I can't think of such a simple answer, but others can always think of an idea at once.
These all come down to our different ideas and methods to deal with problems, and the results will be different.
A friend who is engaged in manufacturing has worked in the front line of machining for nearly 20 years. The so-called rich work experience, the mechanical processing industry basically has no problems that cannot be solved.
Even the most talented people will short circuit. Once, a customer had a new product with high precision, especially the corner design position could not be processed. Because of performance requirements, customers do not agree with the optimization of drawing structure, and strongly demand the company to overcome difficulties. This problem must be solved in order to ensure that the samples meet the requirements of the drawings and output smoothly. Just when a friend was at a loss to surrender, suddenly a technician of a production line put forward the optimization process, started reverse processing from reverse thinking, and finally solved this intractable disease through trial production.
Thinking determines action, action determines the result, the method is wrong, and the efforts are in vain.
In today's enterprise management, faced with complicated business problems, if it comes to solving problems, McKinsey & Company is well deserved.
/kloc-More than 0/00 years ago, there were no specialized consulting companies in the world. When people encounter problems, they rely more on their own experience or seek advice from their predecessors. Later, with the economic business becoming more and more complex, many companies developed rapidly and needed more professionals in marketing, management, finance, law, engineering and technology to provide advice for themselves, so management consulting companies came into being. Mckinsey stands out with its unique advantages.
Many people envy the members of McKinsey & Company and think that they are all dragons and phoenixes among people, but they are normal to McKinsey & Company and have no secrets. As the subtitle of McKinsey's Method says: McKinsey is not mysterious, but its methodology has created magic.
In McKinsey's view, solving problems is more important than experience, and it also requires methods, from experience to ability. The most important thing of McKinsey's method is thinking, which mainly includes three aspects: being friends with facts, systematically analyzing problems, and going straight from initial assumptions to answers.
First, be friends with the facts.
McKinsey can charge high consulting fees because they have experienced experts, various case bases and high flyers selected from top universities. With their talent, wisdom and experience, McKinsey consultants can ride freely in complex business problems.
Of course, all these factors mentioned above are reasonable, but many people actually ignore a more important secret, that is, they pay more attention to facts than experience.
Take facts as your friend, don't judge whether you have rich experience in facing a problem at the beginning, but collect information extensively first, understand the facts, and then make a decision.
This is like, if a judge has more experience and makes a judgment without studying a large amount of evidence first, his chances of making unjust, false and wrong cases will be greatly increased.
Similarly, in order to solve problems efficiently, the first thing to do is to collect facts. Collecting facts and being friends with them is not only the first step to solve the problem, but also an important principle throughout the whole process of solving the problem.
In McKinsey's methodology, it is found that this has two advantages:
First of all, collecting more facts can prevent consultants from being misled by their own or clients' wrong intuition and experience.
Once, McKinsey's team received a new project, and the client asked McKinsey to evaluate the business expansion opportunities of a department of their company and study when it was more appropriate for them to adopt expansion strategy.
Generally speaking, if we receive such a task, all kinds of past experience cases similar to expanding opportunities will appear in our minds at the first time, and many possible options will emerge in our minds.
However, when the McKinsey team returned to the step of collecting facts and spent weeks collecting data for analysis, they came to a subversive conclusion: the problems encountered by the customer's department could not be solved by their own expansion. Otherwise, it should be closed or sold.
This is the advantage of being friends with facts, so that you can see the essence of the problem better without being confused by superficial phenomena.
Secondly, insisting on being friends with facts has an intangible advantage, that is, it is easier to increase the persuasiveness of the solution. McKinsey Consulting is a golden signboard, but after all, the project managers who report to customers are often young people who are not yet 30 years old. The customer is the boss who has been riding in the mall for many years. Why should they listen to the advice of a fledgling teenager? The secret here is that young consultants have more facts. What is powerful is not the young consultant, but the fact that it is powerful.
Second, systematically analyze the problem.
Many problems in work seem simple, but when you think about it carefully, they are often complicated.
For example, suppose you run a shop now, and the business has declined recently. You ask a question: how can I improve the profit of my shop? This problem, which sounds small, is actually very big.
Because there may be many factors and facts behind this problem, such as product style, product quality, after-sales level, passenger flow, profit rate and so on. , will directly affect the sales and profits of your store. At this time, how do you deal with this seemingly simple but complicated problem?
In McKinsey & Company, there is a set of ideas to solve this complex problem and a corresponding methodology has been formed. That is, a complex problem is decomposed into simple sub-problems, and as long as all sub-problems are solved, the complex problem can be overcome.
This idea of simplifying complexity and dividing and ruling is a key for McKinsey to deal with complex problems.
In fact, this idea of dealing with complex problems is widely used. For example, you can't eat a big steak directly, but it's easy to cut it into small pieces. At that time, scientists thought that it was impossible for humans to send rockets to the moon. This is because people find that the rocket's self-weight is as high as 654.38+0 million tons through accurate calculation before it can be sent into space. But later, someone took this complicated problem apart, divided the steps of launching rockets to the moon into several stages, and solved the sub-problems one by one, and then put forward the method of "grading rockets" The rocket flew some distance and gave up some of its own weight. As a result, the problem was suddenly enlightened and solved.
Therefore, it is a very effective idea to learn to break down the goal into small tasks and deal with them in parts.
However, McKinsey not only adopted this idea, but also further deepened the idea of breaking the whole into parts, forming a special principle of system analysis method, namely MECE law (mutual independence and complete exhaustion).
When we split the problem, each sub-problem should be independent of each other, and all the sub-problems together completely exhaust the possibility of the parent problem.
So how to apply MECE law to decompose a complex problem into small problems step by step to solve it? Continue to analyze how to increase the profit of the store, and how to decompose this problem into sub-problems by MECE method.
It can be considered that there are three ways to increase store profits: either increase sales volume or sell more; Either reduce costs and make more profits; Either raise the selling price and increase the income.
Besides these three ways, can you think of other ways to increase profits? If you can't figure it out, it means that these three sub-problems have exhausted the mother problem. Sales volume, cost and selling price are independent of each other, which can be regarded as independent of each other, so they are also independent of each other. Therefore, the process of decomposing the problem conforms to MECE's law-independent and completely exhausted.
Third, the initial assumption, straight to the answer to the question.
When it comes to how to find a solution faster, it involves an understanding of most of us. Many people think that the order of solving problems should be to find problems, analyze problems, and finally find answers and solve problems. So the answer to the question is the result of all the previous research and analysis work, and the answer is naturally the final result of the last link.
Logically speaking, there is nothing wrong with this. However, in solving practical problems, such step-by-step implementation often does not get a more effective solution. On the contrary, many problem-solving experts use reverse thinking to find a possible answer first, and then conduct in-depth research and analysis. In other words, before finding the answer to the question, we should imagine the possible answer to the question.
In fact, this method is not new, it is the method you have been using, but you don't realize it.
For example, when you are going out, you suddenly find that you can't find your key. At this time, you are solving a key problem. Now you have asked the question, but after analyzing the origin of the key, the possible time and place of the key loss, the influence of the key loss and other factors, and drawing various possible solutions, you will definitely not look for the key. On the contrary, you must first find out the clothes you wore yesterday and feel them in your pocket to see if there are any. If so, well, you can go out with the key. If not, I will find out where the key is most likely and whether it is in another bag. You see, the process of thinking is to have a possible answer, such as a key in your pocket, and then to verify whether this answer is effective.
This process of finding the key is actually the same as our thinking of solving all other problems.
In this process, there are very important principles to solve problems. Let's extend the process of this case a little bit to better understand how McKinsey method solves the problem efficiently.
In the process of finding the key, we can also analyze where the key is lost according to McKinsey MECE method.
For example, we can divide this problem into two independent and completely exhausted options: staying indoors and staying outside. The problem of staying at home is decomposed by MECE method, which may be divided into living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.
We can look for them one by one. The problem of leaving it outside will be decomposed, and it may be necessary to deal with the places that have passed since the last use of the key in sections. If we search every possible place one by one, as long as no one else steals or finds the key, then we can definitely get it back. However, if you want to find so many places, then this workload is really too great.
There may be 100 factors affecting this problem. If we want to analyze them one by one, our workload is enormous. In other words, the more complex the problem, the more processes there are to solve it. For example, looking for a key needs to analyze 50 factors, and the cost generated by workload is far less cost-effective than changing a lock.
So how do we solve this problem? How can we not get caught up in the analysis of so many details? In fact, what we are used to is a good solution, that is, don't think so much first, but think about it: where did you put the key yesterday? This idea of "thinking about where the key was yesterday" is actually an efficient means to solve complex problems. This practice of quickly judging the most possible solution from a large number of possibilities is called by McKinsey: finding key drivers.
On the question of finding the key, the key driver is where he left the key yesterday. Once the key drivers are found, the importance of many other factors will be reduced, and we can greatly simplify the problem. When we solve any other problem, we also need to find such a key driver through analysis or brainstorming to simplify the problem.
Moreover, once the key driver is found, possible answers can be quickly found under its guidance. For example, was it in the pocket of yesterday's clothes or in another bag? Of course, these two answers may or may not be right. But obviously, if you find the key at once, you will solve the problem immediately without looking elsewhere. If you don't find it, you will find the greatest possibility to solve the problem from other possibilities in MECE analysis, which will be more efficient. When we don't find this key, we guess it may be in yesterday's clothes or another backpack. This is called establishing an initial hypothesis, finding the answer to the question first, and then seeing if this answer is correct.
This method sounds simple, but the obvious truth may not be realized. In reality, most companies do the opposite. People often collect a lot of information first and spend a lot of time discussing it, but never come up with a solution to verify it.
For example, the McKinsey team has encountered such a thing. At that time, McKinsey took over the project of an insurance company. Based on rich experience, the project manager of the team judged that the reason for the decline in customer profits was probably "leakage". The "leakage" here is a jargon, which means that insurance companies sometimes lose money before fully calculating the amount of claims, resulting in leakage.
So, in order to prove his original hypothesis is correct, he asked his men to find out where there were many loopholes in the insurance company. As a result, his men searched diligently for a week, and the report submitted said that they did not find too many leaks. However, the project manager didn't believe me and said, how is that possible? You must not have looked carefully. You should continue to look carefully and analyze all the data carefully. As a result, the project manager has been asking his men to find loopholes. Finally, even customers will ask him when they see him: What, haven't you found enough loopholes yet? The case of McKinsey tells us that it is easy for us to take our assumptions as facts. We must remind ourselves not to look for evidence to prove that our hypothesis is correct. When facts conflict with assumptions, we should adjust assumptions instead of facts.
abstract
It is not mysterious to review the core viewpoints of McKinsey's methodology, mainly to improve their problem-solving ability through McKinsey's methods.
To sum up, McKinsey's core method has three aspects:
First, be friends with the facts. No matter how experienced you are, you should proceed from the facts, which can not only avoid misleading our intuition and experience, but also make our customers more convinced.
Secondly, we should learn to use MECE method to decompose complex problems into simple sub-problems. By decomposing the problem into independent and completely exhausted sub-problems, the problem can be partially solved;
Finally, we should learn the method of "establishing initial hypothesis first, then verifying and finding the answer" to improve the efficiency of solving problems.
Through such thinking training, our ability to solve problems can be greatly improved like McKinsey expert consultants.