The miracle of throwing seven coins

One person casts a coin and throws the same national emblem seven times in a row. Do you believe it? Most people don't believe it will be a fact; a few people believe that the coin has magic power; and some people believe that it is playing magic. But very few people will believe that this is a natural phenomenon.

In fact, if there are a thousand people who vote for seven consecutive coins, the first time there will be about 500 people throwing out the national emblem. The second time, there must be about 250 people who will cast the national emblem twice in a row... The seventh time At least seven people have cast out the national emblem. If the same person does a thousand such experiments, there must be at least seven occurrences that we do not seem to happen or consider miraculous.

In fact, the miracles in business management are mostly generated; in the front of successful companies, there are usually many companies that have made similar attempts, but they have given up too early, and only a few companies have persisted. Before the success, a company usually had many failures. Just like the story of the invention of 666 powder, if the inventor gave up on the 665th, he would not. Therefore, "persistence" or "perseverance" is not only the spirit of scientists, but also the qualities that entrepreneurs should possess.

Usually, we require entrepreneurs to have some superhuman qualities. In Germany, there was a survey of the top 600 CEOs. The results showed that insights, foresight and other characteristics were ranked before the characteristics that entrepreneurs should have. But the problem is that if we use such standards to choose entrepreneurs or managers, we usually can't find the right people; let us ask ourselves, how many of us, and how many people around us meet this standard? Even some are recognized as far-sighted. Big entrepreneurs also have to admit that they often make wrong decisions.

I am not saying that insights, foresight, and other characteristics are not important to being a business. If one has such ability, it is absolutely a blessing to a company. But we are usually in a complex environment where insight alone can't solve the problem. We must do a variety of "management experiments" to determine the future direction of the company.

As managers, we have accumulated a certain ability to identify talents. But even the most experienced personnel managers have to use some external features, such as past achievements, to infer a person's future development in a new business. Of course we all have some "intuition" and feel that this person is suitable or not suitable for such a position. But if you think about it honestly, maybe we "intuitively" be right when it is almost as much as the wrong time. A more practical approach to managing talent is experimentation: giving a person with certain conditions the rights, resources, and time, and then judging their ability and retention based on their performance. Even the most critical management consultants like McKinsey, the principle of true success is the experimental principle of their talents: up or go, that is, one person either goes up or leaves. Going up means performance and personal growth. If an employee does not rise up a ladder in two years because of his excellent performance, he must find another high. The "last elimination mechanism" pursued by some domestic enterprises also follows the same principle.

GE is a master of enterprise experimentation in different fields. In my opinion, one of the most important principles of GE's corporate principles is also an experimental principle: up or close, that is, a business area either enters the top three in the world with a defined budget at a specified time, or puts this The field is turned off. In Welch's words: "The headquarters does not care too much about the details - but we have a good sense of smell. Our task is to allocate resources - not only in the financial sense, but also in the intellectual sense of the capital. Smell Allocating resources after feeling, touching, and listening. Putting people and assets on a certain development possibility, and making a decision whether to keep it after making mistakes."

Whether we are willing or not, doing business is actually doing a series of experiments. The clever experimenter will do the controlled experiment like a scientist. Just like the ALDI approach I mentioned in the previous article, ALDI must be in a few minutes before deciding whether to introduce a new product into its chain. The representative chain stores in the home test, according to the data from this small, almost no cost experiment, decide whether to promote to all 3,000 stores. Experiments without cost are turned into gambling, which is extremely costly. In my opinion, Changhong’s practice of monopolizing CPT two years ago is actually such an uncontrolled gamble, not a corporate experiment that can be learned from it.