Lei Jun once said: Don't mask strategic laziness with tactical diligence. This applies not only to the battlefield but also to business management. The following article by Fu Sheng, CEO of Cheetah Mobile, discusses how CEOs can lead their companies on the right path.
Fundamentally, the biggest bottleneck for a company is the CEO himself. If the CEO cannot grow, he cannot lead the company to greater opportunities.
However, CEO growth alone is not enough. Once the team fails to keep up, business collapse is inevitable. Therefore, CEO management methods are particularly important.
But internet company management is not like traditional assembly line management; it requires that everyone's goals be very clear.
Let's start with a classic battle.
Before liberation, there were three major campaigns, and at that time the Kuomintang and Communist forces clashed in Liaoshen. Northeast China, adjacent to the Soviet Union, had a good industrial base and held important strategic significance. Both the CCP and the KMT sent their elite troops to the Northeast.
The CCP believed that after two campaigns, Shenyang and Changchun were on the verge of falling. The Northeast became the first place where the CCP formed a local superiority in forces nationwide. By winning a major battle, they could liberate the entire Northeast and then the whole country.
Lin Biao led troops to attack Changchun and Shenyang, but after half a year, Changchun had not been taken. The line from Jinzhou, Shenyang, to Changchun is the famous Guanning-Jinzhou defense line. Since the Ming Dynasty, this line has been flanked by mountains, with Jinzhou being the only gateway. Lin Biao wanted to start with the big cities and then advance into the pass. But this approach would leave the KMT defenders an escape route back to Beiping.
Mao Zedong ordered Lin Biao to directly cut into Jinzhou, take Jinzhou first, then take the Northeast, and finally eliminate all KMT forces to liberate all of China. However, attacking Jinzhou was very difficult. Jinzhou had a city called Yingkou, where the KMT could land reinforcements. At the same time, Fu Zuoyi's corps from North China could attack Jinzhou directly from the Great Wall coast, and the KMT also had 500,000 troops waiting in Beiping. If Jinzhou was not taken, and the KMT reinforcements arrived from both sides, with Shenyang pushing forward, the CCP could easily be surrounded.
Lin Biao was known for his caution throughout his life; he never fought a battle without certainty of victory. The Battle of Jinzhou seemed fraught with danger, and he hesitated greatly. Later, Mao Zedong sent him more than a dozen telegrams, ordering him to attack, otherwise the Northeast campaign could not be resolved. Eventually, Lin Biao reluctantly obeyed and attacked Jinzhou with all his forces, taking it.
Once Jinzhou was taken, Shenyang and Changchun quickly collapsed, and the liberation of the whole country was shortened from five years to just over two years. In fact, this was a single battle that resolved the entire Chinese conflict.
I have repeatedly pondered: What was the gap between Lin and Mao?
Lin Biao was also a world-class marshal. I think the gap lies in the simple goal of whether to attack Jinzhou or not. This point seems simple, but making that decision is extremely difficult.
As a commander, can you find the "Jinzhou" of your own product, establish that goal, and then go all out to achieve it? This is crucial.
Now let's look at another battle.
During World War II, Stalin's Great Purge led to the execution of many senior Soviet officers. Hitler was so delighted that he almost wanted to award Stalin the Iron Cross. Hitler once said that the Soviet Union was a "steel giant without a lion," a cowardly steel giant.
Later, when Germany and the Soviet Union went to war, many combat heroes were promoted because most of the army officers had been killed. One such hero was a regimental commander who was promoted five ranks in a single year to become a group army commander. This hero was an expert in frontal assaults. Logically, as a group army commander, he should have found a breakthrough point immediately, but he didn't. When his group army of over 700,000 men was surrounded, his first action was to smash the radio to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Once the radio was smashed, the 700,000 men couldn't find him and had no orders. Finally, he grabbed a satchel charge and charged at enemy tanks. The charge exploded, and the group army commander was blown to pieces. His death didn't matter; the key was that the 700,000 troops surrendered like headless flies.
So, the rapid German advance was not only due to the Soviet Union's lack of preparation but also to its lack of senior commanders and strategic goals.
Lei Jun has a very insightful saying: "Don't mask strategic laziness with tactical diligence." Sometimes we spend too little time thinking about goals. Thinking about goals is difficult; we are unwilling to think and just bury ourselves in work. In fact, we are just using tactical diligence to mask strategic laziness.
Back to internet company management.
It's different from traditional industries. Traditional companies are relatively static; a position can be held for ten years with little change in work. As long as there's no promotion, job responsibilities remain almost unchanged. The CEO approves a couple of documents, does a year-end budget, and at year-end sees 10% growth, and everyone is happy. That's a traditional company.
Internet company management requires us to proactively sort out goals. We must think about different goals from our different levels, rather than following the traditional execution-centric approach.
You must think clearly about your goals before you can seek victory.
"Goals" should be extremely simple and focused
I remember in 2012, when we started making Cheetah Browser, we put in so much effort, and finally found that the most effective feature was ticket grabbing. That was a very important goal. But often, it's hard to establish a goal. What to do?
First, the goal should be as simple as possible, so simple that even an idiot can understand it. That's a reliable goal. In reality, finding this point is extremely difficult. Especially at the company level, making a few important, simple goals is harder than imagined.
Second, the goal must be focused. You know, if the goal isn't focused, then the path and resources can't be focused either.
Although internet companies emphasize small teams, the premise of small teams is goal focus. Organize teams around one goal. After thinking about the goal, plan a series of paths around it. On this path, assign each team, which is your resource. Just like after deciding to attack Jinzhou, you know where to deploy a column to attack, and where to support the attack on the city walls.
All focus stems from the goal. If you can't think clearly about the goal, you can't focus. What's the worst outcome? It's buying a little insurance everywhere. This is what I've learned from communicating with many people.
Everyone thinks maybe trying will work. Please give up this illusion; trying won't work. If you can't think clearly yourself, how can you expect a few people to figure it out? You must find opportunities in motion and find the spark that can start a prairie fire. That's the most important responsibility of a manager. Otherwise, if you wait until it grows into a towering tree, why do you need management? In the early stages of finding direction, allow some experimentation, but find the goal point as soon as possible to achieve focus on path and resources.
If you've tried all the above methods and still feel confused, don't worry. I also have a headache every time I think about goals. A phone is only so big; it can't be turned into a truck, so it's relatively easy to focus. But a tool software is often copied by competitors, which is a headache. Later, I found that I wasn't thinking deeply enough about the focus point of the goal, or the essence of the user.
I often say, you need a religious-like faith, to find the essence of matter, the essence of the product, and that essence is user needs. Find the need at this core point, and then establish the goal.
Struggle with the "path," peel the bamboo layer by layer
Many times, our thinking pattern is "because this, so that." I've heard many similar words: because it was like this before, so it is like this now; because it was changed to something before, so it is like this now. I tell you, this thinking path is wrong. Such a path is not based on goals, but on past habits. This is a sign of having no goals.
After thinking clearly about the goal, the path naturally emerges.
Once at a mid-year meeting, I announced that we must invest two hundred people into an internal product team. At that time, the product had just started, and many people were uncertain. When I said how many people we would invest, the employees below advised me that it wasn't necessary, couldn't be done, couldn't fit, couldn't be accommodated.
Why is that? I think it's still because they didn't decompose the path enough. You need to analyze the path along the goal, like a skilled butcher dissecting an ox, cutting layer by layer. If you don't know where the key points are, it means you haven't spent enough time.
For example, if a mobile app needs to add a health check feature, isn't speed important? Under the goal of "speed," there are various sub-projects, which can be further decomposed into many sub-goals, making each sub-goal more focused to solve.
Along the goal, we then make many strategies and break them down one by one. For example, after establishing the goal of health check, you might need to work on interaction design and user perception points, and even think about how to simplify the health check feature. These are all paths. Only by deeply thinking about each path in combination with the goal and sorting out the paths clearly can resources be matched.
For users, if the scan speed improves from 20 seconds to 10 seconds, reducing waiting time, the experience is great. Once this goal is achieved, retention naturally rises. Instead of initially designing the goal as retention rate or the number of times users use the feature, because that's not what users truly need; what users truly need is the "wow" feeling when using it.
If you think a point is too simple and can't invest resources, you must be alert. It's likely you haven't thought through the path. If you haven't thought through the path, you can't invest people, and it's hard to achieve effective results.
These words may seem convoluted, but the logic is clear.
Invest all "resources," to the utmost
Take a mobile product within Kingsoft as an example.
At that time, we mobilized almost all available forces to make this software. Initially, it was just a spark, far from a towering tree in the market. But we thought repeatedly and believed we must make such a cleaning software. There were three reasons: First, cleaning was a point that could create depth; second, the essence of future security was cleaning; third, overseas was our "Northeast battlefield." We could "eat up the KMT army" in the "Northeast battlefield," establish a local battlefield with a significant advantage, and finally achieve a complete victory.
After we made the decision, we began to think about the path and investable resources around this goal. We didn't think about turning 4 buttons into 50 buttons or adding more features. Instead, we decomposed the product goal and finally focused on one core point: "cleaning."
Along the goal of "cleaning," we identified several key paths: size of cleaned garbage, cleaning efficiency, and memory usage. Then, we invested all the people we could see and could invest to do this point well.
Many colleagues told me that in Kingsoft's history, they had never seen a product receive such "three investments"—investing VPs, employees, and external resources, breaking up other teams, and even suspending some businesses. Were there difficulties throughout the process? Didn't we need to persuade? Did it cause psychological pressure on many people? Of course! But your goal determines that everyone will eventually know this is right.
No one else can concentrate almost all the company's energy on doing this; that's the real "threshold." And in essence, we just thought clearly about an extremely simple goal, sorted out the path, and invested resources at every point.
When the goal is simple enough, it becomes narrow enough. What does narrowness bring? It means that after you invest so much, others have no chance to catch up because they can't surpass you anymore.
I often cite this example in internal meetings.
Those who have never experienced major battles, never fought arduous campaigns, never truly gone from 0 to 1 through life-and-death situations, always hope to learn so-called management from MBA textbooks or various materials, but they don't think about the essence of management.
I believe the essence of management is to establish a core business and let that business carry all employees and the organizational structure forward, rather than building a stable organization where all businesses are in order.
Today, the entire internet is returning to the essence. It makes previously seemingly simple points explode, rather than through huge systems.
There is a Chinese idiom called "resolve as easily as splitting bamboo," and you must think about this word repeatedly.
What is the blade? For a company, high growth is the blade. Once the company's growth rate goes up, that's the blade. Once this blade is found, many problems are solved, including people problems, thinking problems, and sense of achievement problems—all resolved.
As a leader, you must find this blade. Although the blade is thin and sharp, once this point is established, problems will be solved.
Look around; all products that achieve great things are because they are extremely simple. Accumulate enough resources on an extremely simple blade. Once this barrier is established, it's as unbreakable as a cliff. Once this cliff is up, when you spread out, the entire model emerges.
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