Ten classic theories of human resource management

1. The Peter Principle Peter Principle

Promotion is the worst incentive

The Peter Principle means: In various organizations, employees always tend to for being promoted to a position of incompetence. The Peter Principle is sometimes called the Climb Up Principle.

This phenomenon is ubiquitous in real life: a competent professor is promoted to university president but is incompetent; an excellent athlete is promoted to an official in charge of sports but does nothing.

For an organization, once a considerable number of personnel are pushed to their incompetent level, it will cause the organization's personnel to be superfluous and inefficient, causing mediocre people to stand out and development to stagnate. Therefore, this requires changing the corporate employee promotion mechanism that determines promotion purely based on contribution. Just because someone has done an outstanding job in a certain position, it cannot be inferred that this person must be qualified for a higher-level position.

Promoting an employee to a position where he cannot perform his talents well is not only not a reward for the individual, but also makes him unable to perform his talents well, and also brings losses to the enterprise.

2. Wine and Sewage Law Wine and Sewage Law

Remove rotten apples in time

Pour a spoonful of wine into a bucket of sewage and you will get a bucket Sewage; if you pour a spoonful of sewage into a barrel of wine, you still get a bucket of sewage.

In almost any organization, there are several difficult characters whose purpose of existence seems to be to mess things up. The worst part is that they are like rotten apples in the fruit bin. If not dealt with in time, it will quickly spread and rot other apples in the fruit bin. The scary thing about rotten apples is their amazing destructive power.

An honest and capable person may be swallowed up if he enters a chaotic department, while a person without moral integrity and talent can quickly turn an efficient department into a mess. Organizational systems are often fragile and are based on mutual understanding, compromise and tolerance, and can easily be violated and poisoned. Another important reason for the extraordinary ability of destroyers is that it is easier to destroy than to build. A pottery that a skilled craftsman spends time and time carefully making can be destroyed by a donkey in a second. If there is such a donkey in an organization, no matter how many skilled craftsmen there are, there will not be much decent work results. If you have such a donkey in your organization, you should remove it immediately, and if you are unable to do so, you should tie it up.

3. Buckets effect / Cannikin Law

Buckets law (short board theory)

Pay attention to the weak links in the team

Buckets law How much water a bucket can hold depends entirely on the shortest piece of wood.

This means that any organization may face a common problem, that is, the various parts that make up the organization often have different strengths and weaknesses, and the disadvantaged parts often determine the level of the entire organization.

The bucket law is different from the wine and sewage law. The latter discusses the destructive force in the organization. The shortest board is a useful part of the organization, but it is worse than other parts. You cannot Throw them away as rotten apples. Strength and weakness are only relative and cannot be eliminated. The question is to what extent you tolerate this weakness. If it is serious enough to become a bottleneck that hinders your work, you have to take action.

4. Matthew Effect Matthew Effect

There is only the first, not the second

In sociology, the Matthew Effect means that the rich get richer. Being poor makes you even poorer. Those with power and economic social capital seize the resources of others to increase their own power and wealth.

There is a story in "The Gospel of Matthew" in the New Testament: Before a king went away, he gave each of his three servants a piece of silver and ordered: You go do business, and when I come back, Come see me again. When the king came back, the first servant said: Master, from the ingot of silver you gave me, I have earned 10 ingots. So the king rewarded him with 10 cities. The second servant reported: Master, for the ingot of silver you gave me, I have earned 5 ingots. So the king rewarded him with 5 cities. The third servant reported: Master, I kept the ingot of silver you gave me in my handkerchief for fear of losing it, so I never took it out. So, the king ordered that the third servant's 1 ingot of silver be rewarded to the first servant, saying: "Everything that is small, even what he owns, will be taken away." If you have more, give it to him so that the more the better. This is the Matthew effect.

This reflects a common phenomenon in today’s society, that is, winner takes all. For business development, the Matthew Effect tells us that if we want to maintain an advantage in a certain field, we must quickly expand in this field. When you become a leader in a certain field, even if the return on investment is the same, you can more easily obtain greater returns than your weaker peers. If you do not have the strength to quickly expand in a certain field, you must constantly look for new areas of development to ensure better returns.

5. Zero-sum Game Principle of Zero-sum Game

Achieve win-win situation in competition and cooperation

Zero-sum game refers to a game in which players There are winners and losers. What one party wins is exactly what the other party loses. The total score of the game is always zero. The reason why the principle of zero-sum games has attracted widespread attention is mainly because people can find things similar to zero-sum games in all aspects of society. The glory of the winner is often hidden behind the bitterness and bitterness of the loser.

In the 20th century, mankind has experienced two world wars, rapid economic growth, scientific and technological progress, global integration and increasingly serious environmental pollution. The concept of zero-sum game is gradually being replaced by the concept of win-win. People are beginning to realize that self-interest does not necessarily have to be based on harm to others. Happy endings are possible through effective cooperation. However, moving from a zero-sum game to a win-win situation requires all parties to have the spirit and courage of sincere cooperation. In cooperation, do not be clever or always want to take advantage of others. You must abide by the rules of the game. Otherwise, a win-win situation will not be possible. In the end, It is the collaborators themselves who suffer the loss.

6. Washington Company Law

Washington Law of Cooperation

Teamwork is not a simple sum of manpower

What Washington Law of Cooperation says is One person is perfunctory, two people are passing the blame, and three people will never achieve anything. It is somewhat similar to the story of our three monks.

The cooperation between people is not a simple sum of manpower, but much more complex and subtle. In this kind of cooperation, assuming that everyone's ability is 1, then the result of the cooperation of 10 people is sometimes much greater than 10, and sometimes, even smaller than 1.

Because people are not static objects, but more like energies in different directions. When they push each other, they will get twice the result with half the effort. When they conflict with each other, nothing will be accomplished.

In our traditional management theory, there is not much research on cooperation. The most intuitive reflection is that most of the current management systems and behaviors are dedicated to reducing the unnecessary consumption of manpower rather than utilizing the organization. Improve human effectiveness. In other words, it might be said that the main purpose of management is not to make everyone do better, but to avoid excessive internal friction.

7. Watch Law Watch theorem

Goals and methods must be unified

Watch law means that when a person has a watch, he can know what time it is now , when he had two watches at the same time, he couldn't be sure. Two watches cannot tell a person a more accurate time, but will make the person looking at the watch lose confidence in the accurate time.

The watch theorem gives us a very intuitive inspiration in terms of business management, that is, the management of the same person or the same organization cannot use two different methods at the same time, and cannot set up two different methods at the same time. Even each person cannot be commanded by two people at the same time, otherwise the company or the person will be at a loss. Another meaning of the watch theorem is that everyone cannot choose two different values ????at the same time, otherwise, your behavior will be in chaos.

8. Murphys Law Murphy's Law

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong

Murphy's Law means "Everything that can go wrong will go wrong." ." Extended to "all programs have defects", or "if a defect has many possibilities, it will inevitably develop in the worst direction."

The factors involved in administrative management are very complex. From a human perspective, it is extremely difficult for management scientists to explain. Therefore, managers cannot avoid making mistakes in setting and executing goals. This management principle shows that if A crisis is going to happen, and something will happen. In other words, managers need to be prepared at all times to face incoming mistakes and failures.

Murphy’s Law is an argument in management philosophy. It contains elements of pessimism, explaining that “if you don’t like the gains, don’t worry about the losses.” You must always be prepared to accept failure at work. Some people often say that there is no success in everything. Don't do anything. As long as you press forward with all your strength, you will be successful. However, they ignore one point, that is, there is never a victorious general in the world, and setbacks and failures are inevitable in life. But on the other hand, we can also think from the optimistic side: "If you want to succeed, you will always succeed." Murphy's theory does not imply that things must be bad or good. It just lets managers know what can happen. , will always happen, in other words, managers must be fully prepared for all things that may happen.

9. Mushroom Management Mushroom Management

Respect the growth law of talents

Mushroom management is a management method used by many organizations to treat newcomers. Beginners are In a dark corner (a department that is not taken seriously, or doing errands), pour a lot of dung (unwarranted criticism, accusations, suffering on behalf of others), and leave it to fend for itself (without the necessary guidance and support). I believe many people have had such an experience with mushrooms. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when everything has just begun. A few days of mushrooms can eliminate many of our unrealistic fantasies and bring us closer to reality. See The questions are also more practical.

An organization generally treats new employees equally, and there is no big difference from starting salary to job. No matter how talented you are, you can only start with the simplest things at the beginning. The mushroom experience is like a cocoon for growing young people, a step that must be experienced before emerging. Therefore, how to efficiently go through this period of life, learn as much experience as possible, mature, and establish a good and trustworthy personal image are issues that every young person who has just entered society must face.

10. Occams razor Occam’s razor

It’s easy to make things complicated, but it’s complicated to make things simple

In the 12th century, Occam, England William advocated nominalism, which only recognized things that really existed, and believed that those empty universal concepts were useless burdens and should be ruthlessly eliminated. He advocated not adding entities unless necessary. This is often called Occam's razor. This razor once made many people feel threatened and was considered heresy, and William himself was persecuted for it. However, the sharpness of this knife has not been damaged. On the contrary, after hundreds of years, Occam's razor has been sharpened faster and faster by history, and has long been overloaded with the original narrow field, but has broad, rich, and profound implications. significance.

Occam’s razor can be further evolved into the law of simplicity and complexity in business management: making things complicated is easy, making things simple is complicated. This law requires that when we deal with things, we must grasp the main essence of the matter, grasp the mainstream, and solve the most fundamental problems. In particular, we must follow nature and not artificially complicate things, so that we can handle things well.

Extension: What is human resource management

Human Resource Management (HRM), the upgrade of personnel management, refers to the upgrading of personnel management under the guidance of economics and humanistic ideas , a general term for a series of activities that effectively utilize relevant human resources inside and outside the organization through recruitment, selection, training, compensation and other management forms to meet the organization's current and future development needs and ensure the realization of organizational goals and the maximization of member development. It is the whole process of predicting the organization's human resource needs and making human resource demand plans, recruiting and selecting personnel and organizing them effectively, assessing performance, paying rewards and providing effective incentives, and combining organizational and individual needs for effective development in order to achieve optimal organizational performance. It is also an important position in the company.