---
title: "Boss, What You Lack Is Not Talent, but Management!"
description: "In the movie 'A World Without Thieves', Ge You famously said, 'What is the most important thing in the 21st century? Talent!' Even a thief knows the importance of talent, let alone business owners. However, if you constantly seek various talents, it's time to reflect on whether your strategy is flawed. This article argues that the real issue is often a lack of strategy and management, not a lack of talent."
author: "刘润"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2016-10-24"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/boss-what-you-lack-is-not-talent-but-management-bad230b3.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4nPy9daKlErmwocFg3XSmw"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E8%80%81%E6%9D%BF-%E4%BD%A0%E7%BC%BA%E7%9A%84%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%AF%E4%BA%BA%E6%89%8D-%E6%98%AF%E7%AE%A1%E7%90%86-bad230b3.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/boss-what-you-lack-is-not-talent-but-management-bad230b3/"
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# Boss, What You Lack Is Not Talent, but Management!

> In the movie 'A World Without Thieves', Ge You famously said, 'What is the most important thing in the 21st century? Talent!' Even a thief knows the importance of talent, let alone business owners. However, if you constantly seek various talents, it's time to reflect on whether your strategy is flawed. This article argues that the real issue is often a lack of strategy and management, not a lack of talent.

**Introduction**
In the movie 'A World Without Thieves', Ge You famously said, 'What is the most important thing in the 21st century? Talent!' Even a thief knows the importance of talent, let alone business owners. However, if you constantly seek various talents, it's time to reflect on whether your strategy is flawed.

**There is** an interesting phenomenon: some friends lament, 'Hiring is so hard. My project is about to launch, and my biggest headache is finding the right talent, especially a good sales director who can figure out how to sell my products.' My first reaction is, no, **what you lack may not be talent, but strategy.**

**1. The 'craving' for talent may stem from a lack of strategy**
The typical scenario is like this: Entrepreneur A, leveraging his offline resources, such as a leather shoe brand, thinks about launching a B2C website dedicated to selling shoes online. So he partners with the brand, hires developers to build an independent B2C site, and starts selling shoes online. Once the business is up and running, A feels it's time to hire a sales director to meet sales expectations. But he finds it hard to recruit such a person. So A laments, 'Talent is hard to find.'

Is that really the case? Let me share two stories I've heard.

In his early days, Zhou Hongyi worked on 3721, selling Chinese domain names. These are hard to sell—they're intangible. After developing the product, hiring a sales director and setting targets is the easiest thing to do, which seems like 'management.' But is it useful? If you don't know who to sell to or how to sell it, why did you develop it in the first place?

Zhou Hongyi devised a 'rural encirclement of the cities' strategy. He gathered a group of salespeople and gave them simple guidelines:
**1. Go to second-tier cities; 2. Attract: Chinese domain names are like online house numbers; 3. Entice: If you don't buy, someone else might.**

It's said that with such a simple sales strategy, 3721 achieved impressive sales results. Did he need every salesperson to be a sales master? No.

Another story is about Shi Yuzhu's 'Zheng Tu' (Conquest). It was a new game—how to sell it? At that time, online gaming was dominated by Shanda's 'Legend'. The standard 'management' approach would be: hire a group of salespeople, set targets, link them to bonuses, and let them do their best. Is that useful?

It's rumored that Shi Yuzhu devised a 'defection' sales strategy. He recruited a group of people to play 'Legend' every day. Their tasks were simple:
**1. Find other players; 2. Chat; 3. Say: 'Zheng Tu' is fun, go play it.'**

Did he need every salesperson to be a sales master? No. These two stories are unverified, but upon hearing them, I deeply felt the simplicity and brilliance of these 'strategies.'

**As an entrepreneur, you yourself are the most important 'talent.'** Your 'craving' for talent may be due to a lack of strategy. The talent you crave is also the talent that can bring you 'strategy.' What you need first is strategy, then talent.

**2. Dissatisfaction with talent may stem from weak management**
A friend in the internet industry said, 'An engineer's essential breakthrough is the ability to simplify complexity.' That makes sense. But perhaps it should be said: 'It would be great if engineers had the ability to simplify complexity.' This is an expectation. It's called an expectation because only a few can achieve it. It's not an 'essential breakthrough.' Why do managers like to say this? I think it's due to weak management.

**The ability to simplify complexity is an organizational ability, a manager's ability, not an engineer's.** What is good management? Let's look at building a house. You hire 20 workers and say, 'Here's the blueprint, here's the money. You must have the ability to simplify complexity and build the house in 20 days.' That's unrealistic. As managers, we know how to simplify complexity. We first divide the work into carpentry, plumbing, masonry, etc. Then we break down the process into steps one, two, three, four, five. Then, the important part: you give each worker a 'simple' instruction, like 'Lay the bricks straight, 3 meters high, 2 meters wide.' That's it. Engineers should only receive simple instructions. We 'expect' everyone to be smart enough, but if we 'depend' on their intelligence for quality, we put the company at great risk.

Expecting too much from talent and being dissatisfied with existing capabilities and initiative may stem from weak management.

**3. Don't expect to hire people to do what you should do**
Finally, on the flip side, finding talent with initiative, strategy, and the ability to simplify complexity is certainly a valuable asset. These relate to culture. While emphasizing the founder's strategy and management abilities, we should not neglect building employee culture.

But **especially in the early stages of a startup, don't expect to hire people to do what you should do; don't shift the lack of strategy and management onto a 'dependence' on talent.** Doing so will prematurely establish a complex organizational structure, and before the revolution succeeds, you'll already suffer from big-company disease.

-END-

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