Ali Deng Kangming: In the early days of starting a business, the top leaders should dare to "dictatorship"

What is the most important responsibility of the top leader in the early stage of starting a business? How to build culture? How to choose and employ people?

Mr. CHO Deng Kangming, the former Alibaba, summed up his experience in human resources in Ali, which is of great reference significance for team management, talent selection and corporate culture construction of startup companies.

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In the early days of starting a business, the top leaders should dare to "dictatorship"

He left Microsoft in 2004 and decided not to work in a multinational company. Why?

I want to be a boss. But there is no such opportunity in multinational companies.

I once asked myself: Can I start a business? I can replace bill. Gates?

I evaluate myself and feel that I can't create a career. So I want to join local enterprises in China.

When I decided to join a private enterprise, Ali was not famous at all.

At that time, Lenovo and TCL were very good. Why did you decide to join Ali? Because Ma Yun talked to me three times. For the last time, he told me that I gave you two choices. One is to be my HRBP, and the other is that you can go to the Supply Department of China to study website and business.

Since the company recruited people, I can't wait to drain your previous work ability and experience. Ali also asked me to study with my salary.

This is a great shock to me, because people set up posts, and he may think I still have some potential.

Later, I did five completely different jobs in Ali, managing marketing, managing products and managing education and training. For example, if you want to do Ali's education, I will give you 200 million yuan to do it. If you don't do it, neither will we.

This is a typical post for everyone.

Division is a monster. This monster is against humanity. Its position and establishment are empty. It cannot calculate the individual's ability and vitality, nor can it stimulate the individual's ability and vitality.

Therefore, the traditional era of establishing posts based on establishment will definitely pass, and the typical era of responsibility and rights will gradually die out. The future is bound to be based on people or people.

If you still cling to your job responsibilities and the management logic behind them today, you will gradually be surpassed by other companies, such as Nokia.

During my years in Ali, I watched Ali develop from a company with 1000 employees.

This made me deeply understand that in the early stage of the company's business, don't expect democracy and collective decision-making.

Only one person can make a decision, and others can play a supporting role in carrying it out.

In the early stage, there should be a person who talks about tea and a specific person.

What is dictatorship?

Dictatorship is the power to make the final decision. Even in the painful darkness and loneliness, you can press this button and say, go, don't give up. The team needs such strength.

In the early days of starting a business, one of Ali's greatest characteristics was execution.

Ma Yun once said that even if it is shit, the team can carry it out and make it blossom.

Don't doubt that everything in this world is fuzzy and everything is unclear.

Whether the product is good or not and the operation mode is good, only by taking a firm step can we know whether the possibility of success exists.

It is impossible to produce anything by drinking tea and preaching in the room.

Entrepreneurs themselves need a strong heart, don't try to share their loneliness and pain with the team, and don't let them bear it.

There is no democracy in this process. If you are not the material, please give up your position and find out who dares to make stupid decisions.

It is not how scientific the decision is, but the speed of decision-making and the intensity of implementation, which makes one company and another company show great differences.

The so-called democracy must exist before we can establish the so-called decision-making mechanism.

The ancestors were very wise and knew manners in a hurry.

The most important thing for all entrepreneurs in organizational construction is to ask themselves whether they can bear the responsibility of decision-making. If no one can help you share the consequences, can you continue?

02

Culture came out early.

Here is another important question. What do you want to share? I think there are two:

The first is equity.

I have carefully studied outstanding entrepreneurs on the Internet, such as Ma Yun, Ma, Zhou, etc., trying to find the law-the relationship between market value and founders and their shares.

In the process, I found an interesting phenomenon:

At present, Ali and Tencent have the largest market value, among which Ma Yun holds the least shares in listed companies, and the market value is inversely proportional to the founder's shareholding ratio.

But we can't draw an absolute conclusion yet.

Second, the company's operating conditions, whether a few people know or most people know, are the best scenes for early companies to form core culture.

Many people ask me how to do corporate culture, which is what I did in the early days.

For example, today, everyone communicates by email. Can I communicate offline in the early days? There must be O2O in the office. There is no need to communicate by email. 30 to 50 people shouted that it was ideal to push the door open and kick him. Don't communicate by email.

When the company is big, it is suitable to use this technical means to communicate.

In the early days, the formation of human culture needed trust and tacit understanding.

The premise of trust and tacit understanding is to understand each other's virtue in the early stage, and virtue is played out in this process.

In the early days, in this environment, you had to work offline and hold hands with people, so that you would know who your team is, who your brother is and who might stab you in the back.

Frank and transparent sharing is the most important point in the process of early organizational construction.

One of the cultural keynote of Ali is that ordinary people do extraordinary things. Accordingly, my original recruitment strategy was to make great strides.

Input 2000-3000 people every year, and eliminate 1500 of them. At that time, Ali did not believe in the so-called elite.

Ali believes in growing and upgrading from within. What does that mean?

Ali is a company that believes in self-cultivation, self-development and self-cultivation of managers.

At that time, Ali mainly served small and medium-sized enterprises, and some customers were even in mountain villages, so the strategy of organization and people should be matched, mainly recruiting some college graduates with six months to one year's work experience.

Ali didn't do campus recruitment in the early years, because the work was very hard and the students were not used to it when they first came out.

Slowly developed, began to do some campus recruitment, but mainly for the upper-middle-class students in second-and third-rate schools.

At that time, Ma Yun wanted to be a company that can be passed down from generation to generation, which decided that our personnel selection must adopt internal "brainwashing", cultivate talents independently and conduct large-scale training.

Recruiting people is "lenient entry and strict exit", usually recruiting more than 100 people, leaving only 50 or 60 people, and the rest are sent to the front to fight; Use the assessment in the middle and brush off half.

Today we are talking about Ma Yun's soldiers, and that's how they were trained.

From 2004 to 2007, Ali recruited people on a large scale, and the turnover rate reached more than 100%. He recruited 2000 people and eliminated 1 500, which may be eliminated together.

But those who stayed after intensive training said that they were "brainwashed" and attached to Ali's beliefs and feelings very strongly.

03

Management should return to the understanding of human nature.

I used to call all my subordinates in Ali.

Scores are directly linked to wages and bonuses. Failure means no bonus and no promotion opportunities.

Although I lost their interest, it won't affect our feelings. They know why I scored this score and never question it.

I failed my subordinates, but this did not affect the cohesion of the organization.

With scars, the organization will be closer, and it is impossible to form a team in the romantic sunshine.

Only by fighting evil wars can the most primitive organization with Jianghu flavor be formed.

Therefore, organizations must experience from gangs to teams, to organizations, to ecology.

Different enterprises are at different stages. Gangs have no boundaries, and everyone works together with Qi Xin, which is the most typical state of early startups.

If you come in with your business and I have my business, and everyone wears masks to discuss and communicate in the conference room, it seems that they all agree, it seems that they all disagree, and they still talk to themselves when they go out, then this organization will be close to death sooner or later.

Therefore, as a leader, the heart should be merciful and the knife should be quick.

If you can't do it, help him. It's like cutting meat with a blunt knife and sprinkling some salt.

If he is left in a qualified scene forever, the probability of his "death" will be greater.

Why can a leader become a leader?

Everyone is willing to follow him, not because of the appointment of the organization.

Therefore, the most important responsibility of leaders is to make people with 5 points become 7 points, and those with 7 points become 9 points. People are willing to follow you because you can increase their market value.

The Giant Building in Shi Yuzhu collapsed and the capital chain was broken.

After more than a dozen of his brothers paid their own money, their relatives and friends lent him money and finally made a comeback. With good leadership, I can become better myself.

I used to be in Ali, and many people told me to leave. I will help him analyze it. If the unit he is going to is good, I will send him away, even if it is a backbone.

Back to the basics, what is the core of an organization?

In the final analysis, it is to gather a group of people to work for the company regardless of short-term interests.

Although this sounds very Jianghu, entrepreneurs need to have a common sense understanding of human nature itself.

Unfortunately, we are so-called recruitment, incentives and so on. A lot of routine things often make this organization close to death faster.

When I worked in Ali, Ali really treated employees as partners, not invited "migrant workers".

Where is Ali's corporate culture strong? The advantage is that culture is based on a wide range of interests.

Companies need mechanisms to solve their cultural problems.

Whether in the era of farming, industrialization or today's information age, struggle, contribution and ownership seem to be eternal values.

An organization cannot develop without struggle and dedication, and needs such a corporate culture.

However, we also know that it is impossible to realize the so-called strugglers without establishing a broad interest restraint mechanism and returning to human nature to solve the contradiction between relative ownership and management rights.

So is Huawei. Although Huawei and Ali take two different paths, their extensive virtual shareholding system is the same as Ali 100% equity distribution.

This is the integration of human individuals on the basis of solving ownership and management rights and labor relations.

At the beginning, 18 "Lohan" who entered Ali were ordinary people, but today these ordinary people have achieved wealth and business empire and the myth of Internet technology application. What is the reason?

It is the change of mechanism and the adjustment of mechanism based on the change of concept.

From avenue to simplicity and returning to the essence of human nature, many basic problems will be solved.

04

Employers should "foster strengths and avoid weaknesses" and not "seek perfection and blame"

The adjustment of the company's organizational structure is to solve problems, not to pursue perfection.

Once I argued with Ma Yun, and I said that this person can't be a vice president.

He said you asked him to do it, and he did it like a vice president.

In the Internet age, it is very terrible to criticize the perfection of talents blindly. Because the information iteration is too fast, we have to keep trying and making mistakes, and there is no planning.

The talent strategy of the changing Internet is to dare to try and make mistakes. But the premise is that the length of employment is limited to short.

Kanekin's law says that the short board determines how far a person goes, but it is not true.

The strong must have the weakness of the strong, and the world is balanced.

So don't pursue perfection, use his strengths, not necessarily make up for his shortcomings.

The premise of today's rapid iterative trial and error is that if this person can give full play to his value at this stage, even if he has many worrying and even unbearable problems, he must be put on board and then use another institutional system to make up for what he is not good at.

Excellent people often have many shortcomings, and we don't need to modify them; If a good man can change easily, he is not a good man.

In 2005 and 2006, I established the "political commissar system" of human resources, and one of the starting points was to make up for shortcomings.

Ali's personnel has become a "political commissar", and the "political commissar" has great power and can veto the business decisions and personnel decisions of a department.

Another method is disassembly.

For example, it seems impossible to find a person for the job of department head; Then split the work in two and let two people do it.

The adjustment of organizational structure seems imperfect, but we should do things in a down-to-earth way and solve problems.

Human resource management should be based on the following concepts:

First, foster strengths and avoid weaknesses; Second, solve today's problems without seeking perfection. In this way, you bring out a group of people.

If you have the chance, try not to use those rules and regulations.

For example, in Ali, the promotion is decided by oneself, not by the leader.

Ali encourages everyone. If you think you can be promoted, please raise your hand. If you are qualified, you will be promoted. This is to dare to break the shackles of rules and regulations.

I think, in these years in Ali, I am very lucky to have Yun as my leader.

He is an entrepreneur who spends the most time on people, organization and culture, so I am rich in resource acquisition.

Moreover, Ma Yun is open-minded, "likes the new and hates the old", and does not exclude new practices and uncertain changes.

Therefore, we have the opportunity to gain local innovation.

In fact, this also makes Ali different today. Many people like it, and many people don't. You can hate it or hate it, but you have to respect it anyway.

No matter what industry or occupation, the magic weapon of truth should be enlightened and reasonable before practicing the magic weapon.

Or, practice the "magic weapon" and then "understand, understand."

In fact, the two directions are moving with each other and spiral upward. What I am afraid of is that I just stay on the magic weapon and don't even understand the reason.

There is a road to growth. As long as you can think and understand problems from a higher position than yourself, and you can implement them within your own responsibilities, it is easy to grow and improve. The difference between people actually comes from this.

I often feel that "growth is the support of others, and success is self-nirvana".