Advice to Guoge Enterprise: Simplified strategy is not simple

In order to make your staff understand, how would you describe your business strategy? Well, you may have heard this, "Say simple, stupid." Usually, the subtext of this sentence is, "Simply, your people are less clever." But the simplified core Not to reduce difficulty, to make things easier, but to simplify it so that it can be carried out. If your strategy does not allow employees to act, it is not a strategy. What you are trying to solve is not an understanding problem. What you are trying to solve is a problem called "decisionlessness".

"The powerlessness of decision-making" stems from a psychological discovery. It means that when we choose more, we tend to behave more rigorously, so we can choose the way that resistance is smaller and easier. Here is a simple experiment: There is a table in a grocery store with 24 kinds of different tastes of jam, customers can taste, this is a huge temptation; the next day, the same table only put 6 different The taste of jam is equally tasteful, which is not bad. But the troubling question came: When we finally calculated how many cans of jam we sold, we found that each jam had only 10 cans on the day when only 6 jams were placed on the day when 24 jams were placed. When you have to make choices among 24 options, this is really too difficult. This is "decisionlessness."

Think about the reasons in your organization that are prone to “decisions and weaknesses”. Believe me, the situation is definitely worse than making a choice between strawberry jam and blueberry sauce. Each company needs to make choices among attractive options: serving customers and reducing costs, increasing sales revenue and profit maximization, product quality and market expansion. To put all these pressures together, you will undoubtedly "kick" your life. As Barry Schwartz said in his book "The Paradox of Choice", when we face more and more choices, "We are overloaded. What we choose to give us is no longer freedom. It makes us weak." So much so that we abuse it." What should you do?

simplify. I met a man named Hoover Adams, who founded the Dunn Daily Chronicle in Dunn, North Carolina, and is one of the most successful newspapers in the country. On average, each family subscribed 1.12 copies of the newspaper. That is to say, members of the same family, everyone rushed to read, so that sharing a newspaper was very difficult. So, I asked Adams what he was? He said that his strategy has not changed in 40 years. It comes down to one sentence: "name, name, name."

Every day, Adams asked his editors and reporters to write as many Dunn's local people as possible. As many as possible, he would browse the newspaper and count the names one by one. His point is, "Look, we obviously can't do the USA Today and we can't do the Washington Post. The only thing we can do and others can't do is tell our readers what your neighbors have done recently. If you Is an editor who needs to make choices in two photographs. One is the beautiful local park in the setting sun, and the other is a tedious meeting room with 9 people. Which one would you like to have? The Chronicle must choose the latter. Although boring, nine people were mentioned in one photograph.

Relying on the spell of "First Name, First Name, First Name", Adams helped his editors make the same choices as they did. This is the value of simplification. It frees employees from "decisionlessness" and ensures that everyone is moving toward the same person. Go ahead.