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Author | Wang Min Editor | Xiang Xiaoyuan
Source: Deep Burn
“If the boss doesn’t show up, the company is doing well?” Recently, LeEco, which has been trending on Weibo with several topics, has caused some netizens to express similar sighs.
After the founder Jia Yueting went to the United States and the negative news continued, it was revealed that LeEco now has about 400 employees, and “lives a fairy life without a boss”, “no 996 and involution”.
Similar jokes have also happened in New Oriental. The first half of this year is the initial stage of New Oriental’s transformation of live broadcast and delivery. The founder Yu Minhong entered the “Oriental Selection” live broadcast room in the early stage, originally to increase popularity, but he did not expect that his words touched sensitive words, which also caused the live broadcast to be interrupted. Yu Minhong laughed at himself, “I’m going to make trouble.” The anchor of Dongfang Selection also joked that “the boss should work less hard, maybe we will succeed earlier.”
Can the company run as usual or even better without the boss? What this actually involves is the topic of management and decentralization. American management scientist Loeber once put forward the “Loeber Theorem”, “For a manager, the most important thing is not what happens when you are present, but what happens when you are not present”, which refers to a good management Managers should assign responsibilities and tasks to subordinates and give them room to play freely.
Decentralization is a big question. Whether it is the founder of a large company with tens of thousands of employees or the owner of a start-up company with only a few dozen employees, this topic cannot be avoided. Many bosses even take the initiative to study related courses in business schools. In a large Internet company with a scale of tens of thousands of people, the founder has set off a “retirement wave” and is breaking away from daily management. However, the status of many small and medium-sized companies is still the same. Wherever the boss goes, they are busy. As soon as the boss leaves, the company begins to “holiday”.
How should the top leader delegate power? Can “the company be better when the boss is not there”? The management philosophy behind this is worth thinking about by every boss and worker.
big company:
“Relying on management to get results”, you can transfer even if you leave the boss
“LeTV actually has more than 400 people left, and many of them are old employees of more than five years.” Recently, this “cold knowledge” shared by a blogger detonated the Internet this July. For a time, the outside world developed a strong interest in this declining Internet company, and topics such as “LeTV employees live a fairy life with no boss, no involution and 996” continued to ferment.
On July 12, LeEco responded that the company does not have 996, nor will there be any in the future, and the company has indeed never owed wages and social security to its employees in the past five years.
Although judging from LeTV’s 2021 annual report, its accounts payable in the consolidated statements are 2.98 billion yuan, current liabilities are 3.696 billion yuan, and other non-current liabilities are 3.049 billion yuan. These liabilities add up to nearly 10 billion yuan, strictly speaking It’s not a “fairy day”, but its status quo does surprise many people.
Before this, the outside world saw that LeEco has been negative since the second half of 2016, with the news of debt collection by suppliers and large-scale layoffs of the company one after another. It has been five years since the founder Jia Yueting left China in mid-2017.
However, in the past five years, LeEco has not completely collapsed, but has been operating normally. In fact, half a year ago, in December 2021, LeEco said in an internal letter, “LeTV has achieved a double balance of operating profit and cash flow without considering the impact of historical debt.”
On this side, LeEco had to operate on its own without the presence of the founder. On the other hand, in the live broadcast room selected by the new “ceiling” New Oriental Oriental in the live broadcast industry, the anchors ridiculed that they hoped that the founder would appear less.
Dong Yuhui, the anchor of Dongfang Selection, mentioned in the live broadcast that when Dongfang Selection first started to transform into live broadcast, the anchors were groping for the rules of the platform, and they were actively earning credit points, but when the founder Yu Minhong came to the live broadcast room, Because of some prohibited words, points will be deducted in the live broadcast room, and even the broadcast will be suspended, so that there is a joke among the anchors that “if the boss works less hard, we will have succeeded already”.
What is even more interesting is that due to the impact of the epidemic, after the live broadcast of Dongfang Selection was collectively moved to the hotel in Tongzhou, Beijing, far away from the former office and “away” from Yu Minhong, the live broadcast room suddenly became popular.
These two companies that have recently been on the cusp of the storm, both give people a feeling that “the company is better when the boss is not there”.
In fact, this is not uncommon in large companies. In the past few years, Internet giants have set off a “retirement wave”, all claiming to no longer participate in the management of daily affairs.
In 2019, Alibaba founder Jack Ma announced his retirement. In 2021, Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng will no longer serve as chairman. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and Kuaishou chairman Su Hua have resigned as CEOs. By this year, JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong also stepped down as CEO. Among them, some began to enjoy life and explore new directions. Ma Yun’s new dynamic was showing up on a golf course in Spain, and luxury yachts were also docked on the local coast. Huang Zheng announced that he would focus on the exploration of life sciences, Zhang Yiming, Liu Qiang East is to focus more on long-term strategic research.
The founder’s relegation does not affect the operation of these large factories with a scale of tens of thousands of people. This is because the big bosses dare to delegate power and start “retirement” after they have found a “successor”. And the successors are either early start-up employees or generals who have served as company executives for many years. For example, Yu Minhong is not on the front line of the transformation of live streaming, but Sun Dongxu, CEO of New Oriental Online, a post-85s executive who has been in New Oriental for many years, is the main person in charge of the front-line management of Oriental Selection.
In addition, large companies have core management, and daily decision-making and promotion will not be concentrated on one person.
LeTV is an example. Jia Yueting started to split with LeTV as early as when Sunac China invested 10 billion in LeTV. By June this year, Jia Yueting had transferred the right to use part of the equity and was no longer the largest shareholder of LeTV. He is currently the largest shareholder of LeTV. The chairman is Liu Yanfeng, who was born in Sunac.
Recently, LeEco also mentioned in its response to the hot search, “LeEco is not without a boss, perhaps because the bosses of various business lines within the company are diligent and conscientious, and do not need other superior bosses to do their best to make everyone feel that No boss.”
Seeing the news that “LeTV still has more than 400 people”, some people commented that the employees are still there, the company is still there, and there is still a chance to return blood. Zhu Jupeng, a senior human resources expert, mentioned that many large companies have reached the stage where “management gets results” and promotes the ecological development of the platform through organizational management. .
Small and medium companies:
Decentralization has premise, scale has knowledge
Large companies are indispensable for employees, but small and medium-sized companies in the early stage can only survive by relying on their bosses at the beginning.
“Cognition determines development, and stability determines decentralization,” said Chi Yi, an enterprise operations consultant, to Shen Ran. With a large team and a large company in a stable growth period, you can consider delegating power, and only when the boss slowly frees his energy from the front-line management and operation work can he spend more time on strategy and lead the company to go further .
However, the bosses of many small and medium-sized companies are in the middle ground between “releasing” and “not letting go” of management rights.
Start-up entrepreneurs understand that in the early stages of a business, it is unrealistic to expect the company to run better without the boss.
“Start-ups should not be obsessed with delegating power, but only focus on the general direction. This is not the stage for small companies.” An e-commerce entrepreneur said, “Start-up bosses must be able to ’72 changes’ in order to grow small teams slowly. “.
When the entrepreneurial team is just set up, the boss must focus all his energy on the front line of the business to get the company on the right track. The boss is equivalent to a “business leader”, leading the company to make money and maintain operations. When the company has entered a stable stage of development and the business and team are basically mature, the boss can gradually focus on management, stay away from the front line, and give the team more space.
Chi Yi has contacted many companies with teams of less than 40 or 50 people in the live broadcast e-commerce field. The commonality of these companies is that it is difficult to recruit elite management talents. When the boss is recruiting people, the cost of trial and error will be relatively high. Under such circumstances, it is difficult for the boss to “decentralize”.
When the company’s development entered a stable stage, the boss was able to start delegating power step by step.
Zhang Huai, who started his business in the Internet field in 2013, mentioned that in the first five years of his business, the company was in a period of rapid growth, with more than 40 employees at most, and he often participated in first-line business bidding. The energy is gradually freed from the front-line business. Every week, I will focus on checking the weekly reports submitted by employees, and then organize regular meetings with the director of the business department to control the general direction of the company.
Zhang Huai began to withdraw from the front line in 2018 because, under the accumulation of the previous years, the income that the company’s current main business can bring has been basically stable.
In the existing team, two employees who followed the start-up in the early stage have become the core backbone. They can win the business independently, and the company’s culture has basically been formed. There is basically no internal struggle, and the company’s benefits are good. The staff has a certain appeal. In his view, even if the grass-roots employees are lost and replaced, the business operation can be basically stabilized.
Zhang Huai’s experience with decentralization is that the boss is far away from the front line, which means to stimulate the creativity of the heads of various business lines, and to give employees trust and development space. He believes that a similar situation also occurs in the “money-making teams” incubated within many companies. The innovation of some companies is top-down and implemented by the boss’s “strong control”, but many companies also have a bottom-up innovation logic. As long as the CEO and the team formulate core goals and how to promote it, they are small teams. own business.
It is undeniable that how to decentralize is a big question. Many bosses even take the initiative to study related courses in business schools, but the result is that some people only decentralize on the surface, or they do not grasp the scale of decentralization.
There are many examples of just superficial decentralization. Chi Yi mentioned that, for example, frequent meetings and complicated approval processes are signs that the boss may not really want to delegate power. A grass-roots employee said that if the boss only delegates power on the surface, but does not let go of any detail, the result is that employees are tied up, the team is lost, and it is easy to fail to explore new businesses.
“The boss works less, the company makes more money”,
How can this be achieved?
“In the case of the boss delegating power, if the company wants to operate normally, the first thing is to stabilize the three points of business, capital, and personnel organization.” Chi Yi believes that bosses who plan to decentralize power should first focus on different businesses at different stages. up, and then slowly and gradually let go. The most important thing is to grasp the degree of decentralization. The specific scale is inseparable from the development stage of the company and the management style of the boss.
Zhu Jupeng also mentioned that it is very difficult for the owners of small and medium-sized companies to achieve real decentralization. Many entrepreneurs focus on which areas they are strong in, which is highly related to the previous accumulation of the boss. In terms of your own non-strength, go to the corresponding professionals to form a team. Even though many small and medium-sized companies have achieved hundreds of millions of revenue, they are still business-driven, and management does not play a big role in this.
Not only is it not easy for the bosses of small and medium-sized companies to delegate power, but the Internet giants have also gone through a long preparation period before “retirement”.
For example, before Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba announced his retirement in 2019, he no longer held the position of CEO of the group in 2013, focusing on the strategic decision-making of the board of directors; Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, before resigning as chairman in 2021, is also in 2020. He stepped down as the CEO of Pinduoduo earlier in the year. The actions of Su Hua and Liu Qiangdong to step down as CEOs also seem to be paving the way for a thorough decentralization.
How should the boss delegate power? From the perspective of employees, many people think that if the boss is not in the company for a long time, the process and state of work will not appear in the boss’s field of vision, and they will be more relaxed. is more focused on results. Without the daily tension, some employees are more responsible for the results, have a stronger goal orientation, and have a strong executive power.
Therefore, Song Wenshuai, an expert in business management consulting, believes that in order for a company owner to decentralize power, no matter what the circumstances, there must be three prerequisites, namely, a trusted team, mature institutional mechanisms, and corporate culture.
He further explained that firstly, the boss must have a core management team that he trusts enough; secondly, only when the enterprise management system is relatively complete can the company operate as usual without certain people. That is to say, each work module must have corresponding processes and execution standards, and the business person in charge will carry out corresponding performance management on this basis. The mature corporate culture is to make employees unite for the same goal.
Song Wenshuai also mentioned that many Internet companies now pay attention to flat management.
Whether for a large company or a small company, only by screening out outstanding talents, building a core team, establishing an effective performance appraisal, clarifying tasks for employees and then properly authorizing, the blueprint of “the company develops better without the boss” can be realized step by step. .
*The title picture and the pictures in the text are from unsplash. At the request of the interviewee, Chi Yi and Zhang Huai are pseudonyms in the text.
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