This article is from WeChat public account: people with gods Fen (ID: tongyipaocha) , author: God people were excited, from the title figure: the movie “The Thirteenth Floor”
1. Constant change
Every once in a while, I think about a question: In this era of change, what else will change in the self-media industry that has changed a lot in the year?
This habit stems from an opinion of Amazon CEO Bezos: “People often ask me: What will change in the next 10 years, but no one ever asks me: What will not change in the next 10 years?”
This view belongs to Buffett earlier, “I always look for things that don’t change in investment, which can reduce the risk.” He also took chewing gum as an example, saying that the world is developing fast. No matter how fast the technology advances, everyone’s demand for chewing gum will not change.
In the past, a word popular in the business management world was called “embracing change.” We always hope to seize the next opportunity in the era of change. But Bezos gives us another idea: It is more important to look for your side and find things that are unchanged in the past, present, and future.
If you want to list the ten thinking models that I think are the most important, Bezos’s point of view is definitely one of them: every time I make a decision, I will look at the factors of this decision. Find the most important ones that will not change, and use this as a basis for decision-making.
At the beginning, I felt that for the media, “thinking” is the same. It solves the confusion that I write more fresh and fun, or deeper content;
Later, I feel that “characteristics” are the same. It solves the confusion that I ’m writing what readers want to see or what I like most.
Because of some choices, I recently started thinking about this again. On the weekend, I suddenly realized that thinking about “constant” is constantly changing, so even the “changing” thing is also constant.
This looks like a word game. Do I emphasize “change” or “unchanged”?
2. Behind diversified “change”, constant value
Amazon, which claims to focus on “constant value”, is actually the most tricky. From book sales to everything, from retail to cloud computing, from Kindle to smart speakers, it is almost a borderless enterprise. .
In China, the company that benchmarks with ideas is Meituan. Meituan is also a “borderless” company. From group purchases to hotel travel, movie tickets to takeaways, bicycles to various O2Os … every time you think it stretches too long this time, you can Stand still.
Alibaba’s veteran Ali is also “benchmarking” Amazon. From e-commerce to cloud computing, from online to offline, other businesses that cannot be classified are classified as “innovative businesses.”
Tencent, Ali ’s rival, embarked on the opposite path. Tencent, which had “what else can’t be done”, began to “repent” more than a decade ago, and its new business contracted to “two and a half”, only social and content, half One is to build alliances with money and traffic. There is a good name for Bole in the industry, but there is another voice calling it “there is no ideal Tencent”-so it is difficult to be a big company, and everyone will be criticized for doing it.
Everyone thought that focus can provide value. For the so-called diversified enterprises that want to do everything, the capital market is disdainful. The method of calculating the valuation is to add up the value of each business block, and then make a 20% discount, as a worry about not “one-stop” punishment.
But now the management community has also begun to reflect on this long-standing view. The just-released financial report shows that the business growth of Meituan has exceeded the forecasts of the most optimistic analysts.
So, what we think of as “the same thing” is really the same thing?
Buffett said that with the change in technology, people ’s demand for chewing gum is constant, but it turns out that there is no constant demand. Gum sales have been declining for nearly a decade. Buffett’s favorite Wrigley has also been acquired by Mars Foods. “The culprit” is technology-because people just look at their phones, and no longer, as before, take a box of gum or condoms off the shelf while waiting boringly for checkout.
In fact, what is behind the diversified “change” is the “constant” thing, which is the value of data. In the era of big data, the more diversified the business, the more dimensions of the data, the higher the user value. Therefore, Ali’s ads sell better than Tencent, so Ali was the first to emphasize the value of Central Taiwan, and Tencent also realized the problem. , Began to “cut Fanfan.”
Finding constant things is valuable; finding constant things is also slowly changing, and even more valuable.
3. Minor changes
There is an interesting question in philosophy. Are you now, the same person as you were a minute ago?
Biologically, the answer may be no. People die and regenerate 300 million cells per minute. At least some of you are no longer you.
In essence, human beings are different from other animals. The answer may also be negative. You might have never thought about this question a minute ago, and this question may change a lot of your thoughts. How can you say Are you the same person as before?
What makes you wonder about this problem is that your consciousness constitutes a continuous scene. The world is a movie film. Each cell looks similar, but when connected, it is a dynamic world. .
What makes you think “no change” is not “constant” but “continuous small changes”.
These changes are so small that even if you have just made a Nobel Prize discovery within a minute, others will not recognize you, and sometimes you do n’t even feel it yourself.
But these small changes accumulate enough to make you from young to old, from mediocre to great.
The “change” that keeps you the same, I call it “slight change.”
4. Creative destruction
What will happen if a biological body undergoes a mutation in its biological characteristics, such as an additional arm or an eye? In most cases, it will die alone because it cannot adapt to the environment.
If it survives, what will happen to this world? In most cases, nothing will happen, or it will not be able to pass on this biological characteristic to the next generation? Either passed on to the next generation, but because of no competitive advantage, this biological characteristic was lost in continued inheritance.
So the mutation of the vast majority of individuals has almost negligible effect on the population, and it can also be called the “micro change” of the population.
But what if there is a change in the external environment that is conducive to this genetic characteristic, such as the change is not afraid of cold, and the earth just entered a cooling cycle?
This process is “evolution” in evolution. Evolution is the change of the entire population. The mutation of most individuals will not change the population, but the change of the population must come from the mutation of an individual before.
40 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, a 20-year-old economist named Schumpeter introduced evolutionary ideas to his theory of economic development. He believed that capitalism This kind of disruptive innovation has three important factors in this process: “innovation, entrepreneurs, and credit.”
Peter Schumer believes that economic growth is not equal to development. Economic growth is only a change in quantity, but a low-dimensional self-cycle; and “development” must be a “mutation” in the economic structure, which is equivalent to changing from ape to human Evolution.
How did this evolution happen? It is the result of entrepreneurs’ pursuit of innovation.
Schumpeter’s “innovation” is not a technological advancement, but a “mutation” and a “recombination of production factors.” Entrepreneur’s “mutation” is also a kind of “micro change” for the entire social system, and the development of society is also an evolution driven by various “micro changes”.
The reason why it can develop after destruction is because of the continuity of social credit as a whole, including property rights protection, stable currency and free trade.
Schumpeter believes that capitalists are not equal to entrepreneurs. The capitalist is pursuing profit, and the entrepreneur is a heterogeneous capitalist. The entrepreneurial spirit is pursuing a “mutation” from ape to man.
Entrepreneurs are prone to failure, but from the perspective of the whole social process, entrepreneurs must succeed. Why do you say that?
5. From slight change to evolution
Many people say that fighting a lot is a miracle. When the big guys shouted “The Internet enters the second half”, when analyzing why “Shanghai can’t get an Internet giant”, an Internet startup company born in Shanghai but sinking the market In just four years, JD.com’s market capitalization has hit the throne of China’s second largest e-commerce company.
Many people have written a lot of articles to analyze how the Pinduoduo miracle is produced. These articles are very valuable, but standing at the height of an industry or even society, the appearance of Pinduoduo is both an accident and a very Strong necessity.
China’s e-commerce companies, from Jingdong and Suning to Vipshop, to Xiaohongshu, Weidian, and even various merchants, are precisely this kind of “mutation””, Evolved the new species” Pinduoduo “and broke through a corner tower of Ali’s e-commerce empire wall.
So the answer to another similar question is obvious. People often ask: Why is WeChat QQ so powerful, so why do people make social products?
It is precisely because WeChat QQ is so powerful that there will be huge benefits; because there are huge benefits, more people will go forward to make social products one after another. This is “micro change”.
The result of “micro changes” is “evolution”: As long as someone keeps making social products, WeChat QQ will be killed one day; because someone will kill you in the future, you might as well kill yourself Wechat appeared after QQ.
After talking about the logic at the enterprise level, the article finally returns to individual thinking.
A person is an individual to the entire human being, but this individual is also a complete system for an idea of his own. Therefore, a “micro change” in thought can also bring about someone’s evolution .
6. The birth of a public account
Every day, we have thousands of weird ideas, and they seem meaningless.
A lot of years ago, when I was in high school, I read a novel about a court messenger who lost a secret letter. When I went back to find it, I found a farmer who had picked it up and was waiting by the road. Owner. The messenger thought to himself that there are such honest people in the world. I can’t kill him and destroy his mouth, so I “reward” him two whip. The logic of the messenger is that if the farmer receives the reward, even if he promises to keep it secret, it will inevitably be boasted after drinking, but now he has done a good deed and only got two whip. Who would say such a scandal?
This is a story about human nature and power, but at the time I suddenly thought of the farmer’s IQ,You may never know why this officer sent him so. Similarly, Does the unfair thing we encounter have such a higher logic behind our IQ or experience?
After I wrote down this idea, my brain was quickly occupied by more new ideas. Until a few years later, I sorted out my notes from school and saw these words. Feeling after sentence work.
A few years later, when I saw this again, I wrote a thousand-word text, and for a moment I couldn’t think of any use, and it was temporarily stored in the computer.
After a few years, I opened a public account and started selling educational products. Later, I sold bags, and my positioning changed several times. One day when I saw the thousand-word text, I felt something, and suddenly felt that I should have a personal account with a strong personal color. I sorted out what I wrote before. This is the first article of “People and God work together.” Why does our life change from an advertisement to a joke? “.
In fact, the positioning of this public account is completely different from that time, but if I did not have the idea at that moment, my life might be completely different.
A new idea of yours can hardly change anything for you, just like the mutation of an individual in a population has almost negligible effect on the population; but The evolution of your life must come from A small idea of a certain day is like the moment when I read the story of the farmer and the messenger to me now.
So, we can evaluate what we are doing at any time, whether it has long-term value, which is “unchanged”; but we cannot say to ourselves “what’s the use of this and can’t be eaten as food” — -Many “minor changes” are invisible right now.
We should say to ourselves, “You can’t do anything, because then, you will no longer be yourself.” This is “unchanged”; but We cannot say to ourselves, “What should you do Because we need “minor changes”, every moment.
Species evolve, businesses evolve, and people evolve. Evolution is slow, it can be so slow that you feel no change, and evolution is out of control. It always happens when you don’t expect it.
It was first published on WechatZhonghao, an original article every Tuesday, subvert your perception of the workplace.