MUJI: No Anxiety, No Slack, No Pride.

After 20 years of continuous growth, Muji has suddenly lost 3 billion 800 million yen in 2001. The external evaluation has changed from "Muji myth" to "the era of Muji" has come to an end. Inside, there is also a "desperate desire" for the company to be finished. This is a situation many people are not familiar with. Maybe you once or I am now in such an environment.

How to do it? The first method used by ordinary enterprises is to lay off staff and sell brands / departments.

Matsui believes that there are 2 key problems in MUJI products.

(1) 20 years after its establishment, the spirit of "innovation" originally contained in the brand has not been able to keep up with the needs of customers.

(2) the company attaches too much importance to "past experience and intuition" and is not able to keep up with the rapidly changing business environment (which may also be influenced by the corporate culture of the parent company).

This is a time of anxiety and agitation.

This is a difficult time to settle down and become an enterprise.

There is no doubt that "impetuosity" has become the label of modern society.

We rush to catch up with wealth, race against the clock to indulge in the virtual world, envy the jealous jealousy of the myth of getting rich after 90, entangled in the stock market gambling, occasionally despair on the Internet of natural disasters and the high price of real estate, more proud and complacent with their own three acres of farmland.

Mr. Matsui, who was born in the year of 2001, was at risk of losing 3 billion 800 million yen in the Muji business in 2001. He was in danger when he was in danger (actually because he was being severely demoted). He acted as a chairman of Muji. He faced a lot of business and organizational problems. He chose a way to start from the "enterprise system and culture" and take the whole business as a fulcrum.

The essential elements behind any external product, publicity or sale are people, not single people, but a group of people.

Only when people are able to get rid of all external representations can the key to success be management system / culture.

This is the reason I taught in college.

But at that time, young people simply couldn't understand it. They only felt that resources, opportunities and luck were more useful and effective than boring management systems.

Today, they are more aware of the fact that fast acting does not mean that persistence is strong. It does not mean that they can sleep peacefully. Instead, they should always be on guard against accidents and fall asleep.

Matsui's solution is to create a system and try to change the culture of the enterprise.

Develop a little bit of good work habits and promote business growth.

Then, what is Matsui's "system"? In fact, it is to standardize the various aspects of the chain around the business value chain (such as the development of MUJIGRAM manual), and continue to improve the system according to the actual situation, so as to reduce dependence on people and human nature.

This is one of my thoughts over the years.

The companies I've been to, regardless of foreign companies or private enterprises, often brainwash and inculcate corporate culture, try to motivate employees through speech / training or intense changes, and often involve testing and testing human nature, but the results are not optimistic.

The enterprise continues to be filled with the "depressed helplessness" and "self mockery" of "learned helplessness". When the boss is anxious and helpless, he often goes faster and faster, and continues to introduce more new means of change and blindly turn to other foreign monks.

I have been wondering why? Is knowledge and change unable to motivate people and organizations to move forward?

Later, I observed the cases of other companies and read some books (especially professor Chen Chunhua's Books). Until now, I have actually had two realistic feelings of running a company.

(1) Wang Yangming said that "knowing and doing together" is not known.

But how many changes in enterprises are just stopping? How much knowledge training is just a walking process? How many people are always thinking about the loopholes in the system for their own profit? Therefore, execution and practice are more critical than knowledge in the brain.

(2) try not to test human nature, and human nature can not stand the test.

The healthy system is to avoid the test of human nature.

Wang Yangming's "conscience" is actually difficult to rely on people. It is still necessary to rely on the system to create a habit of behavior that is consistent with conscience.

In fact, there are very few top talents who have conscience awareness and behavior. Often these people are very difficult to hold together. Therefore, more than 80% of the people in the enterprise are all ordinary people like me. It is hard to ask everyone to have an initiative, let alone test humanity.

Well,

How to establish and practice the system?

Do we feel that we often talk about solutions to avoid problems? Sometimes we are forced by circumstances, sometimes because of suffering. Sometimes, it is simply because we have to fight against each other for a day.

If there is no real problem, there is no such thing as the so-called system. Even if it is formulated, it is also from the Hi, offering the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva.

(by the way, many companies worship gods. No matter private enterprises or foreign enterprises, some are truly awe, some are false comforts, others are geomantic auspicious, interesting phenomena. In short, the key to solve the problem lies in "visualizing the problem".

If the problem can not be visualized, it is not a personal problem, but a problem of corporate culture and system.