According to the general business strategy, this kind of product display is very strange. Consumer electronics companies often follow the principle of simplicity when releasing new products to avoid confusing consumers (even their own sales staff). Basically, in the same category, they will only release one product at a time, which is the case when Sony released the classic walkman. But now Sony has not only released a digital walkman product, but also released two products, each of which adopts different patented technologies.
Soon after, Sony even launched a third product called "Network Walkman". The three products compete with each other, and Sony seems to be hitting itself.
The result was terrible. In just a few years, Sony abandoned the digital music market and let Apple rely on the iPod to sweep consumers. More amazing than the barn itself, almost no one inside Sony found that things were not good and changed the disadvantages of excessive division of labor. Sony fell into tribalism, but the employees were so used to this model that they didn't notice anything wrong at all.
To some extent, Gensonnie is no different from other social organizations. As mentioned in the previous chapter, human beings always take it for granted that they have classified the world. It is normal for Kabel people studied by Buchdieu to let men and women live in different parts of the house. New york employees think that the fire department should be different from other departments, and different data should be stored in different databases. Similarly, most Sony employees think that the computer department belongs to the computer department and the music department belongs to the music department.
Some supervisors or employees did find the disadvantages of this division of labor. For example, howard stringer, the British director in charge of North American business, is very worried. After Sony released different "competing" digital walkman devices, stringer spent years fighting the barn and sometimes dealing with it in difficulties. Stringer later recalled: "What did Sony do wrong? A big culprit is the barn. 」
However, on the exciting day of 1999, Sony's staff were so excited about the new products that they didn't question the company's corporate culture, so that they were carried away by success and didn't see the imminent crisis, and those competing products on the stage just symbolized the company's future difficulties.
In-depth cooperation and collaborative development will enable Apple to build an iPod and beat Sony. In contrast, Apple's corporate culture is completely different. Almost at the same time that Sony's team developed the digital walkman, Apple President Steve Jobs began to develop his own digital music player with a group of technicians, without dividing the technicians into different departments. Jobs led the company in an arbitrary way, opposed the internal barn, feared that the supervisor would protect the company because of the barn, clung to the past victory, and was unwilling to make great strides in the future. He believes that Apple should focus on a few products, throw away existing products if they are outdated, and seize new ideas.
Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs Biography, wrote: "Jobs didn't want to divide Apple into semi-autonomous departments. He tightly controls all the teams and keeps the whole company united and flexible. * * * is the same as calculating profit and loss. Later, Tim Cook, Jobs' successor, also said, "We don't have a self-financing department, but the whole company calculates the profit and loss together. Therefore, when talking about the future of digital music, Apple's technicians brainstormed together and put forward a series of ideas that span different product categories.
This open and informal brainstorming has achieved fruitful results. At first, they wanted to develop a product similar to walkman, but they could connect to the Internet, that is, a "one-step" digital music player, where users could download music from the Internet and then play it anytime, anywhere. However, they soon found that this one-step design has a major disadvantage: according to the existing technology, storing and editing music requires a lot of computing power, and any one-step product can only store a limited number of songs. If they use patented compression technology to store songs, it is not compatible with most music databases.
They brainstormed and finally decided to adopt an innovative two-step method. The first step, consumers use Macintosh or other computers to download music from the internet and edit it into the playlist; Step 2, transfer the music to the mobile playback device and then play it at will.
The advantage of this two-step method is that the playback device does not need to edit or download music, so it will not consume too much computing power, and the whole device can be kept as small and light as possible. In addition, there is an additional benefit, which is to encourage consumers to use the Macintosh computer introduced by Apple. Isaacson, the author of Jobs Biography, said: "The words used are' in-depth cooperation' and' cooperative development'. The development process is not a piece-by-piece cutting, from technology, design, production, marketing to sales, like a relay, but all departments cooperate at the same time. 」
Then Apple's technicians further blurred the product boundaries and brought more innovations. They know that record companies don't want consumers to download music from the Internet because they can't make money. So Jobs and his colleagues tried to fight the infringement and get the record company to nod. Finally, they came up with an iTunes store to let record companies sell songs to consumers at a low price of $0.99 per song. This kind of profit is far less than selling records, but record companies can at least draw some royalties and are more willing to cooperate with Apple. In order to increase sales, Apple technicians opened this platform wide, and consumers can connect any device without using Apple products. In contrast, Sony's digital music system has its own choice.
In 200 1 year, Apple launched its own digital mobile music player, namely iPod. This product is quite small and beautiful, and can be put into a coat pocket to store a large number of songs. The marketing slogan is "1000 songs in your pocket". IPod swept the market and became a trend. In just a few months, the name "iPod" has become a powerful brand in itself, and even defined the whole product category, comparable to Sony's walkman. Finally, Sony admitted its failure and withdrew from the market, leaving Apple in the lead.
Barn effect: internal reluctance to cooperate, indulging in past success, employees don't want to change ... In fact, Sony's problem is not a special case, and many other companies are also deeply troubled by barns. For example, Microsoft and Sony are in the same boat, and it is difficult for all departments to cooperate. Part of the reason is that Microsoft used to be all-powerful, and employees didn't think it was necessary to change.
Satya Nadella, a Microsoft executive who took over as CEO in 20 14, said, "This has always been a problem for us. Once you rely too much on your past success, it's easy to be reluctant to cooperate with each other ... but the external competitors don't care about your internal problems. Many state-owned or semi-state-owned units have also been dragged down by barns.
In the complex society of 2 1 century, we all face a subtle challenge: we can be dominated by the barn of psychology and structure, or we can be dominated by the barn in turn. The most basic first step to dominate the barn is to reflect on the classification method that was used to the world every day.
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This article is authorized to be published in "The Barn Effect: Why the Division of Labor will lead to personal loss of competitiveness, enterprise collapse, incompetence and economic out of control" by Sanchai /Gillian Judy. 》
Barn effect: why does the division of labor lead to personal loss of competitiveness, business closure, incompetence and economic out of control? 》