---
title: "The Winter of Management"
description: "Behind technology lies ideology. From the Mongol cavalry's defeat at the Battle of Balqiao to the rise of modern management, this article argues that the internet is a technological revolution that will challenge and transform classical management theory, ushering in a new spring through technological insight and design thinking."
author: "刘东畅"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-10-23"
language: "en"
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---

# The Winter of Management

> Behind technology lies ideology. From the Mongol cavalry's defeat at the Battle of Balqiao to the rise of modern management, this article argues that the internet is a technological revolution that will challenge and transform classical management theory, ushering in a new spring through technological insight and design thinking.

**Behind technology lies ideology**
Let's start with an unrelated story.
In the 13th century, the fierce Mongol cavalry, wielding sabers and bows, swept across the Eurasian continent. With flexible tactics, bold charges, and superb combat skills, they successively destroyed more than forty countries and established the largest empire in history.
Then, as long history passed and dynasties changed, we arrive at the end of the Qing Dynasty.
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, at the Baliqiao Bridge near Tongzhou, elite Mongol cavalry led by the Qing commander Sengge Rinchen faced the Anglo-French forces, who were less than one-third their number but equipped with **muzzle-loading rifles** and smoothbore cannons. They charged bravely but suffered a disastrous defeat, with corpses strewn across the field, while the Anglo-French side lost only 5 men.
The fiercest part of the battle went roughly like this:
 _After the battle began, the two sides were locked in a stalemate for a while. Sengge Rinchen's cavalry once approached the enemy's command post, charging to within less than fifty meters of the enemy, but then there was no "close combat" as expected; their arrows also failed to threaten the French soldiers hiding in the trenches. Instead, the French soldiers' "every bullet fired always knocked some cavalryman off his horse," and the cavalrymen who charged ahead "were met with dense fire, and many men and horses were killed." But the numerous Mongol cavalry still shouted and charged forward. Just then, "because the roads were bad," the French artillery, which had been "blocked midway," arrived, and shells landed accurately among the Mongol cavalry, causing them to begin to scatter. One of the Qing commanders, Shengbao, was also hit by artillery fire; his mount was killed, and he himself was wounded in multiple places and carried off the line. "Shells poured onto the bridge," "the marble on the bridge railings was shattered," and "the stone tigers (actually stone lions) placed on the bridge planks were also damaged." The artillery fire forced the Qing army to retreat in disorder, and the French seized the opportunity to attack, with soldiers fixing bayonets and charging at Baliqiao. Although the Qing defenders of the bridge were very brave, "not one of them retreated; all died in the line of duty." Baliqiao was occupied by the French._
This is a landmark battle in military history, symbolizing **the clash between feudal cavalry and modern armies**. From then on, the Mongol cavalry, which had been proud for over six hundred years, came to a dismal end.
However, the wheel of history did not stop. Soon, the **breech-loading rifle**, which surpassed the muzzle-loader, was born. Simply put, the method of loading changed from loading from the front of the barrel to loading from the rear. This gun seemed to only change the loading method, but in fact it had considerable advantages over the muzzle-loader, such as more accurate shooting, faster loading and firing speeds, no need to stand the gun upright for loading, and the ability to adopt skirmish tactics, lying prone for concealed shooting, rather than requiring soldiers to stand in dense linear formations for volley fire like with muzzle-loaders.
Thus, only six years after the Battle of Baliqiao, Austria, equipped with muzzle-loaders, went to war with Prussia, equipped with breech-loaders. The war turned into another massacre; Austria, despite having an absolute numerical advantage, suffered losses several times greater than Prussia's. An Austrian colonel said that (because muzzle-loaders had to be loaded standing up and loading was slow), his soldiers felt they were unarmed most of the time during battle, while the Prussians were always ready to fire.
**In the era of breech-loaders, the tactics of muzzle-loaders were bound to be completely abandoned.** For example, during the Russo-Turkish War, many conservative generals opposed skirmish tactics, emphasizing that soldiers charging upright was a sign of bravery, but such prejudice often only resulted in unnecessary sacrifice of soldiers.
From ancient times to the present, technology has never been merely a tool. **Major technological changes themselves imply ideological changes**, and this change brings about an irreversible subversion of **human thinking, motives, and ways of acting**, just as we cannot now imagine life in the Middle Ages without electric lights, nor journeys without cars and airplanes.
In this process, **technology** initially must act on **productive forces**, and the improvement of productive forces inevitably brings about changes in **production methods and production relations**. Then, changes in production methods and relations inevitably lead to changes in **value creation and value distribution models**, which in turn affect **organizational behavior patterns**, and even the rise and fall of **various social strata**.
Therefore, we find that in world history, almost all major historical processes, when traced to their roots, have technological progress playing a role behind them.
Examples are easy to give: a steam engine brought humanity from the pastoral agricultural era into the efficient, precise, standardized industrial era. At that time, the management models that existed among nobles, manors, and serfs could no longer be used in the industrial era. So people began to think about management suitable for the industrial era, and after Adam Smith, we had Taylor, Barnard, Drucker...
Then came electricity, computers, industrial automation, and now **the internet**, which brought about huge changes.
Today, in the face of internet technological progress, many people still emphasize that nothing has changed; the internet is merely a technological tool. It has not changed management, the market, or business strategy.
At this moment, I seem to see, in the late 19th century, a team of elite soldiers holding muzzle-loaders, standing shoulder to shoulder in linear formation, facing a small force holding breech-loaders, lying prone in skirmish formation or hidden behind cover, stubbornly completing the actions of loading, raising, and volley firing.
In my view, today's classical management theories are like an infantry drill manual for fighting with muzzle-loaders, because they have too many similarities.
**First,** they both appear quite **anti-human**. Whether it's the "queue execution" linear formation of the muzzle-loader era or the extreme objectification of people in industrial assembly lines, both give a feeling of "not treating people as people," and to some extent, they make first-time observers think such practices are very foolish.
**Second,** this anti-human nature had **considerable rationality** under the specific technological conditions of the time. For example, the linear formation was actually to offset the problems of slow firing speed and inaccuracy, using numerical advantage to compensate for qualitative deficiencies. Industrial production was to make people compensate for the "simple" and "unintelligent" weaknesses of machines. Even if the action was just a simple repetitive motion for trained people, for machines, realizing this "last mile" function had a marginal cost far higher than hiring cheap labor; it was complex mechanical design, not a line of code as today.
**Third,** after a period of time, such practices would be solidified into a certain "**culture**." For example, officers would consider skirmish formations as a sign of "cowardice," and managers would consider the lack of systems and processes as a sign of "chaos."
**Fourth,** when new technology emerges, anti-human practices **immediately face challenges**, such as breech-loaders versus linear formations, and computers, automation, and robots versus industrial production.
So today, with the advent of the internet, will classical management collapse like the medieval castles symbolizing pastoral idylls, amid the roar of steam engines, and usher in **the first winter of management** in a bleak landscape?
**Yes, it will**, I firmly believe now. If you don't believe it, look at how wars are fought now.
**The Death Knell of Classical Management**
As we all know, industrial society produced powerful corporate organizations. These organizations were built on the motives of **reducing transaction costs** and **improving productivity**, with the purpose of **value creation**, and countless people attached themselves to organizations to obtain **value distribution**.
Thus, one after another, behemoth-like organizations swept through industrial society, carrying countless lives, composing stirring corporate legends. The research object of classical management is precisely these enterprises.
But as we all know, when premises change, conclusions may also change. If **external transaction costs are equal to or even lower than internal transaction costs**, or if we find **forms of collaboration that can tap into greater productivity**, it will inevitably lead to organizational mutation or even disappearance. Classical management, which takes the current organizational model as its research object, will inevitably be challenged or even subverted.
And this is happening. In terms of **transaction costs**, the development of internet technology has greatly shortened the distance between people, facilitated connections, and reduced **communication costs**, directly affecting the **search costs**, **negotiation costs**, and **enforcement costs** that make up external transaction costs. Thus, we find that the organizational development path of **vertical integration** has begun to collapse. A company's finance, HR, supply chain, marketing, and even technology and design can all be outsourced, and an excellent talent becomes increasingly less dependent on an organization.
In terms of **productivity**, today's hierarchical organizations, rather than promoting productivity, are more like **suppressing productivity development**. Within the constraints of hierarchy and processes, organizations become increasingly conservative and rigid, and in the face of rapidly changing markets, they appear slower and slower. The excellent talents in organizations have to devote great energy to dealing with various management behaviors instead of focusing on value creation. Especially the excellent talents among lower-level employees, their career development and ability utilization are tightly bound to a corner of the organization by hierarchy and processes. Their created value is directly evaluated by managers rather than by customers or the market, and their voices are not valued by the organization. These and other organizational drawbacks lead to the burying of talent and hinder the maximization of their value.
Therefore, in this situation, the best way for talents to realize their self-worth is to **break away from dependence on organizations and, with the help of the internet, achieve collaboration completely different from the industrial era**. For example, I can crowdfund a coffee shop with a few hundred friends, use my idle resources or skills to join platforms like Airbnb or Uber to earn money anytime, or even build a self-media to earn advertising revenue. These methods were unimaginable in the industrial era, when people worshipped the power of capital and organizations. But in the internet era, where every node has equal relationships, any small company just founded in a Silicon Valley garage, as long as it has a good idea, can beat a century-old multinational giant into a pulp.
This phenomenon is not necessarily de-organizing or re-organizing; it is more like the disappearance of organizational boundaries. The result of disappearance is more like a pan-organization based on the "free association of free people" under the internet, but this organization is no longer the organization mentioned above, nor does it belong to any type of organization that has existed in human history. Therefore, we need entirely new organizational theories to explain it, rather than hoping to interpret it within current theories.
**If there's a car to drive, I don't need to find a faster horse.**
Some may ask: this situation only applies to **rapidly changing** scenarios, not to **static** scenarios. In static scenarios, by embedding capabilities into processes, you can reduce dependence on excellent talents and keep the organization highly productive.
This is the compromise of classical management, seeing itself as classical physics facing breakthroughs in relativity and quantum mechanics, retaining its explanatory power over the material world in low-speed, macroscopic states.
But unfortunately, the "**low-speed macroscopic state**" that belongs to classical management is disappearing.
With the continuous iterative development of artificial intelligence, robots, and 3D printing technology, **almost all static scenarios can now be considered replaceable**. This covers not only the supply chain links that have already undergone drastic changes, but also some links that require higher-level thinking, such as driving vehicles and writing news. When people are freed from these "low-speed macroscopic states" that once seemed "eternally unchanged," classical management, used to explain such states, can easily be replaced by computer science, perhaps becoming "AI management" or "robot management."
Again, **behind technology lies ideology**.
**The True Spring of Management**
Shelley wrote in "Ode to the West Wind," "**If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?** " If the winter of classical management truly arrives, will there be a next spring?
My answer is, **yes**.
But in today's society, where cross-disciplinary phenomena are frequent, this spring will not come from management itself, but from grafting from other fields. Currently, there are two forces that can change management: one is **technological insight**, and the other is **design thinking**.
With the development of the internet, integrating technological insight into management is the most obvious strategy. At this time, the advantages of technology represent, on the one hand, **the simplification of enterprise operations and management actions**, and on the other hand, **the discovery of previously hidden facts**. The combination of these two is enough to change our understanding of management.
For example, **Google's Project Oxygen** used data mining and analysis to compile statistics from over 10,000 observations of managers, over 1,000 variables, including various performance evaluations, survey feedback, and other reports, to answer the question "What leadership model is best for us?" The eight characteristics finally discovered came entirely from the optimal integration of individual employee perceptions, forming a bottom-up construction.
Google's People Operations department has used big data technology to complete analyses in multiple areas, such as the optimal number of interviews, the best utility plan for compensation and benefits, prediction of employee departure likelihood, and even details like the length of lunch lines and plate sizes.
Without the application of big data technology, classical management would be powerless in the face of these problems. This is the charm of technology: it allows us to **face the future**, rather than only citing the past.
In addition to technological insight, **design thinking** is also a concept worth noting. Its value lies in giving us more dimensions to understand a complex and rapidly changing world. Designers face clients who often don't know exactly what they want, and designers must understand the client's psychology, behavior, and experience to output results that surprise and delight the client.
Classical management, in the face of purposes that cannot be clarified, is often powerless. They tend to define things clearly and tightly, like designing a machine. This is the legacy of the industrial era. If you don't believe it, just open any book on human resources; they often start with the most basic concepts of duties, positions, and posts, and then talk about person-post matching.
But in reality, the market changes too fast. Based on changes in strategic and business needs for capabilities, new positions are constantly created and old ones disappear, making precise person-post matching increasingly difficult, and the workload required becomes larger and larger. If this continues, one day in the near future, person-post matching will become an impossible task.
If positions disappear, one of the foundations of organizational theory—**the division of labor system**—will be the first to be challenged. In fact, the demand for talent now increasingly requires comprehensive abilities and end-to-end vision to adapt to any possible change, while the previous division of labor based on specialization and hierarchy is becoming increasingly impractical.
**The winter of management is not scary; what is scary is that we don't try to make a fire to keep warm.**
Management will change, but some things will never change, and that is human nature itself. Human nature does not change; modern management is not about changing human nature, but about **the liberation and return of humanity** after being alienated by the industrial era.
For thousands of years, humanity has continuously studied human nature in fields such as **science, psychology, and economics**, and many of those conclusions have not yet been digested by management. Moreover, now we have technologies like the internet, big data, and machine learning that can help us re-verify, in an **empirical** way, the theories we once held as dogma. And on the basis of empirical evidence, whether the philosophical foundation of management will shift from **rationalism** to **empiricism**, from being built on theoretical models to being built on scenarios, is not a small possibility.
Dig into the snow of winter, and you'll find firewood everywhere, as long as we haven't lost the will to bend down and the ability to pick it up.
Perhaps, one day, when our descendants see these industrial-era management thoughts, they will be like watching a movie about the American Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic Wars, pointing at the muzzle-loading troops "queuing up to be shot" face to face, and exclaim in shock: **Why did history have such stupid and anti-human ways of fighting?**
Then we chuckle and tell them that people at that time had no choice but to do so, and then we look up, tilt our heads at a 45-degree angle, and weep.
**-END-**
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