Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Just a few days ago, friends from several big factories came to Nanjing from Beijing to visit me. The first thing they did when they arrived at the hotel was not to eat, but to take out their computers and start writing weekly reports.

About writing a weekly newspaper, friend A has called me to complain before, and I have heard of it myself: according to friend A, he once wrote more than 8000 words in a weekly newspaper, and what is even more outrageous, friend B is a girl. she was busy writing the weekly newspaper after she got off the phone with me at 4 o'clock on Saturday morning.

After I left Hu-sniff, I also worked in the Ali department to do brand work. The working time was not long, about 10 months before and after. Of course, I also had to write a weekly newspaper. However, the weekly newspaper I wrote at that time was far less voluminous than that of other big companies, and it was more like "paying public food" at a specified time-reviewing the work of the past week and combing the work plans for next week.

Maybe I caught up with the good time, or maybe it was because the company was doing well at that time, and its business planning was pragmatic and conservative, so I didn't resent writing a weekly newspaper at that time. However, in the past two years, there has been a sharp increase in hostility to the weekly newspaper-it is very painful, but we still have to write it. Some companies even ask to write a daily newspaper. On the other side of the enterprise, bosses are also very anxious. The first reaction when the business is not going well is to catch people. Finally, when it comes to action, the first thing is that the weekly report should be written well.

So the question is, if the weekly report is well written, can it really make the performance of the enterprise better?

The answer is no. Because from a management point of view, the weekly report is at best a way to review after the event, it is different from the meeting, and it is not real-time and fast. Some people may refute me and think that the weekly report is an important channel for organizing communication and uploading.

But in fact, a good weekly report should have feedback, but the effect of feedback is often determined by your direct leader. That's the problem. You can be a very hard worker, but you can't ask your leader to be as serious as you.

Moreover, the bigger headache than writing a weekly newspaper is that your colleagues are more voluminous than you.

Because the weekly report is a weekly reporting mechanism, in the actual work scenario, most companies or departments will not have too many major events in weekly time slices. Doing so will only magnify the importance of the original things. In addition, the management experience and business logic of each company are different, which is not universal.

So from this point of view, we can reasonably question the scientific nature of the weekly report.

To some extent, the current domestic management style is quite rigid, even for large companies like Tencent and Ali, many of them follow only the leadership, which has something to do with the off-duty director management of examination-oriented education for a long time.

So we often hear the story that so-and-so left and later set up a legendary company, and in this respect, foreign countries are aware of these problems earlier than we do. that's why Amazon has a six-page culture and the famous "20% time" rule sprouts at Google.

The purpose of these measures is clear-to encourage innovation, but only within the company. So after buying Twitter, Musk caused an uproar when he asked programmers to write a weekly report on the number of lines of code, and many opponents claimed that it was too much.

In response to this, anthropologist David Graber wrote a book called "bullshit work". According to Graber's theory of "bullshit work", many people are suffering from mental violence and trapped in a meaningless cycle of work day after day.

I think this is the only way for social progress. Graber's point of view is certainly reasonable, but it is too idealized. In the case of writing a weekly newspaper, for example, there is nothing wrong with the starting point and motivation. The mistake is that in the end, it turns into a project: and face is bigger than the inside.

Why would you say that?

Let's have a good rip on this article.

01. Stop fooling around. Formalism is the original sin of a weekly newspaper. In the past, the foothold of good business was often a good idea. Microsoft and Apple, including General Motors, which beat Ford's T-line, are typical examples.

But with the development of the times, it is becoming more and more difficult for good ideas to occupy the market. Including Steve Jobs, the world's top product manager we are familiar with, has also suffered such losses. people only heard that Jobs saved the country and took charge of Apple for the second time, but it was easy to overlook the first thing he did when he returned to Apple. is to optimize the organization and cut off the redundant product line.

Such changes are actually happening all the time.

If you follow the Internet technology circle, you will find that today's Silicon Valley is already a Silicon Valley Co., Ltd. Those who create and dominate Silicon Valley have gone from highly intelligent geeks such as Woz (co-founder of Apple) to businessmen represented by John Doyle (Silicon Valley's top investor), who once wrote the famous "this is OKR".

It is hard to imagine that as the founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, John Doyle has a perfect person with both strategic analysis and executive enthusiasm. His investment purpose is to be a "missionary to create the future", so his behavior guide can be roughly summed up as-- through the OKR of "quantifying grand goals", quantifying vision and goals into practical, deeply connected current practices.

Later stories you may have heard that this originated from Drucker's goal management, which was later cited by Intel and developed into a textbook organizational management system at Google. However, when it comes to China, I do not know whether it is not satisfied with the soil and water, or whether it is intentional. OKR has successfully replaced PPT as a new "cake painting tool," which is reflected in the organization, that is, employees write more and more words in their weekly newspapers, but their business is getting worse and worse.

Here is a place where managers can easily make mistakes: it is right to catch people, but it must not be too formalistic.

We can make a simple deduction, that is, empathy is often said, for the sake of others, if you, as a leader, are willing to devote your time and energy to the careful planning of the weekly newspaper, or would you rather bring up the question and ask your leader time for advice? I think most people will choose the latter.

The reason is very simple. The starting point of the second approach is from the perspective of solving the problem. At this time, someone may retort, "leaders are very busy, especially in a large department, one person is in charge of hundreds of people, the leader simply does not have time to listen to you, and the weekly newspaper is the best form of upward communication."

This view is even easier to defeat: 1, your company organizational structure design is unreasonable, many mature companies, like Amazon, it uses a half-pizza model; 2, to say the least, if your leader is really that busy, do you still think he has time to read your weekly report?

That being the case, should we ban weekly newspapers?

Indeed, the current employment environment is not very friendly to young people. Sam Walton, the famous founder of Wal-Mart, once talked about this issue in his book Rich America: in the past, as long as you were smart and willing to work hard, you could get all the opportunities in the company. but today, the organizational structure of the company is becoming more and more complex, it is very difficult for ordinary people to have the opportunity to stand out.

But as long as you think about it, the above question becomes "how on earth should managers do management?" Choice is very important, as I mentioned earlier, the weekly report, in the final analysis, can be abstracted into a way of upward communication, upward communication is not right or wrong, but the form is good or bad.

And, generally speaking, if your company is too formalistic, I believe it's not just writing a weekly newspaper that turns your stomach. Maybe you should think more about "do you want to change your unit?"

Is it reliable for the boss to write a weekly report to his employees? Then let's talk about the above topic. in fact, there have been a lot of changes in the weekly newspaper since it became popular. Especially in the past two years, after the domestic enterprise service field became popular, many cooperative office players spent on it, which can be described as painstaking efforts. For example, in the case of "the boss writes a weekly newspaper for employees", I believe many people can only say after reading it: thanks to the Nobel Prize for Management.

Why would you say that? Let me analyze it with you.

Let's start with the foreign tool software, whether it is Notion, Slack, or Airtable, Hipchat, Zoom, their starting point is the tools born under the general management logic and used to save communication costs. Zoom, for example, was popular at first largely because it was simple enough to open a link at the end of the page to enter the meeting.

Moreover, although they are also PaaS logic, they all have their own absolute line of defense. But in China, these tools seem to be at a loss, and the logic of the small platform, which should be profitable, has been forced to become a large platform and big ecological logic.

Nail from the early IM tools, to now bound with Aliyun, although the profit is unknown, but it is also an attempt in a dilemma; the Flying Book featuring PLG, the product is really good, but the pricing logic is a bit confusing, and still does not jump out of the traditional software company's way; on the contrary, WeCom, whose product logic is not so PLG, has made his own day in the sinking market.

As a result, domestic organization and management is largely biased by these tools-at first, people don't hate nails, but they just hate the feeling of clocking in and being controlled in real time, and so is the weekly newspaper.

In other words, if enterprise services, especially collaborative office players, want to break through, product building should be efficiency optimization based on common sense, but it should be noted that differentiation does not mean being blindly original.

Let's go back to the matter of "the boss writes a weekly newspaper for employees" and regard it as a selling point. The starting point is really fresh and refined.

But as long as you think about it, you can find that this can not stand deliberation. No matter whether the boss is willing to calm down and write seriously every week, and whether employees are willing to have the patience to finish reading the weekly report, just from a pragmatic point of view, the significance of the weekly report itself is two-- reviewing the past work and defining the work after that. That being the case, why not just hold a meeting, or the @ responsible person in the group will come more quickly.

Jiang Wen has a famous movie-- "Evil suppresses evil" has a classic line-- who would write his heart in his diary, can it be called his heart? In fact, it is the best description. Xin Mou has discussed this issue in detail in the article "China's Internet needs a" human efficiency revolution ": the large organization that was once proud of has now become a shield to cover up the plight of innovation, whether to add or subtract, has become a riddle of the entire industry.

So in Huawei's Ren Zhengfei's view, whether the enterprise collapses or not depends entirely on itself and on the progress of management. The basis of denotation is the fulfillment of connotation, which often lies in whether the management system at all levels of the company is optimized. If we look at it from this point of view, the fact that employees of large factories are unwilling to write weekly reports is actually a problem worthy of reflection by the management, and the situation is already very urgent.

03. So, is it necessary for the weekly newspaper to continue to write? As the end draws to a close, some people may ask whether the weekly newspaper is still worth writing and whether it should be continued.

My advice is that if you don't have to, you'd better not mess with the team; if you want to, you must use it for another purpose.

In the case of our own team, we also write weekly reports, but the focus is not on describing the work of the past week and sorting out the work plans for next week, but on three aspects: 1, describe the problems you have encountered at work, and what kind of help you need; 2, whether there are some bad phenomena in the company, if so, please explain boldly; 3, because we are content workers, we will ask you to share some recent experiences.

Our team is very small, and the industry we belong to is also special, so we don't have any reference. Within the company, we define the weekly report as-- mainly for ourselves. Moreover, after more than a year of practice, it is found that this is indeed useful, but not much.

By the same token, the management style suitable for byte jump is not applicable to Baidu and Tencent, and we should all know that those successful management rules eventually become part of the corporate culture, not a part of the corporate culture.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: new eyes (ID:xinmouls), author: sang Mingqiang

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