A concept that needs to be agreed by the team
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “42 Chapters” (ID: myfortytwo ) , author: Tian put.
This article is from Li Tianfang, serial entrepreneur
We have previously published two articles by Oasis Capital Zhang Jinjian. They are:
Signal and Noise in Investment 丨 42 Chapters
Signal-to-noise ratio in investment decision ｜ 42 chapters
These two articles explain the venture capital market from the perspective of signals and systems. Today’s article can be seen as a supplement to it. It talks about the meaning of “bandwidth” for communication and entrepreneurs.
I believe that from a certain level, the bandwidth of the team will indirectly or even directly determine the success or failure of entrepreneurship, and the individual bandwidth is our eternal challenge and pursuit of self-intellect.
Bandwidth is important.
If the internet speed is too low, the game will not play well, the video will not be seen, and even the best websites will not be used.
The unit of bandwidth is bit per second or the efficiency of information transmission per second. Communication between people is also a kind of information transmission, which can also be measured by bandwidth. Communication bandwidth doesn’t measure speed or content length, but efficiency. Some people with a lot of words have said nothing for a long time. In turn, some people can use one sentence or even one word to grab the point of one thing.
Even if you haven’t thought about the concept of bandwidth, you can feel it in everyday life.
Discussing things with people with low bandwidth at work will be “unclear”, and chatting with people with low bandwidth in life will “have no common topics.” Bandwidth directly affects our career, social, and happiness indicators.
Under the same conditions, the bandwidth of people with clear thinking will be higher, because if they want to transmit a concept efficiently, they must first think clearly. People with a wide range of knowledge and people with a large vocabulary will have higher bandwidth because they are more likely to use the right words and precise analogies.
High bandwidth is a trick. Sometimes we need to tell a story, sometimes we need to find a good metaphor, sometimes we need to abstract a concept, and sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.
Bandwidth is not only an attribute on each person, but also an attribute between two people.
There is a category of questions in the product manager interview: “How do you introduce this product to your parents?” or “How do you explain this product to people in the 18th century?”. This type of question examines how to clarify a product with low bandwidth. Your parents and 18th-century people are not stupid. The difficulty is that you and them lack a common Context (common language and knowledge overlap).
Context is the key to increasing bandwidth between people. Having a common Context can simplify complex concepts with familiar analogies.
For example, when discussing issues in a narrow field, I like to use metaphors to explain, similar to the concept of dating in life to explain hedge funds, etc.
Similarly, movie friends can use one movie to describe another movie, such as “Titanic in Space” or “Ultraman in Transformers.” Entrepreneurs often use one product to describe another, such as “Weibo for enterprises” or “GitHub for artists”. This is the role of Context in improving communication bandwidth.
For network bandwidth, we can improve efficiency through compression.
A way to compress is to describe data in a shorter and more compact way. For example, if you want to transmit “00000000000000000000”, you can only transmit “20 x 0”. Similarly, we can compress the content of communication. An hour’s meeting may be able to be pressed for half an hour or simply not meet, and email instead. A long message can often be reduced to a short message. A picture can sometimes omit hundreds of words.
Another compression method is to take advantage of differences.
There is not much change between each picture in the video and the previous picture. Just saving the difference between the two pictures can make the file dozens of times smaller. People with a common Context are often enough to just describe the differences. If you talk about Ruby to a non-programmer, you need to start from scratch, but to talk about Ruby to a Java programmer, you only need to mention the difference between Ruby and Java.
Bandwidth effects are amplified in teams.
If the cost of communication between two people is n, the cost of communication between teams is n ^ 2. Ideally everyone in the team should have strong communication skills. In reality, most teams will naturally generate some communication nodes, and most members will pass a few middlemen.To convey information. These people are “well-connected” and “compassionate”, which means high bandwidth.
Some positions, such as product managers, are innate communication nodes. These positions require people with high bandwidth.
Ultimately, bandwidth is not just about communicating information between people. Programming is actually the transmission of instructions between people and computers. The “Human Computer Interaction” in the design is the docking theory between human and software.
For entrepreneurs and creators, the purpose of increasing bandwidth is not to turn yourself into a eloquent sales expert, but to make it easier for you to turn the piecemeal ideas in your mind into reality.
n ^ 2 For the cost of communication, please refer to the book “Myth of Man and Moon”-
