Tao Te Ching and Wuwei Management

Chapter 14 2 "Being the King of Hundred Valleys": Don't be obsessed with the cold superior-subordinate relationship
The best leadership is like air, invisible and intangible, but indispensable.

The reason why Jianghai can be the king of the hundred valleys is because of his goodness, so he can be the king of the hundred valleys. ——"Tao Te Ching" Chapter 66
The reason why Jianghai can become the place where all the rivers flow is because it is good at being in a low place, so it can become the king of all valleys.

For a long time, people have only emphasized the restrictive effect of external systems on people themselves, because people believe that as long as there is a sound and perfect framework, everyone can perform their duties and work hard.When the modern management system is perfected, under the influence of fame and fortune as the fundamental driving force, it is only natural for the weak to prey on the strong.But what it brings to people is a kind of deep internal injury, a kind of helplessness and torment towards the world.

At this time, I suddenly thought of Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching.Thinking about whether there is an environment that can arouse people's desire for the improvement of their own quality of life and for values ​​other than chasing fame and fortune.

In contemporary times, various modern engineering technologies and business activities cannot be done by one person alone, so a division of labor and cooperation have been formed, and commercial organizations with a scale of operation that are much larger than those of our ancestors.Is this also one of the crux of the problem?

Jack Welch is a master because he gave a suitable answer to a pointed proposition-whether a company can be too big to manage.But what we care about is only how to have a harmonious and friendly working atmosphere.In the early days of Microsoft's founding, it was even a punk-style team, but the pursuit of fame and fortune has made it a huge bureaucracy and lack of vitality. ID company (creator of Doom and Thor) once just wanted to create the world's first-class games, creating an eternal legend of 5 or 6 guys, but the modern financial system and concepts have destroyed all of this.Perhaps a company-style team will eventually tend to go public for financing and divide up the turbid flow of equity, and then the board of directors, a large number of CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CTOs, and CXXXOs will fall into the cliché and cannot extricate themselves.

Maybe what we want is not a cold company, but a loving team.

The system is cold, administrative orders are rigid, and the relationship between superiors and subordinates creates distance.Therefore, when leading employees, enterprise managers should not appear condescending and arrogant because they are in the leadership position, cannot rely on the framework of the system to make subordinates feel that management lacks emotion, and cannot rely one-sidedly on orders to make subordinates feel bound Employees should not have a sense of distance because of the relationship between superiors and subordinates; otherwise, the team will have endless problems.

There is a zoo in New York, the United States. Due to the lack of manpower, the zoo recruited a group of breeders from the society. One of them is very clean and caring for small animals, so he cleans the house where the small animals live every day. clean.But things turned out to be the opposite. Those little animals didn't appreciate him at all. In a clean and comfortable environment, they all gradually became weak.

what is the reason behind the scene?The breeder was very distressed, so he went to ask someone with experience.Others told him: Those animals have their own living habits, some like to smell the turbid air, and some feel safe when they see their own feces.Only by respecting their living habits can they grow up healthily.

This story has quite a moral for business management.Effective management must address the needs of individuals within the organization, accommodate individual differences, and on this basis, respond flexibly and perform multi-management, so as to achieve a "harmonious" team atmosphere.If, like the breeder in the story, ignoring the individual differences of employees and blindly pursuing a seemingly perfect unity, then such an organization will eventually disintegrate or become dead due to obliterating the individuality of the individual.

This is evident in the rise and fall of Ford Motor.Henry Ford is a banner of the American auto industry. He has changed the way of life of the American people and is a hero of the American people. He is known as "the greatest entrepreneur of the 20th century".However, Ford's authoritarian management and his antagonism with his employees made his business suffer.Ford has a wrong concept. In his eyes, employees are no different from commodities. Employees who do not obey orders can be thrown away at any time. Anyway, as long as they pay money, they can "buy" new employees at any time.

This notion nearly killed Ford's career.Beginning in 1889, Ford tried twice to start a car company, but both failed due to management problems. In 1903, Ford co-founded the American Ford Motor Company with others. Later, Ford hired management expert James?Kutzens as manager.Under James' excellent management, in 1908, the Ford Model T, which dominated the world, was born.Subsequently, the Model T car occupied the automobile market extremely quickly, and Ford Motor Company also ascended the throne of the world's largest automobile industry in one fell swoop.

Success and honor made Ford more arrogant and rude. He thought that all his employees were just hired, so if the employees did not obey him absolutely, they could only let him go.For nearly 20 years until the 20s, Ford only offered the market a single-color, single-model Model T.His salesperson has repeatedly proposed to increase the color of the car's appearance, but Ford's answer is: "Customers can choose any color, as long as it is black." This stopped the pace of progress.Because of Ford's arbitrariness, employees also left one after another. In the end, even Kuzens had no choice but to find another place. In 20, Henry Ford paid a huge price for his arbitrariness, and Ford's market share was surpassed by General Motors.

The lesson is profound.By the end of Henry Ford's life, the Ford Motor Company was on the verge of collapse.His grandson took over the reins of the company from his grandfather.In order to save this crumbling company, Ford II hired a large number of outstanding management talents, such as McNamara, who later served as the US Secretary of Defense, and Nestor Bridge, the former deputy general manager of General Motors.Under the vigorous reform of these people, Ford has regained its vitality. "Ford Kingdom" ushered in its glorious peak once again.

However, the good times didn't last long.With the performance of the company getting better and better, the stubborn and domineering ills of the Ford family broke out again. Ford II inherited the bad temper of the old Ford. He began to be jealous of his talents and fired three outstanding general managers who disagreed with him. .Under his exclusion, Bridge, McNamara and others who made great contributions to Ford's re-emergence left the company one after another.The departure of these outstanding talents caused Ford to start to decline again, and its performance plummeted. In the end, it had to hand over all the management rights of the company to people other than the Ford family.

In fact, the best leadership style should be air leadership.The air is invisible and intangible, so we don’t give people meaningless pressure, just as the pressure that a good leader puts on employees is the pressure necessary for life and the pressure that employees self-inflict; but air is everywhere, and people can’t live without it , when a leader is inseparable from the company, it shows the value of the leader to the company's development.The thoughts and ideas of leadership, as well as the institutional norms conveyed, must permeate every corner of the enterprise; leaders who can reach this level are truly brilliant leaders.

(End of this chapter)