📰 Weekly Digest#
Vision Pro goes on sale with various eye-catching bags! Driving, exercising, and crossing the road are all amazing, AI expert Karpathy shares his thousand-word personal experience#
After watching some usage videos, it feels like it's still a high-end toy, maybe it has some use in the office.
Ant provides train station weather information#
South Korean man sentenced to prison for refusing military service due to playing "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds"#
According to a report by the Korean Pioneer on February 4th, the Supreme Court of South Korea sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for refusing military service on the grounds of opposing war and violence. And the reason he lost the case was because he was enthusiastic about playing "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds".
Bǎngbù zhùle
📚 Articles#
The Myth of Management in Internet Companies#
Excerpt One#
Values, OKRs, nicknames, flexible working hours, etc...
In the past 20 years, the internet industry has contributed many innovative management practices to the business world. Some of them are original to the Chinese internet industry, while many others have been learned from Silicon Valley and are now common in the global internet industry.
When the internet industry was in its golden age, almost every successful internet company had to some extent promote their own management methodology, either through founder speeches, books, or directly influencing the startups they invested in, like Tencent and Alibaba.
However, with the end of the golden growth period of the internet and the disappearance of the global internet popularity dividend (population dividend for China), we were surprised to find that many management concepts that were once highly regarded in the internet industry are now failing... or perhaps they never really worked.
Looking back at the management methodologies that were once popular in internet companies, such as Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Google, Amazon, and Netflix, we can see that they may have made attribution errors - underestimating the era they were riding on and overestimating their own efforts (management behavior).
Because in the world of business management, there are some obvious wrong answers, and everything else is the "right answer".
This is my impression after reading the recent book "Big Factory Talent" by Samantha, a partner at Mu Sheng Consulting. The book provides a detailed evaluation of the management systems of various big companies such as ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, and Huawei, and occasionally compares these different models with traditional corporate management systems.
The author of the original book summarized the conclusions in a more tactful manner, but based on my own experience working in a big company and my reading of this book, I can say directly: all the management innovations in internet giants may be unnecessary additions.
Excerpt Two#
However, the world itself is made up of backwardness.
I first realized this when I was sharing my manuscript (the one with tens of thousands of words) on Feishu during a conference attended by older members. When I was halfway through my presentation, an audience member asked me, "What page are you on?"
I was stunned. What page was I on? Feishu doesn't have page numbers because it never occurred to Feishu that someone would print out an electronic document and read it.
The questioner was in his 50s, which from my perspective and the perspective of most internet employees, could be considered "old". But in fact, he has been using computers since the 1990s, so how can you say his "digital literacy" is lacking? Similar situations exist for almost all online document platforms, which do not support "footnotes," a very important feature in academic writing (there is also "revision mode"), to the point that Kingsoft Docs still has a market share that Tencent Docs and Feishu Docs cannot obtain.
Is it because the dazzling array of online document platforms is not "advanced" enough? No, it's because they are too advanced and do not match the backward real world.
Unless you assume a society where everyone retires at the age of 35, compatibility with backwardness is the most important foundation for advanced management tools and productivity tools.
This has been repeatedly verified in the SaaS market. Everyone says that the SaaS market in China is difficult, and they have come up with many reasons. But by 2024, there are only a few companies that dare to start a business without buying Microsoft Office, and even the free WPS can only grab a market share because it looks "exactly the same" as Microsoft Office. That's why when I was talking to @汐笺 about SaaS, I said:
If you create an office suite and think you're innovative and don't look like Office at all, then you must be doing it wrong because each button in Microsoft Office represents a product and R&D effort that is as big as your entire team, and corresponds to a market share of 0.x% to x%.
You can use Feishu, Notion, Obsidian in your daily work, and even in small teams, you can use these new tools for collaboration. However, once you enter a larger scale of social collaboration, you cannot do without Microsoft Office. Does ByteDance share Feishu links when dealing with the government? Do Alibaba and Tencent use DingTalk documents for preliminary mutual review when signing contracts? Impossible.
This is not only true at the tool level but also at the management tool level. OKR is a so-called "innovation-oriented" management tool. But even in the past half-century of intensive human innovation, innovation has not been the norm for companies. Innovation brings new growth points, but once these points are created, subsequent growth work is invariably driven by a massive number of people and funds in mundane daily work.
Source
I agree with excerpt one, which is the conclusion of the book "Big Factory Talent". My company has been using OKRs for a long time, but I don't feel that it's particularly brilliant, and even Google doesn't use it anymore~ However, excerpt two is somewhat biased. Good tools make your own work more efficient and advanced, rather than aligning with so-called industry standards and outdated practices. When dealing with external parties, you can easily switch to meet their requirements, or even have the power to change the industry. Nowadays, both government and enterprises use Tencent Meeting for communication, isn't this an innovation that changes the industry?
🎞️ Life#
Returned to Hefei from Shanghai for the Lunar New Year on February 7th.
💭 Thoughts#
There are many things that are more rewarding than work, such as gardening. However, besides the tangible returns such as salary, work also involves the necessary evaluation from the social system, which may seem worthless but is difficult to give up.