By Xiao Masong

The original title is "Xiao Masong | From Results to Methods: A New Thinking Model"

When chatting with some company bosses, I often hear them say: "We are a result-oriented company." But later, observing how their companies do things, I find they are not actually result-oriented, but method-oriented.

What does method-oriented mean? It means that when we receive a task, we first determine the nature of the task, and then invoke the usual methods to carry out the work.

For example, in new media communication, advertising agency proposals are almost all the same: KOL, event marketing, H5, viral videos, WeChat, Weibo, etc.

In fact, these proposals are not really proposing solutions; they are listing methods, without proposing a real solution to the problem.

Why is this? Because listing common methods is simple, while finding a specific solution is complex.

Sometimes, even if you sincerely want to solve a problem, you are still influenced by habitual practices and cannot solve it, because the problem may never be solved by common methods.

This kind of inertial thinking also affects a large number of people.

01 American Lawns

American middle-class people like to have a lawn in front of their houses and spend a lot of time maintaining them. But what significance does a lawn have for a family?

Actually, a simple lawn is not that fun; sometimes it is not as good as Japanese or Chinese garden designs. But American middle-class people just like to have lawns; they do not like shrubs, nor big trees and flowers, nor small ponds, and certainly not a date tree on the left and another date tree on the right.

It is historical habit that has formed the European and American lawn worship. Before the Industrial Revolution, lawns were only owned by the nobility, because without mechanization, maintaining them entirely by manpower was very costly, and they had no practical output, so only nobles had lawns.

This gave rise to the European and American lawn worship, so now every family has a lawn.

This is like in Jiangxi and Hunan regions, where cooking is still extremely salty, because in the past only wealthy families could afford salt. Europeans like sweet food, which is extremely unhealthy, for the same reason: when sugarcane was introduced to Europe, only a very small area could grow it, so sugar was very precious. This formed a worship of sweet food; worship became habit, and habit strengthened people's dependence on sweet food.

Human breast milk is almost not sweet. If children's sugar intake is controlled when they are young, they will not have a strong dependence on sweet food when they grow up.

02 A Reversed Way of Thinking: From Results to Methods

So, in some matters, the power of habit is very terrible; it can lead you into a dead end.

Inertial thinking makes you ignore whether your methods can achieve the goal, and you habitually follow the original methods. Do you achieve the result? Only at the end do you discover that this was an impossible task.

So those who do not follow the beaten track are result-first.

The Model T might be an unsurpassable miracle in automotive history. Ford reduced the price of cars from $4,700 in the early 20th century to $360 in 1910. At that time, Ford's Model T production exceeded half of the world's total automobile production.

Many people think that Henry Ford found the standard production process of assembly line, thereby reducing costs, and then launched the extremely low-priced Model T. This is typical inertial thinking, because the traditional pricing method is that cost determines price.

But old Ford did not think that way. He used the opposite method: let price determine cost. Ford calculated that only if the car's price was reduced to this level would the American people buy cars in large quantities.

So he first set the price (that is, the goal), and then looked for ways to massively reduce costs. This is price determining cost.

This is a maverick way of thinking. I call it "from results to methods." Although Ford used this thinking to create the miracle of the Model T more than 100 years ago, after so many years, we are still accustomed to the thinking mode from methods to results.

03 Nagoya Airport

Japan's Nagoya Airport is said to be the most profitable airport in Japan.

This airport was built for the Aichi Expo. When they received the task, their research and calculations showed that according to the existing construction methods, even if they started construction the night they received the task, it would be impossible to complete before the Expo.

The team responsible for building the airport did not start work immediately, but began meeting to discuss how to complete the airport as soon as possible. As a result, the meetings lasted for half a year, and the airport made no progress.

After half a year, these Japanese people formulated a detailed plan that greatly shortened the construction period. In the end, they really delivered before the Expo opened, and the cost was also saved by 25%. Of course, if it were handed to the Chinese, they would also complete it on time, right?

For example, the construction of Nagoya Airport originally required land reclamation first, and then building the foundation and the airport. They changed it to simultaneously reclaim land and build the foundation and airport, overlapping the two engineering cycles by more than a year and a half.

Also, there were 20,000 navigation lights on the original runway. Each maintenance required removing the seals, checking each one, and screwing them back on. The maintenance time for each light was 15 minutes.

Then the navigation light manufacturer changed the structure of the lights to a plug-in type, allowing a new light to be inserted directly, and the old one sent to the factory for inspection. As a result, the maintenance time for each light was reduced from 15 minutes to 1 minute.

The original navigation lights were approved by the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau, but this manufacturer greatly reduced the maintenance cost of the lights by changing the structure.

First set the goal, then choose the methods to achieve it according to the goal, rather than directly doing things according to common practices. This is what made Nagoya Airport the most profitable airport.

Moreover, Nagoya Airport believes that the airport should pursue safe, fast operation and profitability, not the luxury and grandeur of appearance. This also allowed the airport to cut a large amount of costs.

04 Product Manager Set Meal

Let me give another example, although friends who follow my public account may already be familiar with it.

When I was at Baofeng, HR gave me a task to help design an advertisement for recruiting product managers, because we were in urgent need of many product managers at that time.

My thinking was: Since we have not found suitable product managers through traditional channels for so long, can we find them just by making another advertisement?

So we broke the original approach. We partnered with Xiyeye Roujiamo and launched a "Product Manager Set Meal" in all their chain restaurants (because Xiyeye's restaurant locations coincide with the distribution of internet startups in Beijing). As long as you brought a product manager's business card, you could eat a Product Manager Set Meal for 1 yuan.

As a result, we collected a large number of product managers' business cards, and then let HR call them to poach them.

If you use traditional methods to recruit, how long would it take?

The "from results to methods" way of thinking encourages us to think carefully before doing things:

How deeply are we influenced by inertial thinking and methods? Can we try to break their limits? Can we reverse-engineer from the results to find the right methods?