Traveling through the sword to engage in military industry.

Although Ren Zhong did not find a direct answer, he finally had some ideas about the direction.

In his mind, he already had many successful business models, from George Eastman, the camera magnate, who was just around the corner, to Jack Welch, who was still studying for his doctorate.
Each one is a true legend.

Ren Zhong is absorbing the growth trajectories and ideas of these giants in managing successful businesses.

Next, Ren Zhong plans to pilot these ideas in his companies.

Fundamentally, the talent development mechanism for senior management of enterprises needs to be changed.

First of all, the approach of directly selecting talents from research institutions to start businesses is gradually being abandoned. Ren Zhong has already seen that in business operations, although people in technology are not absolutely unable to start businesses, most of the helmsmen of companies are directly dispatched by the technical research and development departments. Now it seems that this approach is becoming less and less feasible.

Today's entrepreneurs have to recruit and select widely from the social level. It is best to train multiple seed players and choose the final leader through a horse racing mechanism. Although the cycle is a bit long, at least three to five years, and at most ten years, the entrepreneurs who come out of this horse racing mechanism can keep a company developing for twenty to thirty years, just like Welch to General Motors, who led GM to glory for twenty years.

No matter how long or difficult it is, you have to persevere. In this regard, Ren Zhong is not prepared to rely entirely on himself. In his mind, he already has a big plan for high-level talent training. A talent selection committee will be set up at the level of the Liming Research Institute. 5 to 7 leading members will be selected from well-known entrepreneurs, practical experts and university professors. There will be an office under it to handle the summary of the training of each reserve talent. After the report is formed, it will be submitted to the committee for evaluation. There will be about 2-3 candidate training talents for each position, and these candidate talents will be evaluated every year.

Ultimately, once it is confirmed that the candidate has the ability to work independently, suggestions for promotion will be given, and the candidate will be allowed a transition period of 1 to 3 years to the next higher position. Only if the candidate completes various performance targets during the transition period will he or she be promoted to a formal leader.

Such a strict mechanism may seem somewhat bureaucratic, but it has low risks, and all promoted talents have demonstrated their skills in actual work.

Another mechanism is to poach talents from the top executives of other emerging companies, directly dig out leading talents from mature companies in society, and put them directly in important positions for training. From the perspective of efficiency, this method is fast, and it may only take half a year to a year from screening to recruitment. However, it is relatively risky. On the one hand, if the fields of the poached talents are not consistent, it will be a big problem if these talents cannot adapt to the switching of companies in different fields, because if it is between the same industry, there are basically no companies in China that can be compared with the companies under the Liming Research Institute in this field.

As a leader in technology, the companies under the Liming Research Institute are usually the leaders in a field and rarely fall out of the top three. In this case, they either have to poach from smaller companies or from other types of companies across industries. No matter which one, on the one hand, they have to consider the feelings of the candidate's original company, and on the other hand, they have to consider the adaptability of the parachuted senior executives to the company.

Therefore, Ren Zhong feels that this mechanism is risky. In his mind, he puts it in a supplementary position to see if he can recruit some outstanding management talents in the society to take up the banner in the companies under the Liming Research Institute.

This is the aspect of employing people. Ren Zhong feels that through these two channels, even if he cannot completely solve all the problems of senior management under his research institute, it will create huge external pressure on unqualified managers and prompt them to update their own knowledge and abilities.

Instead of being complacent and becoming a mechanical manager who simply executes procedures.

At the management level, it is appropriate to introduce external forces to stimulate the catfish effect. This aspect is the foundation of corporate management. No matter how difficult the task is, we must find a way to move forward. Moreover, when implementing this policy, it is best for him to observe the effectiveness of these methods as a bystander rather than do it personally.

In this way, the power of the mechanism can be formed rather than an extension of his personal power. A long-term mechanism can be created so that it can continue to be implemented even when he is no longer responsible for his duties.

In addition to employment, there is also research and development.

According to the current mechanism, the research of core technologies is basically completed by the Liming Research Institute, and then a company is established to develop applications. Judging from the actual implementation in the past, this mechanism seems to be very effective and the efficiency of developing results is very high.

But don’t forget that most of these highly efficient research results are based on the fact that after Ren Zhong purchased the products from the main world, from principles to certain processes, the R&D team followed a relatively certain technical route to reproduce the technology rather than conduct completely new innovative research!

In order to get results as quickly as possible, Ren Zhong even tried to transport samples from the main world as much as possible, if the volume and weight of the samples were not too large.

Although this approach greatly shortens the product development cycle, fundamentally speaking, this type of research does not play much of a role in cultivating the innovative capabilities of project team members.

This is also the reason why Ren Zhong needs to find ways to bring in top companies such as Zeiss and Rolls-Royce for joint research.

In terms of basic technology accumulation and formal new product R&D experience and processes, these companies are the top players in their respective fields.

For example, in the field of aviation engines, in the current research on three-rotor turbofan engines, even though Ren Zhong provided more detailed technical information to the aviation engine research team of Dongda University, during the joint development process, the progress of the part that Rolls-Royce is responsible for is much faster than that of the Dongda University team!

Relatively speaking, Ren Zhong provided Rolls-Royce with design specifications and some ideas, but even so, their implementation efficiency was much higher than that of the Dongda team. This is the difference in technical background.

Although Dongda has completely replicated the WS-9, the world's top turbofan engine, and gained a lot of valuable engineering experience, these experiences have not been fully integrated in the process of researching the three-rotor engine. Their understanding of many innovations of the new engine is much shallower than that of their peers. If Ren Zhong had not asked to be more conservative in providing information to the outside world, only the Dongda team would have had detailed information, and the Rolls-Royce technical team would have only proposed large specifications and design ideas.

This means that Dongda already has an almost complete picture of an actual three-rotor engine after it is formed, but Rolls-Royce can only see one part of it. Under these unfair conditions, Dongda's progress is somewhat lagging behind its partners.

This is the sequelae left by forcing things to grow too fast. Ren Zhong is of course well aware of the drawbacks of this research method. However, in the initial stage, if he wants to overtake others, he has to take a shortcut by importing some goods from the main world, and he can't care about forcing the team to grow too fast.

First we have it, then we can think about how to make it better and more solid. When this research method is fed back to the mechanism, we can find that we rely heavily on Ren Zhong's information to provide ideas and technical routes for implementation, rather than the research team proposing new technical routes themselves!
On the other hand, after the current technology is developed and transformed into an enterprise, should the research of the next generation of technology and products continue to be placed in the research center, or should it be transferred from the research center to the enterprise, and a new research center should be established in the enterprise to be responsible for the iteration and optimization of the next generation of products?

At present, this interface is not very clear, because Ren Zhong cannot simply put the technology research into the enterprise, or continue to put it into the independent research center under the Liming Research Institute. Both of these have inevitable disadvantages.

If we look at enterprises, when they start up, they definitely do not have as strong technical strength as the research center under the Dawn Research Institute. This will inevitably seriously extend the evolution cycle of the next generation of products, and they may not even evolve the next generation of products.

For a high-investment, high-tech product like aircraft engines, it is almost impossible to set up a new research center from scratch.

Therefore, for this type of product, we must rely on the original research center to continue to develop and evolve the next generation of products. This model is the joint research and development model of enterprises + R&D institutions. The enterprise earns profits through productization, and feeds this part of the profit back to the research center to invest in new product development. In this way, R&D and the enterprise form a delicate situation of mutual checks and balances. From a mechanism perspective, this R&D model has a certain rationality. The core R&D still needs to be placed under the Liming Research Institute to be responsible for major basic technology research.

At present, most of them adopt this model.

However, this model has certain drawbacks, that is, the product direction is also extremely dependent on Ren Zhong's decision.

Rather than reaching an agreement through consensus between companies and research centers.

Judging from the results, this model obviously cannot be implemented well in the post-Renzhong era.

Therefore, Ren Zhong felt that this model could no longer continue after him, and that this model would inevitably lead to a dead end if a new successor took office after him!

Not everyone can travel between two worlds and obtain valuable technical information and experience in development and application from different historical times and spaces.

Therefore, although it is still necessary to maintain Ren Zhong's authority in establishing research projects, we must also start to pilot improvements to this mechanism and encourage people in research centers and enterprises to start proposing new research topics.

Therefore, in terms of the establishment and assessment of new research topics, enterprises must have certain assessment rights to prevent research centers from slacking off. Enterprises must also have teams for product application research to carry out some specific research work on the front line and output new marketable products through micro-innovations and micro-improvements in basic technologies or basic products.

Especially in terms of civilian products, Ren Zhong believes that the leading role in new product development in this area should be given to enterprises. What the research center should do is major basic innovative research to ensure that the next generation of products are launched ahead of competitors.

For example, for home appliances such as cameras and televisions, the specific products to be launched will now be handed over to the company's internal R&D center for research and innovation. The research center under the Liming Research Institute will shift its focus to researching revolutionary technologies such as liquid crystal technology, new generation motors, new generation photosensitive materials, and new generation lithium battery technology.

And major technological breakthroughs in the production of related production line equipment.

In order to ensure the sustainable development of R&D, in terms of hard investment in R&D expenses, Ren Zhong directly and roughly stipulated that more than 20% of the revenue of technology-based enterprises must be invested in scientific research, most of which (5%) must be allocated to the research center that develops the technology. The remaining research expenses of the enterprise must be ensured to be more than 30%, and up to %.

By maintaining this high-intensity R&D investment, we can maintain the intensity of research in the hope of maintaining long-term technological competitiveness.

The research center has the dominant power over the expenditure of these funds, but in terms of assessment, if the research center fails to produce new results according to the schedule, and the results are inferior to those of the company's own research center, then according to a three-year cycle, the allocation ratio of the next round of scientific research funds will be adjusted according to the output ratio. If the results of the company's research center are more than those of the Liming Institute's research center, then the funding ratio for the next three-year R&D cycle will be adjusted accordingly.

These works were put to the Achievement Appraisal Committee for evaluation. Liming Research Institute has a 5- or 7-member Achievement Appraisal Committee for each industry field to appraise the technical achievements related to the field, and to evaluate the technological leadership, market potential and other dimensions to ensure that each technical achievement has a relatively objective evaluation result.

其中技术维度分成1-5级，而市场维度则分成百万以下、100万-1000万、1千万-1亿、1亿-5亿、5亿以上等五个等级。

Although there may be some discrepancies in the evaluation, this is a fairly fair model in comparison.

Finally, in terms of dividends, the current short-term behavior pattern has also been changed. Under the new mechanism, the three-year rolling return must be used as a benchmark. If the three-year total growth is lower than the previous three years, the dividend will be reduced to less than 6% of the normal standard. Only by achieving an annual growth of at least 10% will there be a 100% dividend opportunity.

On this basis, companies are also required to achieve innovation requirements in these dimensions, with new product sales accounting for more than 15% of total sales within three years.

Traditional enterprises such as steel, chemical and shipbuilding must invest at least 5% of their sales revenue in product innovation and research on new materials and new product varieties, and cannot rely on their past achievements indefinitely.

After absorbing the opinions of experts from the main world and gradually forming a complete plan, Ren Zhong began to prepare for a pilot project in the companies under the Liangjian World.

As he is still young and has time to perfect this new mechanism, Ren Zhong plans to make a major optimization of the corporate management of the Dawn-related industries in the world of Bright Sword to ensure that these companies can maintain their long-term prosperity after his death.

(End of this chapter)