The Boundaries of a Company

Thoughts of the Week

I started working on the second day of the Lunar New Year this year, and the pace was particularly fast, as if everyone was full of energy after the new year to make up for the lost time last year. According to legal holidays, it has only been a month since work started after the new year, but it seems like we have been working for half a year. Here are a few recorded insights:

First, choice is the most important. I remember seeing a sentence last year, “Only children make multiple-choice questions, adults want it all,” and I believed it for a long time, but when it comes to work, you must make choices. Take an engineering project as an example: a project requires business communication, a project manager, on-site construction, and delivery and acceptance. Except for the length of the on-site construction period, the time, manpower, and material resources consumed in the other three links for large and small projects are almost consistent. If you don’t make choices and accept both large and small projects, you may end up busy but with little return. In addition, a correct assessment of the probability of project success should be made as early as possible, and projects with a low probability of success should be abandoned as early as possible. When I was at my old company, I remember a project manager who would report at the weekly meeting that he had been following a project for several months or even a year or two. The boss praised the project manager for his perseverance and spirit of never giving up, but in the end, both the boss and the project manager lost their jobs.

Secondly, stick to the right path and surprise others, and use fewer tricks. Regarding tricks, people in the workplace generally go through three stages: when they first enter society, they don’t understand tricks and are often deceived by low-level tricks, such as seeking a child with a heavy reward, ancestral traditional Chinese doctors, fellow villagers helping out, traps everywhere, and falling for them everywhere. After struggling in society for a few years, they learned a few tricks, started talking about feelings and brotherhood, eating and drinking with customers, calling them brothers, but the performance was not significant in the end. Later, they finally realized that everyone is smart and knows the tricks well. There is no need to play tricks. It is better to be sincere and things will go smoothly.

Third, instant information is not important. There are so many push messages from Weibo, WeChat, and various apps. I used to have information anxiety because I couldn’t finish reading the subscribed content. Now I am too busy to have time to read official authoritative news. After a period of time, I found that the information from various industries and trivial news did not affect my personal work (maybe the short-term effect has not yet appeared?). Even if there is important information, it can be learned from communication with people around you.

Fourth, read big classic books. Classics have stood the test of time. When you watch speeches by contemporary celebrities and industry insights, if you read a lot of books, you will find that they are just paraphrasing common sense in their own words. Yu Minhong once publicly said that entrepreneurs should try to attend fewer forums and activities. I think his implication is that if you have that leisure time, you might as well read more books.

Fifth, to force myself to think, benchmarking against the investment section, I will also update a weekly issue in the entrepreneurship section, including the week’s insights and some fixed content. This is the first issue, and it will be constantly added, modified, and improved in the future.

Sixth, innovation. The word innovation has almost penetrated into the marrow of every Chinese person. If a product or solution is not innovative, it is difficult to win the favor of customers, especially for To G projects, most of which are demonstrative and leading. If there are no bright spots, the project decision-makers cannot see any flash points, and it will be difficult to push forward. Innovation points mainly include two aspects: technological innovation and humanistic spirit. Relevant keywords in recent years are:

Seventh, for a company to operate normally and grow rapidly, it faces management needs in many aspects such as strategic management, personnel management, project management, product management, and quality management. For new managers, it is crucial to explore a set of practical management methods. Fortunately, whether from the perspective of Eastern traditional culture or Western modern management, there are already quite a few classic methods in all aspects, such as Six Sigma for quality management and the 5-slide method for strategy formulation.

Eighth, the founder’s cognition is the boundary of the company. Whether a company goes towards the stars and the sea or towards mediocrity depends only on the founder’s vision. Only when the founder continues to grow will the company grow.

Event of the Week

Zhejiang launched the “New Phoenix Action”. By 2025, the number of listed companies will reach 1,000. Data shows that as of the end of November 2020, Zhejiang Province had 641 domestic and overseas listed companies.

This week, a smart hardware company in Hangzhou was listed in the US. A friend sighed that he was planning to join this company at the time and asked the company to cash out options upon entry, but the company said that it had just finished a round of option distribution and it would not be cashed out until the next round, so he gave up.

Industry Trends

Recently, no-code development has been very popular. Software has been developing towards the trend of no-code development. Genius engineers do the underlying infrastructure, outstanding engineers do compilation frameworks, excellent engineers do software development, and engineers can only do no-code development.

Ps: The blog has always had three columns: investment, entrepreneurship, and life. In the early stage, investment and life were updated frequently, while entrepreneurship was updated less. Starting from this week, the entrepreneurship section will be updated weekly like the investment section, and the life section will be updated randomly. The content of the entrepreneurship section mainly includes three main parts: thoughts of the week, entrepreneurship events of the week, and industry trends. It will also be adjusted appropriately during the update process.

Published at: Mar 21, 2021 · Modified at: Jan 14, 2026