📰 Weekly Digest#
Vision Pro goes on sale with various eye-catching bags! Driving/fitness/crossing the road operations are amazing, AI expert Karpathy shares his experience in a thousand-word test#
After watching some usage videos, it feels like it's still a high-end toy, maybe it has some use in the office.
Ant provides train station weather information#
South Korean man sentenced to prison for refusing military service due to playing "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds"#
According to a report by the Korean Pioneer on February 4th, the Supreme Court of Korea sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for refusing military service on the grounds of opposing war and violence. And the reason he lost the case was because he was enthusiastic about playing "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds".
Bǎngbù zhùle
📚 Articles#
The Myth of Management in Internet Companies#
Excerpt One#
Values, OKRs, nicknames, flexible working hours, etc...
In the past 20 years, the internet industry has contributed many tricks to the field of enterprise management. Some of them are original to the Chinese internet industry, and many others are learned from Silicon Valley and belong to the global internet industry.
When the internet industry was in its golden age, almost every successful internet company had to some extent promote their own enterprise management methodology, some through founder speeches, some through books, and others, like Tencent and Alibaba, directly influenced the startups they invested in through entrepreneur clubs.
However, with the end of the golden growth period of the internet and the disappearance of the global internet popularity dividend (population dividend for China), we were surprised to find that many management concepts that were once highly regarded in the internet industry have become ineffective... or perhaps they were never effective to begin with.
Looking back at the methodologies that internet companies have accumulated, whether it's Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Google, Amazon, or Netflix, we may find that their enterprise management methodologies may have made attribution errors - underestimating the era they rode on and overestimating their own efforts (management behavior).
Because in the field of enterprise management, there are some obvious wrong answers, and everything else is the "right answer".
This is my impression after reading the recent book "Big Factory Talent" by Samantha, a partner at Mu Sheng Consulting. The book provides a detailed horizontal evaluation of the management systems of various big factories such as ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, and Huawei, and occasionally compares these different models with traditional enterprise management systems.
The author of the original book summarized it more tactfully, but based on my own experience working in a big factory and my impressions from reading this book, I can say directly: the management innovations of all internet big factories may be unnecessary additions.
Excerpt Two#
However, the world itself is made up of backwardness.
I first realized this when I was sharing my manuscript (the one with tens of thousands of words) on Feishu during a conference attended by older members. I was halfway through my presentation when an audience member asked me: "What page are you on?"
I was stunned. What page was I on? Feishu doesn't have page numbers, because Feishu never expected anyone to print out and read electronic documents.
The questioner was in his 50s, and from my perspective as well as that of most internet employees, he could be considered "old". But in fact, he has been using computers since the 1990s and can't you say he lacks "digital literacy"? Similar situations exist for almost all online document platforms, which do not support "footnotes", a very important feature in academic writing (and also "revision mode"). As a result, Kingsoft Docs still holds a market share that Tencent Docs and Feishu Docs cannot obtain.
Is it because the dazzling array of online document platforms is not "advanced" enough? No, it's because they are too advanced and do not match the backward real world.
Unless you assume a society where everyone retires at the age of 35, compatibility with backwardness is the most important foundation for advanced management tools and productivity tools.
This has been repeatedly verified in the SaaS market, where everyone says that the SaaS market in China is difficult, and then they come up with many reasons. But by 2024, there are only a few companies that dare to start a business without buying Microsoft Office, and even the free WPS can only grab a share of the market because it looks "exactly the same" as Microsoft Office. So when I was talking to @汐笺 about SaaS, I said:
If you create an office suite and think you're innovative and don't look like Office, then you must be doing it wrong, because every button in Microsoft Office represents a product and R&D team that is as big as your entire team, and corresponds to a market share of 0.x% to x%.
You can use Feishu, Notion, Obsidian in your daily life, and even in small teams, you can use these new tools for collaboration. However, once you enter a larger scale of social collaboration, you cannot do without Microsoft Office. Does ByteDance share Feishu links when dealing with the government? Do Alibaba and Tencent use DingTalk documents for preliminary mutual review when signing contracts? Impossible.
This is true not only at the tool level but also at the management tool level. OKR is a so-called "innovation-oriented" management tool. But even in the past half-century of intensive human innovation, innovation has not been the norm for companies. Innovation brings about new growth points, but once these points are created, subsequent growth work is invariably driven by a massive number of people and funds in mundane daily work.
Source
I agree with excerpt one, which is the conclusion of the book "Big Factory Talent". We have been using OKRs for a long time in our company, but I don't feel that it is particularly brilliant, and even Google doesn't use it anymore~
However, excerpt two is somewhat biased. Good tools make us more efficient and advanced in our own usage, rather than aligning with so-called industry standards and outdated practices. When dealing with external parties, we can easily make adjustments, and even have more say in the industry.
Nowadays, both government and enterprises mainly use Tencent Meeting for communication. Isn't this an innovation that changes the industry?
🎞️ Life#
Returned to Hefei from Shanghai on February 7th to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
💭 Excerpt#
There are many things that are more enriching than the rewards of work, such as gardening. However, besides the calculable return on investment such as salary, work also requires certain evaluations from social systems, which may seem worthless but are difficult to let go of.