Note: "Three cobblers with their wits combined equal Zhuge Liang the master mind" is sometimes just a wishful thought. Managing for the sake of managing, assessing for the sake of assessing, and informatizing for the sake of informatizing are putting the cart before the horse!
As the saying goes, "Three cobblers with their wits combined equal Zhuge Liang the master mind," meaning that three people of average ability, if they work together and pool their ideas, can come up with a plan even more thoughtful than Zhuge Liang's. But in real companies, why do groups of intelligent people often make things worse when they work together?
Once upon a time, there was a mountain, and in the mountain there was a temple, and in the temple there lived a monk. One monk carried water on his own; two monks carried water together; but three monks had no water to drink!
When the abbot of the head temple learned that the monks on the mountain were so poor they couldn't even get water to drink, he sent a director and a secretary to jointly solve the problem.
After taking office, the director found that the key issue was poor management, so he recruited some monks and established a Temple Management Department to formulate division of labor and processes.
To better learn from advanced foreign experience, the temple selected leaders like Tang Seng to go abroad for study; in addition, they spent money to invite priests from the Catholic and Protestant churches to teach MBA courses.
The foreign priests didn't stay long and left behind two treasures: BPR and ERP.
The secretary was also busy, believing that the key issue was that talent wasn't fully utilized and the temple culture wasn't well built, so he established a Human Resources Department and a Temple Labor Union, and seriously went through the motions of competitive hiring and fixed staffing.
A few days later, results appeared: the three monks started carrying water desperately, but no matter how much they carried, it wasn't enough to drink. Moreover, the young monks were all busy carrying water, and no one in the temple was chanting scriptures. As time went on, fewer and fewer pilgrims came to burn incense, and the incense money became tight.
To solve the income problem, the Temple Management Department and Human Resources Department held several days of meetings and finally decided to establish a dedicated Water Carrying Department for logistics and a dedicated Incense Burning Department for the market front end.
At the same time, to better carry out the work, the temple promoted more than a dozen monks to serve as deputy directors, director assistants, and appointed department-level sub-directors, deputy sub-directors, and sub-director assistants in each department.
The old problem was alleviated, but new problems followed.
The monks responsible for chanting scriptures at the front desk constantly complained of thirst and insufficient water, while the monks carrying water at the back complained of insufficient manpower, unpredictable and high water demand, and difficult service.
To better resolve this contradiction, after meetings and research, it was decided to establish a new department: the Water Drinking Response Department! It was specifically responsible for coordinating conflicts between the front and back ends.
To facilitate communication and coordination, each department set up a designated liaison monk. Although coordination was in place, the results were not ideal. Upon closer study, it was found that the causes were inaccurate water demand forecasts and insufficient wells.
So various departments held several more meetings and decided to strengthen the front-end monks' forecasting of drinking water and the assessment of the water-carrying monks' satisfaction, having the front and back ends sign agreements and score each other, improving the assessment mechanism.
To facilitate scoring and assessment, the temple specially purchased several computer systems, including a water carrying statistics system, an incense burning statistics system, an ordinary pilgrim donation analysis system, a big donor donation analysis system, etc., and also established an Incense Money Management Department, an Incense Money Disbursement Department, a Well Drilling Strategy Research Department, a Well Drilling Construction Department, a Well Drilling Maintenance Department, and so on.
Since the numbers from the various systems were always inaccurate and inconsistent, a Technology Development Center was established to maintain and do secondary development for the systems.
Due to too many departments and insufficient office space, the temple established a General Affairs Department to solve this problem, and finally decided to turn the entire temple into an office area, allowing pilgrims to burn incense only outside the mountain gate.
With many departments and many officials, documents and meetings naturally increased. To reduce the mountain of documents and sea of meetings, the General Affairs Office led the organization of N meetings about reducing meetings and issued a "document about reducing documents."
At the same time, to streamline the organization and improve efficiency, the temple also established an Office for Streamlining Organizations, a Department for Institutional Reform Research, and other departments.
Everything seemed reasonable, but the problems of incense money and drinking water remained unresolved. Where was the problem?
Some monks suggested holding an analysis meeting every month, so the Business Analysis Department came into being.
Analysis required a lot of data and reports, but the systems couldn't always provide them, so each department assigned some monks to manually compile statistics, fill out reports, and work for the systems.
The temple became unprecedentedly lively: some monks were desperately carrying water, some were desperately chanting scriptures, some were desperately coordinating, some were desperately analyzing... But no matter how busy they were, there still wasn't enough water to drink and not enough incense money to spend.
What was the reason?
One monk said the process wasn't smooth, another said the task decomposition was unreasonable, one said the department responsibilities were unclear, another said the assessment wasn't strong enough.
Only three people knew the key to the problem best—the original three monks. After all the talk, the problem was simply that there were too many idle people!
They said, "What's the point of all this blind analysis? What process problems, responsibility problems, interface problems, assessment problems—it's obviously an organizational bloat problem! If we had known this would happen, we might as well have been more self-disciplined from the start! Now we've brought in a bunch of mediocre people who don't do any real work and just cause trouble every day!"
The three monks couldn't stand it anymore and dared to report upward, requesting more water-carrying staff. After going through several levels, the director and secretary finally received the request.
After quarterly meetings, summaries, and analyses by various departments, and after several intense discussions, they finally managed to transfer some monks from other departments to provide support, but these cross-departmental monks couldn't carry water at all! They even criticized the water-carrying monks. The water-carrying monks again requested to lead the water-carrying team themselves. After evaluation, the General Organization Department believed that the three monks were professional but lacked management ability, and after some encouragement and persuasion, they maintained the status quo.
Another year passed, and the temple went bankrupt. Most of the monks died: some bodies were found by the well, dead from exhaustion; thousands of bodies were found in the temple, dead from thirst.
A few monks didn't die of thirst; they jumped to other temples. They were the "senior monks," and they brought with them "advanced management experience."
This is the reason many companies go bankrupt: headquarters gets bigger, the grassroots get busier, costs rise, and customers become more dissatisfied.
This is also a characteristic of traditional Chinese enterprises: individually, everyone is sensible, smart, and clever. But once they get together, they stare at each other and things become extremely complicated. You scheme against me, I scheme against him, he schemes against you, and in the end, all these cleverness cancels each other out!
So, a group of smart people together becomes a bunch of fools.
If not you, who else would go bankrupt!
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