---
title: "Four Management Thoughts Every Manager Must Understand"
description: "This article introduces four essential management philosophies from James C. Collins, Michael Hammer, Philip Kotler, and John P. Kotter, covering topics such as building enduring companies, business process reengineering, social marketing, and leadership versus management, with insights for Chinese enterprises."
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published: "2014-05-14"
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# Four Management Thoughts Every Manager Must Understand

> This article introduces four essential management philosophies from James C. Collins, Michael Hammer, Philip Kotler, and John P. Kotter, covering topics such as building enduring companies, business process reengineering, social marketing, and leadership versus management, with insights for Chinese enterprises.

I. Collins's Thought
James C. Collins, a recipient of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Distinguished Teaching Award, has worked at McKinsey & Company and Hewlett-Packard. He co-authored "Built to Last" with Jerry I. Porras, which presents his key management ideas.

"Clock building, not time telling." Collins points out that "the founders of great companies are usually clock builders, not time tellers. They focus on building a clock, not just finding the right time to enter the market with a visionary product; they are not obsessed with the personality traits of visionary leaders, but rather with building the organizational traits of a visionary company. Their greatest creation is the company itself and everything it represents." Most Chinese business leaders have not succeeded in "clock building." "Clock building" means establishing a mechanism that allows the company to survive and grow in the market through organizational strength, rather than relying on individuals, products, or opportunities. As the market becomes more mature and regulated, companies must increasingly rely on a sound mechanism, including a good organizational structure, a good evaluation and assessment system, and good strategic management.

"Profit beyond profit" and "cult-like culture." All great companies are "pragmatic idealists." "Built to Last" states, "Profit is a necessary condition for survival and a means to achieve a more important purpose, but for many visionary companies, profit is not the goal. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the human body; these are not the purpose of life, but without them, there is no life." In great companies, the pursuit beyond profit is instilled through a "cult-like culture." For Chinese companies, the pursuit beyond profit is often vague and abstract, often reduced to empty slogans. Most Chinese companies do not recognize the important role of corporate culture. A "cult-like culture" means that great companies must have strong shared values, which is the biggest challenge for Chinese companies to become great.

"Homegrown managers." Collins's research found that "among 18 great companies over a total of 1,700 years of history, only four CEOs came from outside." Homegrown managers are familiar with the company culture and are better able to lead change. From the experience of some domestic companies, internal managers are more likely to succeed in succession, while "paratroopers" (external managers) often face difficulties. Chinese companies should invest more effort in establishing internal promotion mechanisms and personnel development so that "homegrown managers can grow."

II. Hammer's Thought
In 1993, American management scholar Michael Hammer and James Champy defined Business Process Reengineering (BPR) in "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution": fundamentally rethinking and radically redesigning business processes to achieve significant improvements in cost, quality, service, and speed, enabling companies to best adapt to the modern business environment characterized by customers, competition, and change.

Compared to traditional management thoughts such as the "division of labor principle" and "institutionalized management theory," BPR emphasizes full development and cooperation within the enterprise. Its core content can be summarized as:

"Reengineering": implementing horizontal integration, adopting team-based work, compressing the organization vertically to flatten it, empowering employees to make decisions, and promoting concurrent engineering.

Emphasizing customer orientation: considering business goals and strategic direction with the customer at the center, and determining which business processes to set up based on customer needs.

For BPR to be implemented in Chinese enterprises, three main conditions must first be met:
1. The quality of managers and employees must be improved. Leaders must be willing to innovate, have a strong sense of market competition, communicate effectively inside and outside the company, and deeply understand the essence of BPR. After implementing BPR, employees have more decision-making opportunities and must have correspondingly high quality.
2. The level of technology must be raised. Currently, most Chinese enterprises have low levels of information technology application and backward production technology. BPR applied to modern enterprise management also depends on the support of information technology.
3. The creation of corporate culture and business philosophy. BPR also transforms the business philosophy, which in turn requires the creation of an appropriate corporate culture.

III. Kotler's Thought
Philip Kotler is a master of modern marketing and is known as the "father of modern marketing." He is almost synonymous with marketing—his classic book "Marketing Management" has become the preferred marketing textbook for business schools worldwide, including in China. He is also recognized as one of the "50 best management gurus of the 20th century."

Kotler focuses on marketing strategy and planning, marketing organization, international marketing, and social marketing. His latest research areas include high-tech marketing, and the study of competitive advantages of cities, regions, and countries.

About ten years ago, Kotler published "Marketing in the Future" (originally titled "Social Marketing"), which advanced marketing concepts from production orientation, product orientation, and marketing orientation to the stage of "social marketing." In the late 20th century and today, with economic globalization, a more multipolar world, and the emergence of a knowledge economy, we see a picture of severe environmental degradation, resource scarcity, rapid population growth, global economic contraction, social Darwinism, declining public services, the spread of AIDS, and a variety of electronic waste—all of which are issues that social marketing must address. Kotler's concept of "social marketing" elevates marketing to a higher level.

As the Chinese market fully transitions to a buyer's market, Kotler's marketing theories have played a significant role in promoting marketing popularization and improving corporate marketing standards. Today, concepts such as customer needs, customer value, customer loyalty, integrated marketing, marketing positioning, and global marketing have become widespread and deeply rooted in China. Many companies have transformed or are transforming into "customer-oriented" enterprises, and a number of excellent companies have successfully entered the international market after comprehensively enhancing their marketing capabilities.

IV. Kotter's Thought
John P. Kotter is a leading authority on leadership and change, and a lifelong professor at Harvard Business School. Kotter's most important ideas are the following two:

1. Leadership and management are two distinct concepts. The work of managers is to plan and budget, organize and staff, and control and solve problems, with the aim of establishing order; the work of leaders is to set direction, align stakeholders, and motivate and inspire employees, with the aim of producing change.

2. Corporate culture has a huge positive correlation with long-term operating performance. Cultural change is a time-consuming and extremely complex eight-step process, including: A. Establishing a greater sense of urgency; B. Creating a guiding coalition; C. Developing a vision and strategy; D. Communicating the change vision; E. Empowering employees for broad-based action; F. Generating short-term wins; G. Consolidating gains and producing more change; H. Anchoring new approaches in the culture. These eight steps must be executed in order; otherwise, the chances of success are very slim.

Chinese managers have always been unclear about the distinction between "leadership" and "management." What they call "my leader" or "company leader" actually refers to managers. If they do not clearly understand the terms, they naturally cannot perform the corresponding roles well.

Chinese companies rarely have long-lasting corporate cultures. When a strong leader retires, the company often declines, as the saying goes, "wealth does not last three generations." Kotter has extensive data supporting the relationship between corporate culture and business performance, which is worth our deep reflection.

Most professional managers' understanding of change is limited to the level of "Who Moved My Cheese?," which is far from sufficient to truly drive change. The eight steps of change proposed by Kotter are something we must understand.

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