Introduction Private enterprises typically start and grow in this way: they set off with the belief that they can succeed, but in reality, it's a reckless start. They stumble and struggle to get to where they are today, learning by doing, sometimes learning chaotically, enduring hardships, and growing wildly. Looking back, they find that the enterprise has grown, and people have matured a lot (like a bricklayer-carpenter, the more they do, the more they look the part). Throughout this process, business, organization, and team pull and constrain each other, becoming the main line and core issue of private enterprise management. During this, the leader's overall vision, willpower, sense of direction, balance, rhythm, and leadership are key. The organizational development and construction of private enterprises must be discussed and considered within the context of this management main line, core issues, and overall vision. Based on my years of observation and experience with the survival state of private enterprises, I will share with you nineteen insights on organizational management for private enterprises. These nineteen insights were hard-earned, and I offer them to you as my suggestions. I hope they help you in running your business and managing effectively. First: Prioritize Business, Then Organization Getting the business moving first is most important for private enterprises. If you detach from business thinking and operational operations and focus on organizational management in a general way, that's a disaster. Organization and management are actually pulled by business, so prioritize business first, then organization. Don't get the order wrong; getting the business moving first is most important. There is an entrepreneur in Shenzhen with a very famous brand and excellent business performance. In a discussion with Hejun, he mentioned that a real private entrepreneur can't think everything through in advance. Even if they could, can they execute perfectly? If you truly want to do something, just get moving! He said that when private enterprises face market competition and real situations, they don't really believe that private entrepreneurs complete their organizational construction according to the principles taught in organizational theory. In the end, it's about doing first, facing problems when they arise, dealing with them, then moving forward again, encountering bigger problems, and continuing to face and solve them. After hearing this, I thought this boss had substance. Which real enterprise isn't like this? Just do it, grow wildly. Starting is the most important thing. Second: Scale Matters For private enterprises, scale is important. Tonnage determines status, and volume determines weight. If your company doesn't have some tonnage, it's hard to have status. Without status, it's hard to get a bank loan, interest rates are high, and even asking relatives and friends for help is difficult. You'll find that in real business, "small and beautiful" is often a fantasy; it's hard to survive in reality. In real business, whether it's wild growth, winning through chaos, grabbing territory, or competing for the market, as long as you can achieve scale, volume, and land, let it be chaotic for a while. Scale is the most important; most successful people have this characteristic. Third: Adjust Your Posture While Running You must run with problems, adjust your posture while running, strengthen your physique while running, and at the same time create territory and win the future while running, creating a fulfilling life. In China, for private enterprises, growth means a future; no growth means crisis is imminent. It's okay to be a bit chaotic, it's okay to have lower profit margins, but maintaining enterprise growth is the absolute principle. As long as there's room for growth, you're moving forward. Fourth: The Leader Must Timely Complete Role Transformation After growth reaches a certain stage, management issues become prominent. At this point, the leader must timely complete role transformation. How? Shift from focusing on business to management, from doing business to building mechanisms, from pondering products to pondering people, from managing customers to managing employees. Whether the enterprise can hold on as it moves forward depends on the leader's role transformation. The continued development of most small and medium-sized enterprises gets stuck on this issue: the leader fails to complete role transformation and lacks this awareness. This is what is commonly called management lagging behind. I know some private entrepreneurs whose businesses are very large, even reaching tens of billions in scale, but they haven't transformed their roles yet and haven't played the manager role. They find it hard to fight forward because the team can't keep up, or there's no team at all. Then they go headhunting, offering high salaries to find talent. When the talent arrives, they find they can't handle it, there's no efficiency, and they leave after a while. In the end, it's because the role transformation wasn't completed. Fifth: Management Should Be Simple and Practical, Avoid Seeking Grandeur, Completeness, and Perfection For a long time during the growth of private enterprises, returning to common sense can achieve effective management. Returning to common sense, using human nature and common sense in management, can make the business run well. Knowledge without common sense often complicates management. Of course, when the enterprise develops to the scale of a Fortune 500, these words don't hold; common sense can't manage such companies. But for most private enterprises with revenues of a few hundred million or a billion or two, management should be simple and practical. Systematic thinking and overall planning will ultimately make enterprise management very complex, with employees spending a lot of work time meeting your management requirements rather than truly creating value for customers and business. This is very scary. Employees have no sense of achievement, and wages are paid for work time that doesn't generate value. Sixth: Two Manuals to Conquer the World Simplify the myriad management tasks into just two things: first, compile and execute a management manual; second, compile and promote a corporate culture manual. On one hand, grasp rules and organizational system construction; on the other, grasp corporate culture construction. The first edition of the management manual can be just two pages; don't make it too complex. If the enterprise is only tens of millions in scale, two A4 pages can clearly write out everything the company needs to manage. The second edition might be 10 pages, and by the fifth or sixth edition, it might become a book. Eventually, it becomes a compilation of rules and regulations, possibly in multiple volumes. The corporate culture manual is the same. So, the management manual and corporate culture manual can be an encyclopedia or just two A4 pages. Essentially, the enterprise needs to evolve a complete set of rules, and then require everyone from the boss to employees to follow the rules. Seventh: Two KPIs Are Lifelines The business indicator is customer satisfaction, and the management indicator is employee satisfaction. The ultimate direction of all enterprise systems is these two KPIs, and there is a causal chain in between. As long as they don't point to these two KPIs, the systems and culture are problematic. The two manuals must revolve around and run through these two lifelines. Why are these cultural requirements and these institutional clauses stipulated? What contribution do they make to customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction? If there's no contribution, cancel them; if there is, stick with them. Management should be as simple as possible, as simplified as possible, and avoid over-management. Chinese private enterprises have two extremes in management: one is too rough and crude, to the point of lacking basic management; the other is over-management, too detailed and strict, causing the organization to lose vitality and management costs to be too high. Eighth: Bodhisattva Heart, Thunderbolt Means Running a business requires a bodhisattva heart, to save all sentient beings, letting customers get value and employees get value, but at the same time, it must be with thunderbolt means. Handling historical issues must be clean and decisive, without entanglement or nostalgia. When it comes to important figures, you must dare to let go when necessary. If there are root problems like cultural non-identification, don't cling to their talents, historical contributions, or even face. The handling can be done morally, with interests clearly discussed, but you can't continue together. Handle historical issues cleanly, and show no mercy to those who violate discipline. The faster the team advances, the stricter the discipline must be to maintain formation. The leader must show absolute decisiveness and toughness on this issue. Ninth: Build the Mold, Enter the Mold, Optimize the Mold, and Wash the Team Organizational construction is essentially a process: using clear organizational mechanisms and cultural requirements to recruit, inspire, select, and shape members, then filter out unsuitable people and retain suitable ones. In the end, it's a process of "people." Only when the two manuals are clear and stand the test of time, value, and facts can such a process be initiated. The deep logic of recruitment is: "Our company's rules and culture are like this. Are you suitable to work here?" It should be such a process; this is called selecting members. No one can fully meet the requirements. After entering, you need to influence them with culture, discipline them with rules, and shape them into your warriors. Every employee is a specimen of company culture and a conscious warrior of the company. Not everyone can adapt; those who can't are filtered out. Retain the suitable ones, and as more people are retained, the organizational atmosphere naturally forms. This is the process of "building the mold, entering the mold, optimizing the mold, and washing the team." In this process, "patience is wisdom," and "slow is fast." Don't overestimate the impact of two years, but don't underestimate the impact of five years. Tenth: Organizational Growth Has Footsteps and Rhythm A very important manifestation of an entrepreneur's level is whether they can hear how far the enterprise has come. Have you heard the footsteps of organizational growth? If you mishear the footsteps, all management and operations will go wrong. If you hear the footsteps correctly, you'll grasp the rhythm of management and operations very well. Even if your ability is a bit lacking, it doesn't matter; in the end, the whole undertaking will go smoothly. Grasping the rhythm of organizational growth and business evolution is very important. In the process of enterprise development and growth, when to grasp what, when to let go of what? When to tighten, when to relax? When to be fierce, when to be lenient? On what matters to go straight in, and on what matters to let things drag? All these are very particular. It's an important manifestation of an organizational leader's leadership art. Eleventh: Try Not to Poach Talent with High Salaries Talent shortage is an eternal pain in the hearts of all Chinese private entrepreneurs, and it hasn't been resolved for a long time, causing great distress. Talent shortage has become a key bottleneck for many enterprises' development. It's not that there's no business, no opportunities, no resources, but if people are not effective, either things get messed up or opportunities and resources are wasted. In reality, private entrepreneurs are often troubled by talent shortages, and when pushed to the limit, they resort to poaching with high salaries. I suggest trying not to do this. Breaking through the talent bottleneck requires treating it with the specifications of strategic layout. Today's talent shortage severely constrains your enterprise's development because you didn't lay out a talent plan three or five years ago. Similarly, solving the talent shortage three or five years from now requires starting today. This problem can't be solved in one or two years, but it can definitely be solved in three to five years, or eight to ten years. In the end, you'll find you're not short of talent at all. But if you don't act today, five years later the talent shortage will hardly change, and the original team will be even more out of step. Twelfth: Gradually Improve Management Level in the Direction of "Six Modernizations" That is, "Mission to Strategy - Strategy to Organization - Organization to System - System to Process - Process to IT - IT to Ecosystem." When the enterprise reaches a certain stage, it should slowly move along the direction of these "Six Modernizations" to improve management level. At this point, it's no longer about being simple and practical; it's about systematic organizational rationality construction. Thirteenth: Benchmark Management and Operations Against Listed Companies, Fill Gaps Listing is a legal standard for how to run a business and find development direction. Benchmarking management and operations against listed companies is an excellent choice and a foolproof method for selecting direction, running operations, managing, and training. You can solve a series of major issues in enterprise growth around listing: 1) Boss gets rich: profit model upgrades from product profit to capital appreciation; 2) Original sin erased, wealth confirmed: one-time redemption, from then on, sunny, light, and at ease; 3) Corporate governance and management standardization: enterprise operations shift from individual-driven to organization-driven; 4) Development direction and business structure optimization: industry selection, business structure rationalization, core capability identification, clear business model, clear growth plan, feasible use of raised funds; 5) Talent attraction: talents in the industry flock to you, hearts turn to you, competitors' morale shakes, and people think of leaving; 6) Financial strength: gain competitive air superiority - a contest of capital; 7) Credibility and brand reputation: government, banks, customers, society... Fourteenth: The Top Leader Must Have a Backbone At any stage of enterprise growth, there are many different views, propositions, and disputes. Some need to be firmly advocated, some clearly opposed, some pretended to be ignorant, some ignored, some compromised (as the saying goes, "If you're not deaf and blind, you can't be the head of the household"), but no matter how you respond, you must be a clear-headed person with a backbone, able to make decisions, and clearly make your choices and the company's choices. If the top leader lacks a backbone and isn't strong enough, organizational development is hard to achieve. A truly ambitious entrepreneur, if they want to build a career, should have goals, stay calm, work steadily, produce results, and let rumors and disputes be stopped by facts. Fifteenth: Management Is a Slow Variable Managing doesn't mean you start this month and see results next month. Management is a slow variable. You need to manage according to the flywheel theory, with patience, confidence, and perseverance. The so-called flywheel theory means: getting a huge flywheel moving is not easy. You need to keep pushing it. At first, it's very laborious; no matter how hard you push, it doesn't seem to move. You push and push, but there's no effect. But don't give up, don't slack off, keep pushing. Slowly, you find the flywheel starts to move. Push harder, and it really starts moving, slowly at first, then gradually faster and faster. With a little force, you see big effects. Finally, the flywheel spins on its own, and it spins faster than you can imagine, as beautiful and joyful as flying. The entire trajectory and scene of a private entrepreneur who focuses on organizational construction and management is exactly like this. So patience is very important. You must get your enterprise into this scene, and then the more you do, the easier it gets. Otherwise, the bigger the scale, the more tired you become. Sixteenth: Enterprise Development Must Rely on Employees Organizational change and enterprise development must rely on employees. So whether a boss can build a career depends first not on how they treat business, but on how they treat employees. Look at how they treat employees, and you'll know how far the enterprise can develop. Doing organization and management, in the end, is about treating employees well. If you take this as the soul, you'll find that many management tasks can be omitted; employees will automatically enter the state, and even if an oil bottle falls, they'll pick it up. Otherwise, even with strict assessments and high bonuses, you'll still see situations where no one picks up the fallen oil bottle. Respect vested interests, establish fair rules, be willing to give up profits, and once rules are set, stick to them. The leader must lead by example, build trust with sincerity, treat employees sincerely, and rebuild company credibility and employee confidence. By winning the hearts of employees, then gradually radiating outward, win the hearts of customers and external talent. Win people's hearts, and you'll naturally win the world. Seventeenth: Team Building Starts from the Heart Believe that everyone has innate wisdom and can become an angel. Believe in the meaning and effect of "I believe," and treat others as you would treat yourself. Don't think I'm fooling you; I hope you realize early: saving others is saving yourself. Being good to others is not for their sake, but for your own. Eighteenth: Correctly View Problems, Difficulties, Failures, and Even Crises in Enterprise Survival and Development All private enterprises face problems, difficulties, and even failures at all times, and they'll likely face a crisis every few years. No one can escape this fate; as long as you're in business, it's like this. As an entrepreneur, if you don't have the right attitude toward problems, difficulties, failures, and crises, and can't view them correctly, you can't continue your career, and the organization can't develop. Difficulties, failures, crises, and unyielding pursuit are the best teachers in life; experience and life are the best business schools. In the end, you'll find that without problems, there's no enterprise; without difficulties, there's no progress; without challenges, there's no transcendence; without crises, there's no vitality. How are truly outstanding and accomplished people made? They are definitely made through continuously solving problems, overcoming difficulties, and dealing with crises. In fact, in this process, whether bitter or joyful, loving or hating, tired or idle, successful or failed, as long as you can strive constantly and pursue dreams, as long as there are people who share your storms and treat you sincerely, this life is the most beautiful heaven on earth. Nineteenth: A Grateful Heart, Thankful for Life When you run a business to the end, you must lead all employees to cultivate a grateful heart and be thankful for life. 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