Chapter 143 July 17th Use the right person to hold up the sky

When doing things, we must always gain recognition in terms of style and culture, or else it is "different ways, not conspiring with each other".My feeling in New Oriental is that "use the right person to prop up the sky; use the wrong person to destroy the land", especially when China's business regulations are not yet in place. In 2003, Du Zihua, another vice principal of Beijing New Oriental School and a well-known TSE (English speaking test) teaching expert, left New Oriental to start his own business. In 2004, two other well-known figures of New Oriental - Hu Min and Jiang Bo also left New Oriental in a low-key manner.

Du Zihua, Hu Min, and Jiang Bo left New Oriental one after another, and were hyped by the media.According to Yu Minhong, "The founders of New Oriental, especially me and my partners from Peking University, all operate New Oriental with a mentality of ethics, humanity, and philosophy. But now New Oriental's new generation of management There are quite a few business-minded people in there.” Yu Minhong even thought at one point: "Strictly speaking, New Oriental is not an enterprise. Although we are managing New Oriental with a corporate management model, it is still an educational institution, so it must have many characteristics of education. Running an education business is the same as doing it. Entrepreneurs are different in many ways."

The brief history of New Oriental’s development bears obvious traces of campus culture. In the early days of entrepreneurship, Yu Minhong’s criteria for choosing entrepreneurial partners were “ideal, passionate, and talented.” On the contrary, he did not pay much attention to whether they had business acumen and practical experience.New Oriental School is also divided into two simple sequences: teaching and business. Teaching is completely democratic, but business is not necessarily the case.There are also many ambiguities in New Oriental’s corporate culture, which is closely related to the campus culture of Peking University. The most obvious problem is that academic democracy has been extended to the commercial field and even enterprises without limit, which is very detrimental to the development of enterprises.

In this regard, Yu Minhong obviously also has a clear understanding.For example, he once analyzed: "Wang Qiang is an out-and-out bookworm, and Xu Xiaoping loves music and art. These two people are masters of idealism. They advocate freedom from the bottom of their hearts and like to be unrestrained. Sometimes I think, if New Oriental completely let the two of them run the business, and it probably collapsed long ago. Idealism is not a bad thing, the key is to be down-to-earth and based on reality.” To run an enterprise, we must first have ideals, and secondly, we must pursue pragmatism and emphasize realism.