The word empowerment has been heard on many occasions, but I didn't take the time to review and think carefully. Today, I will use my notes to talk about how to understand empowerment and its application in our work.

? 1. What exactly is empowerment?

? How do we understand the literal meaning of authorization? Happiness can be understood as giving, ability and ability. Simply put, it is the ability to pay. Authorization, which is often heard in management science, is called authorization in a narrow sense, which means that leaders should give front-line teams the right to make independent decisions in order to cope with the changing market environment. Of course, if empowerment is broken into XX empowerment, the meaning of this empowerment is too broad. Algorithm empowerment, marketing empowerment, tool empowerment, etc. There is a combination trend of1+x 0+x. Today, we mainly talk about the empowerment in downward management, that is, the empowerment of decision-making power, and how to understand and judge it.

There is a saying that once a pipe is loose, it will be chaotic, which is our common management scale problem. Often this point is not a dead value, but falls within an interval. This work is not as simple as we thought, but a very systematic and complicated project.

? 2. Empowerment is to deal with uncertainty. ?

? ? Ren once said that letting people who can hear the sound of gunfire command the war actually explains the meaning of empowerment concisely, that is, fighting against the losses caused by environmental uncertainty. War is a highly uncertain environment. In some local wars with complex terrain, waters and airspace environment, if it is not fully empowered, it will lead to the delay of decision-making and the failure of the war. Therefore, from this perspective, this sentence is not meaningless.

So why does war need empowerment, and few people in Foxconn's factories mention this word? It is because in most highly standardized factories, the process is highly centralized, and manufacturers will decompose the complex production process into 1, 2, 3, 4, N steps, and then find the most efficient part of each node through repeated experiments, and finally make it a standard action and enforce it. Everyone is only responsible for one or two actions in the whole production, which further improves the efficiency. Strictly speaking, this method greatly reduces the uncertainty of production, just like a calculator. Suppose you enter 1+2, you may get 3. In this case, factory workers only need to perform actions, do not need to know what to do in the previous step and the next step, and do not need to care about what products and goals the whole production process points to. Managers set goals, optimize systems, set standards, and break down processes. This is the organizational structure we usually see, the tree-like organizational structure. Many companies operate in this way, just like the organizational chart we draw.

? But there are two preconditions. What is this? First, our work system is highly standardized and can be decomposed and repeated. Second, managers have enough information to know the whole picture of the top and bottom of the pyramid. That is to say, in a relatively static environment, the core goal of organizational management is to maximize efficiency, minimize input but maximize output, which is why standardization should be used for management. However, in a highly uncertain environment, the primary goal of management may change. In order to maintain fast and flexible adaptability, the way to achieve this is to empower employees.

3. How to empower employees?

We say that the opposite of authorization is actually a high degree of standardization and centralization, while authorization emphasizes returning employees' autonomy, mobilizing employees' enthusiasm and allowing employees to make independent decisions according to the situation. It will bring some loss of efficiency, but it will improve the agility of some organizations and enhance their adaptability to uncertainty.

So, how should we empower employees without creating a situation of "one tube is dead, one is chaotic"? Its core point is to break the original tree-like organizational structure with clear vertical and horizontal directions and weave a new organizational form of network structure. If the traditional organizational form is a meshing gear, then the network organizational structure is like a small ecosystem with certain elasticity and toughness.

? We can understand it in three steps. The first step is to build a small team with high mutual trust, the second step is to make these small teams form a close big team, and the third step is to establish an information sharing mechanism and cultivate an organizational culture of information sharing. In fact, the first step, "Empowerment" describes a case of marine corps training. Everyone concentrated on training for a period of time, * * * overcame difficulties, got to know each other, one person made a mistake, punished the whole team, established a high degree of team identity and mutual trust, and finally formed a high degree of tacit understanding and became an organic group. On second thought, the author thought, isn't the recent program "Creation Camp" like this? There are also Guan Peisheng projects of various companies, which cultivate the tacit understanding of the team and the feelings of comrades-in-arms in intensive training, create a fighting atmosphere for the intimate objects of the team, and finally bring about the collective flow of coordinated operations. Each member can make his own decision. And can coordinate, that is, strong and agile.

? Then, why is it difficult for many organizations to replicate and form powerful large organizations even if they have super small teams? Because in essence, most of our organizations, no matter how flat, will still have a tree structure, such as the government's governance system. All departments are vertical in provinces, cities, counties and villages, such as an enterprise, and all departments are under vertical jurisdiction from the group to the region. But there is a problem here called interface failure, which I am used to calling business blocking point. For example, some medical accidents occur in emergency rooms, and the main problem is that there is a problem in the connection process between operating rooms, emergency rooms and inpatient departments. For example, American intelligence agencies may have n vertical lines. The CIA, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security all serve the U.S. government, but they don't share each other's information, and they are basically wary of each other, which can easily lead to the failure of the intelligence puzzle. Each department has only a small part of the puzzle, but it is difficult to put it together.

How to solve this problem? In order to break the criticism of this deep well organization, it is necessary to strengthen the horizontal interaction of small teams. We can send exchange students from AB department to communicate, understand each other's positions and establish contact. What is the workplace like? It's a bit like short-term training, and a bit like secondment or attachment in the government. In fact, although the names of these jobs are varied, the result depends only on one thing, that is, whether the horizontal connection of the organization is highly interactive. The intelligence level of a group depends largely on the intensity of interaction between members. Those teams with high level of internal and external interaction can produce more creativity.

? The last step is to break the information barrier and realize the enjoyment of information. This is the most difficult and tangled point, so the author says a few more words. Including the unit where the author works, it is actually the same. The overall information of the organization is in the hands of the leaders. Grass-roots employees are only executors, and they have no motivation or motivation to understand the affairs of other departments, nor do they need to care about the operation process of the whole system. If you want to ask, the leader may only say, if I feel it necessary to tell you, I will tell you naturally. The hidden line is, I don't have to say it.

The deep well-shaped organizational structure here naturally leads to our hierarchical information ability. In a complex and highly interrelated system, the most difficult thing is how do you know which information your role should match most accurately, and how to verify that this judgment is the most accurate? Like what? You want to play football, but you can only see the grass under your feet, but you can't see the whole picture. Think of when I first joined the company. On the first day, the leader told me what the overall picture of the organization was like, which branch I was in, and I was glad where my way was.

This highly transparent culture and information sharing mechanism is very obvious in the corporate culture of some Internet companies. For example, ByteDance agrees that anyone can see other people's OKR in their internal OA business cards, which is a breakthrough that some conventional enterprises cannot achieve. On the surface, people often feel that there may be a risk of leaking secrets, but in fact, if it is a big account, it will be easier to promote the overall algorithm and collective wisdom. Why? Think about what we often say about digital ability, that is, refining information into data, adding algorithm optimization after data structure, and finally realizing intelligent solutions and scenarios. The most important thing is two parts, one is the size of the original information, and the other is the algorithm, which is the interactive value of information in our usual sense.

Therefore, the key to empowerment is to establish a small team with high mutual trust, break the organizational structure of deep wells with horizontal interaction and fully enjoy information.

Golden sentence and silver sentence 05 1:

1. How to understand the curse of knowledge?

What do you mean? Even if you have a knowledge, you can't understand what people who don't have this knowledge are thinking, that is, we often hear "I have made this so clear, why don't you understand?" A kind of knowledge, like a big river, is not difficult for those who cross the river to look back, but they can't understand the difficulties that those who don't cross the river see. How to solve it? You can learn from Bai Juyi. Bai Juyi will fully solicit feedback when writing poems. If the street aunt can understand, then he can think that he can understand.

2. In the long-term investment, cost reduction is the first factor and a very important measure.

I remember a feeling of doing project research recently. For projects with large capital investment, never do projects that can be tried for the first time. For example, milk tea industry, ancient tea, modern China tea shops, hi tea and so on. What we have seen actually started in third-and fourth-tier cities, because the capitalization investment is low, the trial and error cost is low, and the strategic adjustment and operation flexibility are greater. From a financial point of view, IRR will be better.

3. Scale is the enemy of performance.

The inverse effect between asset scale and performance, asset scale is easily overlooked by investors, but it is a very important factor. Scale is the enemy of performance, because the larger the scale, the more difficult it is to obtain the income beyond the market.