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Text | Wang Fang
Source: Pencil Road
What is Lei Jun’s greatest strength? It is “macro-capability” and “micro-manipulation” for consumers.
Lei Jun’s 2022 speech was not unexpectedly popular.
Several of his darkest moments have been screened in the circle of friends: the story of Jinshan from death to life, the story of Joyo.com from life to death…
At this difficult time, a few bowls of sweet chicken soup are particularly inspiring: even a boss like Lei Jun has experienced more hardships than himself, and he is relieved in an instant. At the same time, I also feel that he is very powerful: how can he be saved every time.
I also think that Lei Jun is great, but I think that his greatest strength is that he doesn’t tell you his greatest strengths, but only tells you where he is not that great, and everyone thinks he is the best in these areas. Looking at it this way, Lei Jun is a “liar” – of course, the “liar” here is a neutral word.
I bet: Most of the bosses who have followed the example of “Lei Jun Thought” over the years have failed in their startups. If not, leave a message in the comment area and I will pay you a dollar.
Lei Jun’s publicity is not his best, or misleading many entrepreneurs.
-01 –
Lei Jun misled a whole class of entrepreneurs
For example, 10 years ago, Lei Jun advocated the use of Internet thinking for management – flat management, no hierarchical reporting, and the boss should go to the front line to handle business. A popular story that year: In order to choose a suitable mobile phone wallpaper, he personally looked at hundreds of thousands of wallpapers.
At the 2012 Internet Conference, I asked him a question: When your company was young, you used to advocate flattening. Now that Xiaomi has 2,400 employees, how do you continue to ensure the “vigor of small companies”?
At that time, he had already encountered the “small company bottleneck”: he did not pursue the flatness of the organization so much, but used culture to constrain it. “Every week after the product comes out, there will be a score sheet, which is good and which is not good. I think as long as each employee has 100 rice noodles friends, there will be countless people who will help me manage them.”
Now that I have started my own business (for 6 years), I understand some truths: the “flatness” of the boss doing the front line by himself is only suitable for the early stage of the business, such as the team is less than 100 people.
Entrepreneurs should not pursue extreme flatness too much, otherwise they will lose their IQ. For example, I have seen some “Rebs believers” back then. The company has tens of thousands of people, and they are still doing “picking wallpapers”: in order to pick out a qualified wallpaper, look at hundreds of thousands of wallpapers. I count 200,000 wallpapers, each 5 seconds, calculated on an 8-hour work schedule, which is equivalent to 33 days.
Oh, you are a big boss with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, in order to choose a wallpaper, you spend 1/12 of a year on wallpaper?
For another example, Mr. Lei advocates “using Internet thinking to make hardware”: pay attention to user participation, and products should be iterated in small steps. Around 2012, a number of “Internet mobile phones” emerged in China, and they all respected Lei Jun as the originator: they all took “Internet thinking” as their core competitiveness, such as Xiao Chili mobile phones and Da Coke mobile phones… Of course, these believers all failed later. .
Lei Jun said: Products need to be iterated quickly. It is too slow for traditional mobile phone brands to iterate once a year. If I wasn’t a tech reporter back then, I would be like everyone else: I was “deceived” by these rare remarks.
What is the truth? An executive of a traditional mobile phone brand told me: In fact, there are too many bugs in Xiaomi’s mobile phones, and there is no complete testing team. At that time, Xiaomi’s head office only had 300-400 people, while Lenovo and other mobile phone brands only had 300-400 people in the testing team. Therefore, Xiaomi can only slowly fix bugs through “user participation”.
There are too many remarks like these, and Lei Jun has also suffered a lot of “lightning strikes”. For a while, I said that “the bigger the pixel of the mobile phone, the better”, saying that friends and merchants piled up hardware blindly, but they backhanded a “100 million pixel” “camera”; But he backhanded a mobile phone with “5 cameras”…
The last time I heard Lei Jun share it was three years ago. He is advocating Xiaomi’s “seven-character formula”: focus, extreme, word of mouth, fast.
He told a story of “Xiaomi battery”. He said that around the “extreme product”, he has made several major innovations.
How much do 10 AA batteries usually sell on the market? (about 20 yuan). We knocked down the price, 9 yuan and 9 yuan; the batteries on the market are generally inconvenient to carry and easy to lose, so we made a box; during the use of the batteries, we could not tell which ones were used and which ones were useless. It has been passed, so we designed it into rainbow colors; after the battery is used up, throwing it into the trash can easily cause environmental pollution, so Xiaomi battery is a mercury-free battery…
At that time, even though I had been in business for 4 years, I still felt that Lei Jun was amazing when I heard these remarks. Of course, greatness is indeed greatness, but I know what the boss needs to learn, and what as a consumer just listen to.
In the past few years, Lei Jun has promoted a lot of “entrepreneurship ideas”, but in essence, they all serve the “Xiaomi brand”. In the final analysis, these words are all for Xiaomi consumers, but entrepreneurs should not blindly learn.
-02 –
The most powerful part of Lei Jun is ignored
In the same sentence, in the past seven years, most of the “Rebs believers” around me have failed in their startups: the Internet mobile phone brands of the year, except Xiaomi, were still alive, and the rest of the brands were dead. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I have seen maintain independent thinking, and they will not deliberately pursue anyone, nor will they completely deny anyone.
From the results, Lei Jun is really a very powerful entrepreneur. He first made a mobile phone brand. The landmark event was in 2013, when Xiaomi mobile phones had the third-largest market share in China. He then made “other brands of Xiaomi”, such as air purifiers, TVs, and so on. He also jointly launched the “Mijia brand” through the means of “incubation + investment”. After this is done, in 2019, Xiaomi entered the world’s top 500 for the first time, with revenue of about 180 billion yuan.
From the perspective of entrepreneurs, what is Lei Jun’s greatest strength? As entrepreneurs, we should learn from him the most. In the past so many years, Lei Jun’s “micro-manipulation” has been praised: product micro-manipulation, marketing micro-manipulation… In fact, Lei Jun’s most powerful aspect is “macro-capability”, and “micro-manipulation” is for consumers.
As a boss, if you pursue “micro manipulation” indiscriminately, I suggest you not to start a business, because you will definitely kill the company. The success of a company must only be related to macro planning: a macro decision can allow the company to enjoy more than 10 years of dividends.
The biggest inspiration Lei Jun gave me was on “team building”. Lei Jun actually said this: in the early days of his own business, 80% of his time was recruiting people. What the boss likes depends on where he spends his time, but everyone just missed this sentence, and only listened to his nonsense about “picking hundreds of thousands of wallpapers”.
What I admire most about Lei Jun is that he can build a top-level team in the early stage of his business – Xiaomi’s Eight Kings: Li Wanqiang, Lin Bin, Hong Feng, Liu De… I think that when this team is established, Xiaomi has already succeeded in half. .
To analyze whether a company can outperform another company, we must first look at the team.
Why did Xiaomi stand out in the early days? Because Lei Jun is the most powerful founder of the brand in that year: the former CEO of Jinshan, a listed company, has the most capital, the most experience in business management, the most extensive network, and the highest reputation…
Besides, Xiaomi’s most important hero, Lin Bin, participated in the founding of Microsoft’s Asian Academy of Engineering, and served as the vice president of Google’s China Engineering Research Institute… He is in charge of mobile phone research and development and production. How many opportunities will competitors have?
After careful analysis, it can be found that Xiaomi’s Eight King Kongs have their own division of labor, and in the eight fields, almost all of them are the strongest. In the same direction, the competition is first the competition of talents. Ali has 18 Arhats, Baidu has 7 Swordsmen, Ctrip has 4 Gentlemen, New Oriental has troika, and Tencent has 5 Tiger Generals. What level of team determines what kind of company can be made. I admire Lei Jun for playing such a beautiful hand in the early days of the company.
Finding people, looking for money and direction – these are the three major missions of entrepreneurs, and finding people comes first. Ask yourself: Do you spend more than 30% of your time on the team? Rebs spent 80%.
Of course, Lei Jun is also excellent in long-term strategic capabilities. After careful analysis, Lei Jun’s long-term ability to see strategy is beyond the reach of ordinary people. When most competitors only saw the “mobile phone” business, Lei Jun saw “domestic substitution”: in the future, every product in the user’s home may be marked with the word “domestic”. Therefore, after Lei Jun finished the “mobile phone war”, he immediately started to make Xiaomi TV, Xiaomi purifier, Xiaomi socket, etc., and immediately started the “Mijia strategy”, and immediately started investment (Shunwei Capital, Xiaomi War Investment) to collect high-quality brands.
Therefore, the “big” of Xiaomi today is completely inseparable from the “big” of Lei Jun’s strategy. Only by fishing in the sea can you catch plump seafood, but you can only catch small fish and crabs in the pond.
Therefore, Lei Jun’s macro operation of “finding people + finding directions” is more worthy of learning from the boss.
Compared with the past, Lei Jun’s speech in 2022 is considered to be very conscientious. He has repeatedly conveyed a concept: Perseverance, overcoming the downturn, and believing that good things are about to happen – this is indeed what the boss should learn the most at the moment. As for the “stop shop” and “going to the bar” mentioned in the speech, most people read it to quench their thirst, and the boss will be poisoned if he is bored.
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