the only criterion to test right and wrong. If you do something wrong, you just need to recognize it and correct it. Every revision is a very good study and an improvement in management.
Rule 5: Management is accounting.
This is also a very important one. As managers, we have to make decisions every day, and the basis of decision-making is often accounting.
Each of us can calculate, but not everyone can. For example, most people are not big accounts, but small accounts. For example, the customer service staff of many companies will try not to specify the discounts that can be given to customers. Why? These employees who are very considerate of the company want to save money for the company and feel good for the company. Spend less if you can make the company spend less. But in fact, he may offend a customer and let a customer run away. The loss of the company may be dozens or even hundreds of times the money he saved.
I suggest that every enterprise and every manager calculate how much your typical customer is worth, and let every employee calculate this account, this big account. We will find that a customer will be worth a lot of money. For example, I think that every customer of our Zhong Yi company, including you who are listening to my class, has an average value of100000 yuan.
How did you work it out? A customer spends an average of 5000 yuan here. If he stays with us for ten years, his value is 50 thousand yuan. He successfully recommended three clients to us. If he adds friends, this customer is worth 200 thousand. I'll give you another discount. This customer is also worth 65,438+10,000. If a person understands this big account and knows that a customer is worth so much money, he will not care too much about one or two hundred dollars. It is necessary to teach employees to calculate big accounts, and to calculate big accounts themselves, not small accounts.
There is a very important concept that we should understand when we settle accounts. This is the concept of sunk cost. The chief accountant always takes all the inputs and costs in history into account when accounting. This is right from the financial point of view, but it is harmful to our decision-making in most cases.
For example, if we set a price for a product, the cost of this product will be high if historical input is taken into account, and the price we set will be high. The possible consequence is that you can't sell this product at all because of its high price. Your income may be zero. In fact, all the money you invested in the past can't be recovered, and it has sunk. No matter what you do now, that money has been spent, so you don't have to consider that cost when making pricing decisions. What you need to calculate is, at what price, we can get the largest number of customers and the largest income, which is what we need to calculate.
Employees often ask us, manager, how to calculate this account? In fact, he has more information than you, so he is more suitable for calculating this account than you. But he may not be confident and willing to take responsibility. I suggest you answer this question: "Just think that this is your own family's business, and you will understand." . Usually, if it is your own business, there is no hard debt in the world. We can't figure it out because we don't think this account is ours. This actually goes back to the first point I mentioned before. Management is to be the master. If a person accounts with the attitude of a master, his calculations are usually not bad. But if he is working, his accounts will generally have problems.
Rule 6: Management is positive thinking.
Management is trying to turn bad things into good things every day, trying to change things instead of complaining. As the saying goes, don't make excuses for failure, but find ways for success. We all understand the truth, but the problem we encounter is how to make ourselves think positively and how to make employees learn to think positively.
At this time, I think the most effective way is to tell stories, make sense through stories, move us through stories, and change our behavior through moving. Last year, one of my colleagues was in charge of the promotion of the xue24 platform. Doing it, he felt that the problem was too big to push away, so he came back to complain to me and complained a lot. The tone of complaint is that there are still many problems with our products, and it is difficult for him to make achievements. Is he right? Absolutely right. However, he must be wrong. What's wrong with him? It is wrong for him to say so in general terms. He said that our products were generally not good. If a person complains about the poor products in general, it is actually negative thinking. We can't change anything except doing it. What is positive thinking? Is to point out what's wrong so that we can improve our products. In this way, bad things may turn into good things.
But how do you tell him? Let me tell you a story. A man and his doctoral supervisor are doing a doctoral thesis, and the doctoral supervisor has arranged a job for him to consult in a municipal medical management institution, with the aim of helping the government improve the management level of medical service institutions. He came back a month or two later, looking particularly depressed. He complained to the professor for more than an hour, saying that this institution was too bad, their management was too bad, and what they did was unfair. They don't help the poor according to regulations, but help the rich with state money.
The professor said, do you know those conclusions you have reached? They are not well managed, they don't help the poor, and so on. Your words were told to me by the barber in the barber shop next to their office building five years ago. You are as right as a barber. But the reason why I let you go is to ask you to suggest some solutions to these problems. You're smart enough to know there's a problem. But in fact, everyone is smart, and so is the barber. Anyone can see the problem, and anyone can easily deny one thing. But what do I want you to do? Not to be smart, but to be changeable.
Many years later, when this man told this story to his students, he concluded: That time, I learned the most important lesson in life, that is, don't complain, change.
I think this story has a great touch on my colleagues. Next, he gave specific suggestions and made a lot of progress in promotion.
Rule 7: Management means knowing people and making good use of them.
Needless to say, everyone knows this. Managers should understand the advantages and disadvantages of subordinates and make the best use of their advantages. We should learn to put the right person in the right position and let the right person do the right thing.
Many managers feel great and can judge whether this person is good or not, what this person is suitable for and what that person is not suitable for. But I think we should all be modest. We often make mistakes when it comes to people. Frankly speaking, I often make such mistakes myself. Some people are better, and some people may be worse. Of course I'm not a talented person. I believe that our understanding of a person is usually very superficial. I know many bosses have many stories of being cheated. If so, we need to do some work on the management mechanism. In other words, we need to establish a mechanism to know or test people, and we need a mechanism to race horses. Through the employment system, a person's subjective judgment will not affect the operation of the company.
Having said that, my biggest feeling is that the boss is the most difficult thing for a company to manage. We are talking about knowing people and making good use of them. What is the boss good at and what can the boss do? In most companies, it's actually nobody's business. People below the boss have at least one boss to judge his strengths and weaknesses. But no one cares about the boss except his own reflection. I think this is very important. Every boss should reflect on himself, what he is suitable for and what he is suitable for. In addition, the boss needs to establish a mechanism to manage himself. When your company reaches a certain scale, there must be a board of directors, an organization that can make some judgments about the boss.
Rule 8: Management is authorization.
I don't need to say the importance of authorization. I have a detailed introduction in my Eight Tools for Effective Managers. Authorization is a long process. The most common mistake we make is that our authorization is not enough. Not very thorough, clean and safe authorization.
As an example of authorization, we can look at a familiar example, that is Wang Shi of Vanke. Now he is still far from retirement age, but his authorization is thorough. 1983 started a business in Shenzhen, 199 1 proposed to turn the company into a joint-stock company. There were two purposes at that time. One purpose is financing, because he needs money to enter the real estate industry. But the second purpose is to use a mechanism to manage yourself and the top management of the company. He believes that the joint-stock system is the best mechanism, because joint-stock enterprises legally require you to have such and such settings and ask you to do so. At 1999, Wang Shi, who was still in his prime, gave up the position of general manager and handed it over to someone else. He entrusts all his daily work to the general manager and management, so that he can have more time to think about the longer-term and more important problems of the company. He chose to be the chairman rather than the general manager.
Similar practices can be seen in some very well-developed companies. For example, Niu Gensheng of Mengniu gradually handed over his management tasks and powers to his successor during the company's short eight-year development, and he only became the chairman of the strategic direction.
Rule 9: Management is monitoring.
Authorization and monitoring are twin sisters. It is very dangerous to have authorization without monitoring. I once participated in a discussion on xue24.com Management Q&A Channel. A friend asked a question, saying that the suspect didn't need it and the employer didn't doubt it. Is this old saying still suitable for the current management? Every friend will have his own opinion. If you are interested, you can go to this website to see your answers and participate in the discussion.
My opinion is: it is right not to use suspects in recruitment. When you choose a person, if you have doubts about a person, especially about his character, don't invite him in. In the course of work, it is wrong for the suspect not to use it. In fact, no one can do it well from the beginning. When you authorize a person, he probably doesn't have enough experience and ability, but if you don't give him opportunities and trust, he will never have experience and increase his ability. There is no doubt about employing people. If it is understood as authorizing someone to do something, then the authorized person should stop asking. This is not right. We need to supervise a person's work and constantly review and summarize with him. Only in this way can you help him, and what he has done will not be discovered when it is so bad that it is actually bad for him and you.
Monitoring is not distrust, but a prerequisite for asking for help. The performance of an enterprise, in good times, you may not care, it will continue to grow. But when things don't go well, when the competition intensifies, what you need most is to discuss, review and evaluate the performance of this month, even this week and this day with your colleagues, so that everyone can pay attention to the performance and find a way out. One of my clients in Shandong has experienced such a stage. For two years, the boss didn't pay much attention to the specific business because he felt too tired. For a time, the boss wanted to find someone to replace him, but he couldn't find the right person. As a result, corporate performance has stagnated in the past two years. Later, we let the boss find his life goal again, and he began to do business evaluation and testing seriously. Therefore, the company's performance is improving every month. Sometimes management is as simple as that.
Network will become an important tool for management and monitoring. Even in traditional industries such as real estate, we can make good use of network tools for management and monitoring. Vanke was the first company to put management on the Internet, because Wang Shi realized a long time ago that the best way to manage employees and customers is to disclose a lot of information on the Internet. This includes the last thing many people want to see is complaints about their own businesses. On Vanke's website, you can find that the first channel is Vanke's introduction, and the second channel is that I want to complain. Vanke listed all the cities and all the real estate projects there. Which project do you want to complain about? Just click on it and write down the complaint. Even on the way up the mountain, Wang Shi could see what was wrong with the company. The complaint was made public, and the specific staff could not cover it up. Complaints are made public, and a thing can be understood and mastered by the upper level from the beginning until it becomes very difficult.
We may all have heard that Wang Shi stayed outside for half a year. Will Wang Shi leave the company? Once, I talked to Vanke's human resources director in Shenzhen and asked him to verify this matter. He told me that although Wang Shi is not in the company, he can still know the operation of the company like the back of his hand through Vanke's online office system. Not only that, all managers can work through the network anywhere in the world, and they can still master and understand the company's situation when they are away on business.
We know that most friends use mobile phones for mobile management, but mobile phones can only handle urgent things. If you have a network office system, you can get whatever information you need, and your management efficiency will be greatly improved. This is the advantage of the network, which allows you to get the information you want anytime and anywhere, and pass your information out. Grove, one of the founders of Intel, once said a very interesting sentence. He said that in the 1980s, the Japanese defeated the Americans by generous table management. In the 1990s, Americans defeated the Japanese through e-mail management. Why do you say that? In the 1980s, Japan's economy was at its peak. At that time, Japan's economic status surpassed that of the United States in the world, which was the highest. At that time, Americans and Europeans were afraid of the Japanese. Grove believes that the Japanese's secret to winning is actually to have a special means of communication and monitoring. Japanese communication and monitoring are conducted in collective offices, that is, everyone sits around a big table. Once something happens, let's watch and discuss it together. American enterprises are hierarchical, with the boss sitting here and the vice president sitting here. Call everyone together for a meeting when something happens, but time has passed for a long time. After the emergence of e-mail, Americans communicate and monitor much faster than Japanese. By email, the boss can communicate with all employees anytime and anywhere. Therefore, Grove believes that the American economy revived and defeated the Japanese in the 1990s, thanks to the management tool of e-mail. This is somewhat biased and extreme. But this truth is right. We need monitoring and communication, but we also need effective tools.
Why does "university" talk about a management problem? The reason is very simple. Everyone should manage his own life when he is alive. Life is alive, and all knowledge revolves around this theme.
If you understand the way of university, you can become an excellent manager. Your life is happy, your family is happy, and your relationship with others is harmonious. If you have the opportunity to be the director of an enterprise or social organization, you can also manage it healthily and orderly. Like you, you will help everyone around you to face life and work with a sincere attitude. Therefore, the way of university is the real way of management.
In our present commercial society, management is a very popular knowledge. If you go to the bookstore, you will see many best-selling management books. The authors of these books are telling you some concepts, such as "management is decision-making", "management is execution", "management is efficiency" and "management is communication" … and management is this and management is that. So, what is management?