In recent years, international consulting agencies have continuously launched cases and articles related to Chinese companies, a series of “learning from China” and “Lessons from China” reports And courses, horizontally illustrate the new changes: China is producing and exporting new models and practices that the Western world is looking forward to understanding.
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Red Hat Chief Human Resources Officer DeLisa Alexander remembers that in 2017, she ushered in the first series of conversations with sales in her career. Normally, DeLisa will not be asked to sit down and talk to customers, “especially with customers from the other side of the world, located in Northern Europe.”
It is true that it is not common for a technology company that provides open source solutions to export consulting services to other companies. After all, there are many consulting companies that can provide these services specifically.
But DeLisa found that this kind of situation happened frequently from 2018. She remembered the heuristic dialogue she participated in with Red Hat customers who came from different industries, government, finance, automotive, telecommunications, but the problem was exactly the same: they encountered the problem of “people”.
“Their organizational culture and team structure do not allow them to make full use of these tools.” These customers hope DeLisa can share with them how to build a team that operates according to open principles.
Nothing is unique. In 2015, when Huawei tried to practice OKR, it tried to find a way to change, but it was unsolvable. Kuang Yang, the author of “Performance Enablement: Beyond OKR”, led the design and development of Huawei OKR’s methodology and OKR’s IT prototype system in 2015-2018. He was also the first to use Google’s OKR translates to people from China.
At that time, few companies in China had practiced OKR. No one could penetrate and understand the essence and concept behind OKR. Huawei finally had to study it by itself.
Every indication shows that: The business community under the increased uncertainty is becoming a strong adversary of consulting companies, and the spread of the new crown epidemic worldwide has exacerbated this uncertainty. The consulting methods used by the consulting agencies and emerging in the industrial age may face remodeling in the era of innovation.
Another trend that has emerged with the times of the innovation era is the rise of a large number of Chinese companies. Leading global business practices are emerging in China. For international consulting companies, the Chinese market is changing from an income market to a resource market.
These changes not only mean that there are more and more Chinese companies capable of purchasing consulting services, and the knowledge and practices in the Chinese market have become increasingly valuable.
If the strategic consulting model once popular in the European and American business context has little overlap with the Chinese market, the Chinese consulting market has also been following. Nowadays, these traditional consulting agencies need to start to understand the business stories and the large number of emerging needs in this late-coming country.
An example may be able to illustrate this trend. In recent years, many top international consulting agencies have continuously launched cases and articles related to Chinese companies, a series of “learning from China” and “Lessons from China” reports and courses, horizontal explanations This new change: This Eastern country is producing and exporting new models and practices that the Western world is looking forward to understanding.
“China used to be a learner, but today China has a large number of leading practices, data and materials.” Yao Qiuchen said that he is the founding partner of Shen Sixing, a third-party research service organization in the consulting industry and strategic management field He is also one of the heads of the Chinese version of the “A Brief History of Strategy”.
“In the past, international consulting companies were selling Western management practices in China, and Chinese companies are also pursuing well-known companies such as GE, IBM, Wal-Mart, but today these consulting organizations may tell North American companies that you know Alibaba ’s best practices ? Do you know Tencent?
Organizational change
With the rapid spread and transparency of information, the mysterious aura haunting management consulting organizations is fading.
Walter Kirchler detailed the history of the development of management consulting agencies in “A Brief History of Strategy”. Their history is less than 50 years. He is now the executive editor of Fortune.
Walter believes that “World War II” provides enough opportunities and new tools for the development of strategic planning. In the 1950s, large companies that had never appeared in history began to be able to formulate large-scale strategies for the economic vision. They needed to obtain clearer guidance for the market and also needed to be armed with new ideas.
“Consulting companies are good at doing long-term research and knowledge accumulation, discovering laws from the development trends of enterprises and industries, and applying such laws to other enterprises to achieve success.” Kang Yang said.
The practice of the past decades has proved the success of this model. Andrew Stotti, a professor at Warwick Business School, believes that the role of consulting agencies is more similar to that of knowledge brokers. They help management to implant and implement some ideas. The credibility of these ideas comes from the admiration of these ideas by consulting agencies. The source of these ideas is the experience of those successful companies. But now, these experiences are no longer mysterious.
Not only that, Kuang Yang said that these experiences were feasible in the industrial era where the external environment was very stable in the past. However, in today’s rapidly changing market environment, the company itself will undergo huge changes, and the company’s managers and employees must quickly follow the changes in the external turbulent environment. In this process, as a bystander consulting company, it is difficult to summarize and refine the development law of the enterprise. Even if it is refined, the industry environment has changed, so it has become less applicable.
He once read more than 1,000 analysis materials in order to study Google’s OKR.
When those advanced management experiences are no longer mysterious, a new question emerges: What do companies that need to step into the era of innovation need?
Today, the global industry is facing a new round of transition. Yang Guoan likes to use the “VUCA era” to summarize the current changes. VUCA refers to volatile and unstable (volatile) , uncertain (uncertain ) , complex (complex) , fuzzy (ambiguous) In previous interviews, he kept mentioning the word.
Yang Guoan is a senior management consultant of Tencent. He used to be the deputy dean of China Europe International Business School and a professor at the University of Michigan Business School. He was deeply involved in Tencent ’s “930 Reform”, which is regarded as the third in the history of Tencent. This large-scale organizational adjustment is the first fundamental strategic change.
The previous interview pointed to a theme—Taylor ’s bureaucratic organization could not adapt to the current VUCA environment, and an organization “new species” was being redefined. No matter what this “new species” is, there is no doubt that companies are facing organizational change.
This is not a simple matter. Enterprises need to disassemble and break up the organization like Lego bricks and restructure them in a new way. Obviously not all bricks can perfectly fit under the new model. This involves changes in corporate culture and employee thinking patterns.
In this scenario, the technical tools become less important.
Of course, companies may choose not to change their organization to save trouble, but it also means that it is difficult for them to respond quickly to changes in the outside world.
“After 2000, I was in charge of global HR management at Acer Computer. At that time, we were facing the PC industry for about a decade, but in the past ten years, I served as a senior management consultant for Tencent. It is two years, three years or even shorter. “Yang Guoan said.
With the support of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, the rapidly changing environment has overshadowed Moore ’s Law, which has influenced the semiconductor industry for more than half a century. This means that if the organization and culture of the enterprise does not adapt to the new changes, they will not be able to use those new technologies well.
DeLisa may have the most say. For Red Hat customers, technology is their least worry. “They say that transformation is not only digital, but also culture.” Customers told her that adopting an open approach is the best choice to face the competition.
In the industrial age, who would have thought that the seemingly disordered organization form of Red Hat could be respected. Do n’t forget, Jimmy Whitehurst, the former CEO of Red Hat and now IBM ’s president, said, “The first reaction I took over from this company was to escape everything.”
But after a while, he began to rejoiceReward Red Hat’s operation and become an evangelist of the open organization, and even wrote the book “Open Organization” to introduce the details of the operation of open innovation companies.
“Compared to the past, the proportion of revenue generated by strategic consulting services for consulting organizations is declining.” Yao Qiuchen said, “However, transformation (Transition) is often talked about now, especially after the impact of this epidemic, turnaround (reversal of losses) < / span> Gradually showing momentum in China. “
Business owners are thinking about how to take innovation deep in the organization, how to keep culture endless, and improve the organization’s ability to cope with external upheaval. Although the phenomenon he talks about is more common in Chinese companies, as the world ’s second largest economy, it can also represent a trend to some extent.
This brings new challenges to consulting companies, in fact they are gradually building this new ability.
In recent years, some top consulting companies have begun to expand investment in other departments in addition to strategic business units.
A data from Linkedin shows that in 2017, McKinsey recruited 106 new employees and 21 in the Operation business, second only to the strategy department. Its job is usually to cooperate with the company ’s top management to find out how to get more Value method. Secondly, McKinsey Implementation recruits 10 people. They need to work with customers to implement the strategic goals.
Chinese context
Corresponding to the general environment, it is the rise of Chinese companies that provides a new context for the current consulting industry. The chaser is gradually moving towards the world business stage.
“If Microsoft cannot cooperate more deeply with Chinese customers and partners, then it should not be regarded as an international enterprise.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once told the then chief of staff of Microsoft Greater China Zhao Zhizhong said so.
Europe ’s largest science and technology summit—Global Network Summit (Web Summit) CEO and founder Paddy Cowsgrave also said several times in the interview, “Hey, can you see Jack Ma or Pony Ma? We especially hope to invite them.”
“Now many top international consulting agencies come out to say learning from China, Lessons from China, this is a change.” Yao Qiuchen repeatedly emphasized that the first thing to recognize is that China is a consulting market, and secondly China’s consulting industry is still in the baby stage.
“Enterprises with strong funds often try to build an internal consulting team.” Kang Yang said that Huawei’s practice may provide a reference for the head companies that enter the technology unmanned zone-build their own internal consulting team.
“What the foreign consulting companies are familiar with and follow is the management method of the industrial era, and the management of the innovation era is still being explored.” So they began to try to answer the question from the management about whether to implement OKR. During that time, the department where Kuang Yang was located assumed the role of consulting, providing support and services to the OKR department within the enterprise.
Chinese companies have their own unique growth soil and inertia, and obviously cannot copy Western practice. Taking Huawei ’s implementation of OKR as an example, when promoting OKR within Chinese companies, it needs to be placed in the entire human resources system. But because the founders of many Chinese companies are basically life-long, the founder’s brand is very heavy.
Therefore, when promoting OKR, it is necessary to balance with corporate culture. For example, OKR emphasizes the stimulation of employees’ autonomy, but when it comes to the practice of the Huawei system, it is found that there may be no way to turn the entire Huawei culture into a self-driven, and it needs to find a balance.
At this time, the path taken by Huawei OKR is different from that of Google. If Google says that the team will do a few things this year, the team members will propose it themselves. In Huawei, the organization stipulates ten things to be done, and employees can choose independently. It is to exert the employees’ autonomy when they meet the needs of the organization.
The same OKR is different today. For example, today ’s headline stipulates that a product will be made this year, but the specifics are not well thought out. Employees can exert their autonomy and continue to do so.
This approach obviously presents a new challenge for consulting organizations: When companies build internal consulting teams, what else can consulting organizations do?
“Many consulting companies are” sinking “themselves,” Yao Qiuchen said. Now there are more and more consulting companies are also developing some of ChinaLarge-scale enterprises, although these customers are not willing to do in the past, after all, these companies will not be very generous in the payment.
And these middle-tier companies tend to be more result-oriented, and the headache for these business owners is that consulting agencies cannot help implement the solution.
An interesting past may explain some problems.
In 1999, when the Internet set off a wave in China, Suning, which was still a wholesale business, wanted to enter the Internet. At that time, people in the consulting agency suggested that Suning could put a computer in the community and place orders for the people. If the community did not have an Internet, then they would build a TV and use VCD to play videos, and then cut into the Internet in this way.
Now it seems that the original scene was ridiculous. Suning founder Zhang Jindong’s final judgment is also that the time to do e-commerce at that time was not mature.
The plan cannot be implemented, which is one of the main reasons for the low customer satisfaction of traditional management consulting companies.
Wei Haozheng, the founder and CEO of Laoda Laboroot, shared a customer ’s personal experience.
The chairman of this company once planned to do internal contracting to achieve organizational change. The company’s fighting spirit came to the consulting company to make a plan. After insourcing, employees set up small and micro enterprises in the name of individual industrial and commercial households, and all expenses were paid to the small and micro enterprises. This sounds like a great way to increase the enthusiasm of the organization, but ultimately it can’t land.
The reason is very simple. Employees who register as self-employed or wholly-owned enterprises have no way to approve the business scope. If you want to contract the project to this small and micro enterprise, you need the corresponding business scope, but the local industry and commerce bureau will not grant it.
“Why can’t you solve the registration problem yourself?” The consulting company is not responsible for the implementation of the plan. Perhaps it is a reason, but perhaps the plan itself has problems, and many details do not have the conditions for landing in China. Another reason for the difficulty of landing is the resistance of employees.
“Too much uncertainty, using a fixed model and a fixed solution, and a long time to implement the steps. When finally helping the enterprise solve the challenge, the challenge may be different.” Wei Haozheng believes that various Various problems will lead to a lower success rate of management consulting organizations in making organizational changes. China’s consulting market needs a set of Chinese business models that truly understand China’s local conditions and are close to reality.
This has promoted China to some extent