Yu Minhong's inspirational speech: the eight capabilities of entrepreneurship

Yu Minhong's inspirational speech: the eight capabilities of entrepreneurship

——Yu Minhong’s speech at the University of Toronto Entrepreneurship Forum

Good afternoon, everyone from the University of Toronto. I am very happy to speak to you, and I am very sorry that I could not communicate with you on the spot due to work. The theme given to me this time is about college students' entrepreneurship. I think that college students' entrepreneurship is mainly reflected in the following eight abilities. In these eight abilities, everyone can focus on training and it is possible to achieve success.
The first ability is the target ability. First of all, everyone wants to start a business. Who wants to be their own boss? But you still have to ask yourself a question: Why do you want to start a business? What kind of goals do you have? What kind of state do you want to make it? We are not starting a business for entrepreneurship, but to do one thing and do one thing, and only if you discover that it is possible after self-assessment. At this time, you can start a business. If you say that you have no goals, just a momentary impulse, just think that you should do something, and do not have much love for what you do, then entrepreneurship is just a trend, not a reality, you are not It is sure to be able to do big things. Personally, when I was doing New Oriental, I had a very clear goal. At that time, I dismissed the work of the university teacher from Peking University and worked as a training institution. I hope that I can make a truly meaningful training institution. It is precisely because of this goal that New Oriental’s training career is flourishing and moving forward. With the development of the training, New Oriental's goal is constantly changing. From the initial one to become a school to open a new Oriental school throughout China, we have now become a US listed company. All in all, your goal is to rise, but the foundation will not change. For example, the basis of my initial New Oriental is to make a training school that has brand, taste, responsibility for the students, and that students like. In essence, New Oriental is still like this today. So I think that the ability to target is very important for entrepreneurship, and your ability to love this goal wholeheartedly is also very important. In addition, one problem you need to pay attention to is that your goal must be to be big, not just to entertain yourself. For example, if you like calligraphy, it is not easy to create a calligraphy company.

The second ability I think is very important is professional competence. If you go to start a business without knowing a major, the possibility of failure is great. Just like if you open a restaurant, if you are not a chef yourself, and you don't have too much money to ask a lot of big chefs, it is very difficult to control the quality of your restaurant, and it is easy to be fired by the big chef. For example, if you have invited a big chef, he has a good meal and attracted a lot of customers. At this time, when he looks at his position, it is very important. In turn, he asks you for the price. If you don’t give more money, you will not do it. An angry opened him, so that the dishes in your restaurant could not be done well, and finally faced a bankruptcy. When I started doing New Oriental more than a decade ago, many of the training institutions around me were fired by excellent teachers. It is also because they have a good class, the students are very satisfied, the teacher began to ask the boss for the price, the boss himself does not understand the teaching and can not swallow this tone, and finally the teacher went to other training institutions, the boss can only take the school Turned off. One of the important reasons why New Oriental can do it at the beginning is that I am a big chef myself. That is to say, many courses offered by New Oriental at the time can be taught by myself. Therefore, when my teachers get the salary they feel is satisfactory, they will I will not ask for a non-divided request. They know that once I have made a request, I can give them their own lessons without causing too much damage to New Oriental. So when you start from scratch, have no penny, or have limited funds, there is an important premise: you must be an expert in this field of entrepreneurship, a person who can control the professional situation. For example, if you open a software design company, you don't know the software. You can't control the quality first. Secondly, you can't control the talents. It will be very troublesome. This is the second point. In principle, you must have considerable professional knowledge and professionalism in this field of entrepreneurship, in order to have the ability to control the profession.

The third ability is marketing ability. What should you do once you start your business? For example, if your company is opened and the product is created, what should you do next? If the product is made and nobody buys it, then the company is open, and there are countless companies that are open and closed, and one of the fundamentals is that they don’t know how to sell their products and sell their own company brands. So what we have to do is to "sell" the company, one is to sell the company's products; the other is more important to sell the company's brand with the sale of the product, that is, let the public recognize your company brand, let everyone I know that this product is sold from your company. This involves marketing, which is divided into two parts: real marketing and virtual marketing. The so-called real marketing, such as I am doing New Oriental, marketing is the New Oriental curriculum, telling students why they should come to this class, what can be gained after finishing. But countless training institutions have been marketing courses all the time, but they are always small institutions, and New Oriental can grow bigger. What is the reason? Very simple, because we market the brand. That is to say, New Oriental began to have connotations. In the end, people did not come to class because they heard about New Oriental's courses. They only came to class when they heard the words of New Oriental. At this time, brand marketing was successful, and this was virtual marketing. In China, brand marketing is often combined with personal marketing, which means that your personal image can sometimes represent the corporate image, so it is often necessary to combine personal ethics, behavior and corporate ethics and behavior. For example, when you talk about New Oriental, New Oriental is Yu Minhong, Yu Minhong is New Oriental. When you talk about Lenovo, you will say that Lenovo is Liu Chuanzhi and Liu Chuanzhi is Lenovo. Therefore, in China, the growth of personal brand is largely the growth of corporate brand, and the growth of corporate brand in turn drives the growth of personal brand. These two add up to form a powerful virtual marketing of your company. Plus your product itself can be accepted by the people, so that the product will be valuable. For example, a company that produces shoes does not have any reputation. Although the quality of shoes is comparable to the quality of famous brand shoes, but the brand shoes sell a thousand, he may only sell one hundred, the difference between the nine hundred How did the money come from? It is brand marketing. If you don't have a brand, the price is not high. Therefore, if a company wants to succeed, brand marketing is sometimes even more important than product marketing. The value of brand marketing is unlimited. This is why our Chinese-made bags can only sell for one thousand RMB. The same material can be printed on the LV logo and then sold for 100,000 RMB. The brand value is at work. Therefore, the use of marketing ability to sell products, sell the brand, sell yourself, become an important means of enterprise development, but also the ability that entrepreneurs must have.

The fourth ability is called transformation ability. The first kind of transformation is to transform science and technology into productivity. This is what we often say. You have the technology, the ability, but can't be converted into a product to sell, this is not acceptable. If Bill Gates stayed in the lab for a lifetime, I guess he was a poor man. He turned his research into Microsoft products and sold it to the world. He became the richest man in the world. Therefore, it is very important to transform science and technology into productivity and transform into product capabilities. The second is the ability to transform your individual. Under normal circumstances, intellectuals have a precondition for entrepreneurship, which is to transform the professional knowledge learned in college into social ability and management ability. For example, when I came out from Peking University, I didn’t know what society is like. If I hold a book business and hold the simple thoughts and behaviors in school, it will be more difficult, even in Western society. Not to mention a complex complex like China. Therefore, if you can't turn the professional ability of the university into social ability and management ability, it will be very troublesome. You may manage it well when you are alone, but it is not necessary to manage a group of people, then you need to learn from Manage yourself into a group of people, that is, transform professional ability into comprehensive ability, and transform professional talent into leadership ability. This kind of transformation is going through a very painful process. I personally came out from Peking University and finally felt that I was the leader of New Oriental. The group that controlled more than 100 people was more comfortable, and it took at least five years. The ability is able to grow. Now I am in charge of nearly 10,000 teachers and employees under New Oriental. There are still no major mistakes, indicating the increase in the management capabilities of New Oriental. Therefore, people's ability is constantly changing. The key is that you have to work hard to transform. For example, many college students are very introverted and do not want to deal with the society. If you want to start a business, this communication can't be beaten. If you fight, you will close yourself and close the chances of success.

The fifth ability is social ability. To enter society, you must first understand society and understand why others are doing this. For example, when I first started out, the atmosphere in the society was fascinating. I didn’t understand it at all. When I deal with them, I felt particularly difficult. The development of New Oriental was also subject to people everywhere. After a while, the old lady of the neighborhood committee came to me. After all, the people in the city management came and gave me a penalty. Finally, I couldn’t do anything. I slowly learned to calm myself down and understand the people in these societies. Finally, when you start to immerse yourself in this society, and when your thoughts and realms transcend this society, you will probably be able to do something. It is. You can't show the unwillingness to deal with the society, but the vision of your affairs is beyond the society. "The big hidden in the city, the small hidden in the mountains" is the concept. The small hermit, the hermit who has no interest, runs. Going to the mountains to live in seclusion, not willing to deal with the society, those big saints and wise men are people who deal with people in society and whose thoughts are beyond the society. The same is true for a business. An entrepreneur who is not able to coexist with society but does not go beyond society will be very troublesome. Therefore, I feel that social ability is very important for an entrepreneur or entrepreneur.

The sixth ability is the ability to use people. Just one person can't be called entrepreneurship, it is called self-employed, so if you want to start a business, you have to find a group of people, your partners, your colleagues, your subordinates, these people, you have to use right from the beginning, If you pick someone who has no ability, you can't do anything at the end. If you pick someone who is too capable, you will eventually rebel with you, and you will never go with you. You can't do anything. If you recruit someone, you have to let people wear you. Therefore, you have to show your personal charm, but also have to show your judgment and design ability, so that everyone feels that it is promising to follow you, even if you are willing to follow you in the most difficult time. The success of Alibaba's Ma Yun is largely attributed to his personal charisma. He has the ability to bring together a group of people, give them low wages, and promise them the future. I don't know if this future will come to the end. Can't be realized, but everyone will have a look forward to it. Therefore, the ability to use people has tremendous power. It is a typical embodiment of leadership ability. When Liu Bang hit the world and asked him why he could do it, he said something like this: In fact, I have no skills at all, but I can use such talents as Xiao He, Han Xin, Zhang Liang, etc., they help me to fight. The world; Xiang Yu has a fan increase, he has no ability to use it, and finally I will be caught. This embodies the important role of leadership. A lonely person may become a hero, but he cannot achieve a career. Liu Bang, regardless of whether he has played or not, is a hero in our minds, or a leader, because he established a century of imperial dynasties, and accommodated so many people of insight. Therefore, the ability to use people is very important to us. If there is not a certain number of talents in New Oriental, it can't be done today. There is a saying in New Oriental: A bandit is doing this with a group of turtles. This bandit is me. The turtles are the dozens of top managers in New Oriental around me, most of whom are returning overseas. Everyone knows that the returnee's own vision is relatively high. Many people's eyes are on the forehead. It is easy to look down on the bandits, so I have to hold the mentality of serving them. At the same time, my own learning ability must be super. Strong, in many ways must approach or even surpass them, they will serve you, will follow you, of course, when you want to make a big business, you will find more and more people around you, all kinds of There are more and more people with individuality and ideas. If you want to be able to unite them together, it is not easy to use the leverage of interests and the levers of emotions and levers of career to perfectly integrate them. Things.

The seventh ability is to control the ability. Including several aspects, the first is the control of the enterprise, what is the speed of the development of the enterprise? What is the pace of development? When should I increase my investment? When should the product be developed? and many more. Second is the control of people. When a person walks into your company, he will measure what he should get every day according to his own ability and contribution. People will always find a balance between people; between people There is another relationship, that is, every day, I measure how much weight I have in the other party’s mind. When the other person feels that your weight is heavy and he has no weight, he will not come to care with you, until the other person feels his Talent, his technique or his leadership has reached the point where he can compete with you. If the other party does not propose it, then he is a fool. Therefore, people and people are always in the middle of a balance, and this balance requires a deep understanding of human nature, and always grasps each person's movements to meet their needs, while also suppressing their unreasonable demands. And desire, can let them follow your heart and keep moving forward. In fact, the ability to control people, control the environment, and control the development steps of enterprises constitute an important condition for your success.

The last ability is the ability to innovate. The so-called innovation ability is the ability to reform, renovation, etc., that is, you need to constantly remove old things, introduce new things, carry out institutional innovation, institutional innovation, technological innovation, and ideological innovation. Judging from the process of doing things by myself, the process of growing up a person or an entrepreneur is a process of constantly denying one's past, acknowledging one's present and pursuing one's own future. Once you feel that this is already very good, it is not bad, there will be no room for further development. I have experienced countless denials in New Oriental. You see that New Oriental has developed from a self-employed family to a family store, and then turned into a buddy partnership. Then it became a domestic joint-stock company, and then developed into an international joint-stock company, and finally became a US-listed company. Every step is a strip of skin, because every change means a lot of interest reform and structural transformation, a lot of personnel reform and transformation, if you can't change it, the company may face collapse. Many of the people who started my foreign language training classes at one time were still husband and wife stores. This is my 15 years ago, but New Oriental quickly changed the husband and wife shop into a modern enterprise, training 1.5 million students every year. Every reform is accompanied by pain, but it is also accompanied by development. The reform has to take good steps. If it is not changed well and changed too hard, the enterprise may collapse. But if it does not go, it will collapse. This is like China's socio-political and economic reforms. If you want to modernize everything at once, it will be dangerous. But if China does not change it, it will be old and backward. It is also dangerous. Therefore, every step must be careful, and you must not go. It is also very important for the reform of entrepreneurship. For example, in terms of technology, if you don’t update it, you will lose the market and lose your chance. At this point, I personally admire Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple. He just started. Apple, after being released by Apple, he made cartoons, and the film did a good job. Later, he began to study the iPod. When the iPod was still selling, he started to research the iPhone. Now the iPhone is also selling all over the world. So every step of the way, his thoughts are advanced. Although Steve Jobs is sick and his body is very bad, he is still an innovative, innovative hero and the wave of the times. We have to be a company. People learn.

All in all, the eight abilities mentioned above are the eight most important abilities I think are in entrepreneurship, and the eight abilities that people can achieve in their big business. Speaking these words, I hope to share with my classmates. I also hope that you can return to China to start a business after graduating from a world-famous university like the University of Toronto. I wish you all success, thank you all!