The bottom line is the rules. The bottom line must be true, and it really shows the state of "cliff edge". Only the real bottom line can make people willing to spend resources to maintain it. Only the maintained bottom line is authoritative, otherwise it can only be called a false bottom line.
For example, melamine in dairy products is because it breaks through people's physiological bottom line.
Dairy producers in China, in order to reduce costs, add a lot of water to fresh milk, and in order to cover up the fact that the content of protein in diluted fresh milk is too low, add melamine to muddle through. Of course, when melamine was added, they also had their own bottom line-it was not added to the dairy products exported for the Beijing Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. Moreover, they think that it should not be an accident to add less, so in each kilogram of milk powder, Mengniu added 28.6 mg, Yili added 12 mg, and Guangming contained 98.6 mg per kilogram. ...
The babies who drank these brands of milk powder basically didn't get kidney calculi. These enterprises may feel lucky, as long as the content of melamine is well controlled, the adulterated game can be played all the time.
However, Sanlu Group took the lead in breaking this bottom line. It added 2563 milligrams of melamine to every kilogram of milk powder, which caused many babies to die, thus detonating the milk powder incident. In the end, Sanlu, the former milk powder giant, was split and merged, and the peers had a capital chain crisis one after another.
This shows that there are two bottom lines between enterprises and the public on the issue of melamine. Before the incident, the company thought that as long as the added melamine did not exceed 100 mg, it could live in peace. After the incident, the state clarified the content standard, which was set at 2.5mg/kg. We must find enough space to compete for the bottom.
The so-called bottom space is the distance from the bottom line. For enterprises, this means their living space or business opportunities.
Foxconn moved from Taiwan Province Province to Shenzhen in the late 1980s, because the bottom line of wages in Taiwan Province Province has been raised, while the labor force in Chinese mainland is only a fraction of that in Taiwan Province Province. After Foxconn arrived in Shenzhen, it broke the higher wage bottom line of workers in Taiwan Province Province, thus winning more competition space. After the wages of workers in the Pearl River Delta gradually increased, Foxconn pushed the manufacturing industry to inland areas such as the Yangtze River Delta, in order to gain competition space by breaking through the bottom line of wages.
The best state of the bottom race is Ren's theory of "twisting towels". He said, "The towel is broken and the enterprise is finished; Only when the towel is wrung out and the towel has not stopped, this is the best state. " In the initial stage of competitive organizations, there is still the possibility of two-way communication because the competitors are not strong enough. With the success of competitive organizations, the strength of competitors is getting stronger and stronger, one-way communication is becoming more and more prominent, and top-down command and control is beyond doubt. So as to gradually establish an authoritarian culture suitable for competitive organizations.
All competitors love to hear good news and hate bad news, so competitors have developed the bad habit of reporting good news without reporting bad news for their own survival needs. Because if you report your worries, it is easy to be regarded as "lack of fighting spirit and like to make excuses" by your competitors. In order to maintain competitive strength, competitors usually don't want to be judged and questioned by competitors, so this communication can only be one-way.
Guo Taiming, the boss of Foxconn, is often described as domineering and fierce.
He implements strict militarized management in Foxconn: Foxconn's grass-roots employees have to receive five days of basic training, including standing at attention at ease and marching in procession; The company's orders are always beyond doubt and defense; You can't find a reason not to do it well.
Guo Taiming always said to his men in the tone of marching and fighting: "When did you March, and how many people didn't faint?" Isn't it raining or sunny? "
Guo Taiming also advocates the concept of "dictatorship for the public": because we want to strive for speed, we are dictatorial, but the benefits of dictatorship are rewarded to the company and can be shared by shareholders and employees.
For horizontal communication within the organization, competitors have always been discouraged, because he instinctively feels that communication under subordinates can easily lead to group alliances and form a force against the bottom of competition. This is "there are policies at the top and countermeasures at the bottom".
In addition, competitors also want to exert great influence on informal communication systems, including gossip and gossip. Although informal, information is transmitted faster, and competitors often think that this information is more accurate and credible than the information transmitted in the formal system. This is the sadness that competitors can't eliminate.
In a competitive society, it is the competitor's obligation to admit mistakes, but it is the competitor's right not to admit mistakes. Because competitive strength is based on authority, and once you admit your mistakes, it will damage this foundation. Those who compete at the bottom make it difficult to do things in the organization and it is difficult to stop competition.
For example, Jiang Wei, president of Shenyang Longfei Company, published Twenty Mistakes of the President in 1997. Although his mistake only stayed at the level of enterprise management and operation, it didn't go deep into his soul, but according to Jiang Wei himself, his employees dared to talk back to him, and the whole society and government didn't support him and Longfei. This mistake didn't change the ownership structure of dragonfly at all, but although Jiang Wei is still the boss, he no longer adapts to the bottom of the company's competition. In China, everyone is a potential bidder and a potential bidder.
A female worker on the assembly line is the bottom of the company, but she is eager to achieve success after returning home, urging her children to recite Tang poems, recite four books and five classics, and practice the piano, thus selectively applying the method that the boss gave her at the bottom of the company to her children, thus playing the role of the bottom.
Huawei often gets project orders at a price 10 times lower than its competitors. For this competitive strength, Ren had to compete with internal employees. At this time, the wolf nature has become a kind of "hard struggle", and the pressure of Huawei R&D and sales staff is notorious, leading to many violent deaths such as suicide and sudden death.
After these unfortunate events marked the "bottom line", Ren delivered a public speech with a strong competitive flavor, "Life is beautiful, but the process is full of pain". In the lecture, Ren did not reflect on the inappropriateness of "wolf nature", but only advocated and emphasized "hard struggle". How to drive the bottom bid? Controlling subordinates' sense of security is the boss's favorite tool.
A sense of security is a higher level of normal human needs than physiological needs. When it is used as a tool to compete for the bottom, the greatest advantage of security lies in its continuous development: a migrant worker with a monthly salary of 1000 yuan may feel secure with a deposit of 50 thousand yuan; But when his monthly salary reaches 10,000 yuan through hard work, he may feel that he will feel a little safe only if he has a house, a car and financial assets of/kloc-0.00 million. Therefore, competitors can design appropriate unsafe standards according to different safety requirements, so as to achieve the purpose of driving competitors of different levels.
An unsustainable spell.
Although the bottom strategy of competition has considerable advantages, it obviously has insurmountable limitations, especially because of the limitation of the bottom line, which makes it difficult to develop continuously for a long time.
There is a jingle that vividly reflects the competitive reality in China: "Americans invent things; Japanese people do things well; Koreans have messed things up; China people have no money to do things. "The bottom of the competition is this:" I've made it unprofitable, see how you argue with me! " The spirit of ".
However, to survive below the bottom line that others have no money to earn, the hardships of this lifestyle can be imagined.
Addiction easily damages long-term competitiveness.
Why are there so few original innovations in China? Ren claimed that Huawei has not invented an original product since 18, and the implementation of competitive strategy is a big factor. The bottom strategy of competition makes most domestic manufacturers only willing to follow the old products that have been proved successful by the market, and compete at low prices and low quality, just to avoid risks.
As we all know, as the saying goes, "Not taking risks is the biggest risk", and the competition at the bottom only brings about a low-income and bottomless survival situation. The bottom of competition makes the business income of enterprises increase year by year, but the competitive strength shows signs of declining.
Therefore, Ren Hui lamented helplessly that "selling high-tech products now is as unprofitable as selling radish and cabbage". In 2007, Huawei's profit margin was only a meager 5%; Therefore, in 2008, the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, the two most developed industrial belts in China, will have a large number of closures; Therefore, in 2008, a considerable number of college students couldn't find jobs after graduation, so they had to compete for jobs in 500 yuan and 600 yuan with monthly salaries, because the strategy of competing for the bottom level didn't require much wisdom and could not provide a lot of knowledge posts, but what they needed most was screw operators. As the saying goes, you can't walk by the river without getting wet. The bottom line is the normal state of existence of competitive organizations, so accidents are inevitable, but the size and time of accidents are accidental.
When the organization is far from the bottom line, the competitive bottom system can play a good role, and other strategies are less considered; When the organization is close to the bottom line and the bottom power mastered by the bottom bidders is gradually exhausted, he has to rationalize his bottom goals and use other authorities to drive the bottom bidders.
The closer the competing organizations are to the bottom line, the higher the probability of conflict and the greater the intensity of conflict. Finally, when the bottom line is reached, if the conflict cannot be resolved, the competing organization will die. For example, if the black coal mine is exploited crazily for a long time without safety guarantee, it is inevitable that accidents such as collapse, water seepage and gas explosion will occur; It is not surprising that sweatshop employees have died of overwork for a long time.
As a result, the government can only launch round after round of measures to close small coal mines, and sweatshops have also been eliminated from the supplier list by some well-known brands. Thereby ending the conflict in an extreme way. There are so many advantages of the competitive bottom strategy that even some excellent western enterprises can't help but be tempted to give it a try.
For example, after Starbucks started its brand in China, it began to carry out "major surgery" on raw materials: milk, cups, straws, stirring sticks, cakes, sugar packets, soft drinks, etc. Almost everything has changed. The tempting blueberry cheese came all the way from Dongguan, and now there is no independent packaging to take out. Nestle milk in the cup became Mengniu's, which was originally imported.
There are some minor changes: the cake loss ratio is adjusted from 25% to10%; At the same time, the fixed loss period of most cakes has increased from the previous 24 hours to 48 hours. This means that the probability of consumers eating imperfect cakes is greatly increased.
If Starbucks takes the route of a cheap store, it is natural and reasonable for it to change raw materials in this way to reduce costs. The problem is that it sells "culture", "temperament" and "advanced experience". Its slogan is "Give full play to the flavor of every coffee bean". Now this constant competition has led to the cheap Starbucks brand. On June 5438+ 10, 2008, due to poor performance, the stock price has been in a downward trend 17 months, and the stock price has almost shrunk by half for the whole year. Because the bottom of the game is about people's tolerance for all kinds of bad things: poor quality, poverty and hardship, physical pressure, psychological pressure, noise pollution, bad public security, human dignity and so on. It is an all-round over-limit war. Anything valuable to human beings, such as curiosity, innocence, trust, friendliness, even a good natural and humanistic environment, rich imagination, unique creativity, a quiet life and so on. You can die at the end of the game.
Therefore, it is difficult for competitive organizations to attract high-level and first-class talents to join, which also leads to insufficient stamina of enterprises.
Guo Taiming clearly called Foxconn a "fourth-class talent, third-class management, second-class equipment and first-class customer". Just because I use fourth-rate talents, I can compete with them mercilessly, and I don't have to pursue management progress too much, because competition is the most effective management.
Obviously, Guo Taiming also knows that first-class and second-class talents cannot survive in an environment like Foxconn. He can neither tolerate them nor need them.