In my consulting and training career over the past ten years, I have studied nearly 1,000 companies, 1/3 of which are companies worthy of in-depth research. Based on the characteristics of the company, I divide all future companies into four roles: dancing elephants, industry leaders, billion unicorns, and entrepreneurial ant colonies.
One and four types of animal enterprises
The elephant who wants to dance
Refers to an enterprise with a large enough scale and enough employees. It can be a state-owned enterprise, a central enterprise, a multinational giant, or a private enterprise that operates successfully.
Industry leader
Refers to companies that have at least 10 years of hard work in a niche field, rank among the top 5 in the industry, or have been listed. Although most of these enterprises are traditional enterprises, they are a powerful force that cannot be ignored in the changes in the economic landscape in the next 5 to 20 years.
In the past, the Internet has always been a consumer Internet, so emerging companies ran faster, while traditional companies were generally on the defensive. However, we know that it is the industrial Internet that will cause explosive growth in the future. It is precisely traditional companies that have industrial value chains and understand the industry better.
One Billion Unicorns
Refers to companies that have not been started for a long time but have a valuation of more than US$1 billion, such as e-bag washing. I define 1 billion U.S. dollars as 1 billion RMB.
Unicorns usually have distinct technical or product advantages, and their business challenge lies in whether the business logic makes sense. We know a rule: when a company's business development momentum is good enough, it can cover up management problems to a certain extent.
Entrepreneurial Ant Colony
Driven by mass entrepreneurship and innovation, a large number of incubators have emerged in even second- and third-tier cities. Thousands of entrepreneurial companies will appear in each place, and a large number of college students have joined the entrepreneurial team. This part is what I call the entrepreneurial ant colony.
Common challenges of animals in the second and fourth categories: innovative strategies and entrepreneurial talents
These four types of businesses often interbreed. Next we look at the strategic and talent challenges encountered in the first three categories.
The elephant who wants to dance
Today we are in an Internet era with technological challenges and accelerated returns. The Internet is as mature as the water and electricity industry, but more new technologies will emerge in various vertical industries, and the challenges for enterprises will be very great.
In the past year, central enterprises have encountered great challenges in their operations, such as energy companies, whose original model was more B2B. At this timeNow we see a phenomenon: Central SOEs were originally composed of strong resources and strategic planning, but today the person in charge of central SOEs said that it is no longer possible or realistic to make a strategic plan for the next five years, because the market is changing too fast.
Innovation and transformation in the past five years would have been the icing on the cake for some companies, but today their key is to solve the problem of feeding tens or hundreds of thousands of people. It has become a matter of survival. This is the voice of the top managers from deep in their hearts.
Industry leader
The confusion in the transformation of industry leaders is highly similar to that of an elephant that wants to dance. I have done a lot of research on leading founders or CEOs. Unlike traditional strategy consulting companies, which lock everyone in, brainstorm, and finally write a development report, we use educational methods, which is the concept of midwifery proposed by Socrates, and let the executives themselves give birth to children through discussions.
We usually see many entrepreneurs suffering from deep depression. Their biggest confusion is that after they have become the champion of a niche industry, they find that a company born after 1985 has entered its market from another angle, and its valuation is higher than it. The advantages it accumulated in the past are no longer advantages, no longer in line with trends, and no longer favored by capital. Therefore, it hopes to make its innovative strategy and business model clearer, and at the same time find a new team to support the next fulcrum. Its advantage is that it can do whatever it wants without the constraints of an elephant.
In the Internet era, you must find a channel to reach the ultimate mass of users, which is a typical community model. Your original wheels are still running, but there are new wheels to run, so the best way is to cooperate with the Internet community, or even strategic cooperation, such as Auntie, Tubatu, Jumei Youpin, etc. At this time, we can feel the strong motivation in the hearts of the leaders. They hope to change, embrace new technologies, complete the transformation of business models, and at the same time carry out implementation actions through capital and talents.
One Billion Unicorns
Many unicorn companies have a mess of internal management. They are taking advantage of the tide and trends to bet on a probability. They are not first-time entrepreneurs. They know that if the company does not have a reasonable management structure within the company, it will disperse in the process of running. They are not only thinking about the business logic behind it, but also thinking about the rapid expansion of personnel.
Many founders just want to build a product with peace of mind at first, but now they are asked to manage a dozen VPs (vice presidents) and a large group of employees. This is their confusion.
3. Solutions to challenges
For elephant and leading companies, the leaders of the company are usually most concerned about transformation and change, that is, whether the new business model and strategy can conform to the trend, whether the strategy can be successful, and whether investors can support it.
At this time, a lot of the work done by HR is usually out of line with the wishes of the company's top management, without considering whether the company's top-down language and goals areConsistently, this needs to be interpreted. Let’s analyze further and hope to have in-depth communication on these topics:
The first is the strategic level: What is strategy? Innovation is strategy
Many people mention Internet strategy and industrial Internetization. When I communicate and discuss with many companies, I vaguely see many directions: disintermediation, community, C2B, and ecosystem. Next, let’s see if it can be solved.
The second is the organizational level: flexible organization
Today’s organizations are embedded in the canvas of the new era, so they must constantly make adjustments with the times.
Where does the internal entrepreneurial and innovative spirit come from? In the past ten years, we had a pyramid structure and a one-spoken team. Everyone in the team was a white horse. Suddenly, the boss said that dark horses and wild horses were going to emerge internally. Will they happen overnight? It seems difficult.
The third is the talent level: How to establish a new business talent echelon? How to seize time?
I have met at least 1,000 entrepreneurs, and no more than 20 of them are satisfied with HR. Why are entrepreneurs dissatisfied with HR? The key reason is that the external environment changes too fast, and companies can never seem to find suitable talents. In particular, more and more companies need to continue to innovate and start businesses for the second time, so the demand for talents cannot be met. So what should we do? Run an entrepreneurial university.
4. The way out for entrepreneurial talent strategy—Entrepreneurial University and Innovation Ecosystem
Every true entrepreneur has the dream of becoming a principal. Problems that entrepreneurs generally focus on: leaders and business partners, new business professionals, mid-level managers who adapt to transformation, and the layout of entrepreneurial teams can all be solved through entrepreneurial universities. Specifically, three types of entrepreneurial universities can be established:
The first is the party school
The party school focuses on building a leadership system. Solve the problem of who will be the leader and partner, and who will resolve internal conflicts of interest.
The second type is the military academy
It is not equivalent to sales staff training, but comprehensive job talent training and selection for enterprise development; such as a large number of new talents needed for new businesses; community operation talents; data mining talents; Internet talents; at the same time, who can be recruited from the existing team to train them into the backbone of transformation and participate in new businesses? How to get management on board?
The third type is entrepreneurship school
Entrepreneurs are a group of different species. It is impossible for anyone to train a white rabbit into a wild horse. What we have to do is to identify the wild horses within and outside the enterprise that have not been assimilated, and through practical education methods such as practical simulations, case studies, and interactive teaching, we can cultivate and inspire the wild horses and release the inherent potential of talents.
This is most likely to be ignored by most HR. They all have an inward vision, but they do not realize that entrepreneurial universities can become the source of innovation in the next era and can recruit external entrepreneurial teams. Maybe their projects are unreliable, but their people are reliable, but they just don’t have the resources. By combining them with enterprises, we can jointly build an industrial innovation ecosystem.
In the era of industrial Internet, companies need talents, and talents need resources. As long as we give resources to reliable people, we may be able to find the next growth engine of the company without spending too much. Most elephant or leading companies pay little attention to this section. At last year's Entrepreneurship State Annual Conference, we selected 100 companies that had completed Series C valuations, 100 capital companies, and 100 leading companies, specifically to facilitate companies to complete this docking. We will do this more in the future.
