Chapter 9 Chapter 8 Building a sincere and united team

In an excellent team, the actions of each member cannot be blind, but must follow certain rules and directions. These rules and directions are the goals and overall interests of the team.If the members of the team cannot work towards a goal and direction, the team is a failed team.In your team, if everyone leans together and works together, then you have successfully built a sincere and united team, and your entrepreneurial action will have a greater chance of success. When we check the archives of previous college student business plan competitions or business competitions, we find that the winners are generally teams.Similarly, there is an unwritten "rule" circulating in Silicon Valley: An entrepreneurial team composed of two MBAs and MIT Ph.Ds is almost a guarantee for venture capital.Although this is somewhat exaggerated, it implies the fact that entrepreneurship is no longer a pure pursuit of individual heroism, and the probability of successful team entrepreneurship is much higher than that of individuals starting a business alone.

Partnership success rate is high In 1998, Deng Feng and his classmate Ke Yan co-founded the Netscreen network security company, both of whom graduated from Tsinghua University.They took the lead in advocating the concept of customized ASIC chip technology in the industry, launched the industry's first dedicated hardware-based, high-performance, integrated firewall and VPN equipment and systems, and introduced revolutionary technological developments in the security market.Since entering the market, NetScreen has established an image as an innovative pioneer in the industry through continuous technological innovation, and thus achieved rapid performance growth. Six years later, Netscreen became the third largest network security equipment company in the world.The company was successfully listed on NASDAQ in 2001, and its market value reached US$4 billion in 2003.

Deng Jie, President and CEO of Runxin Communication Technology Co., Ltd.He used to be a partner of Jardine Venture Capital Group; in 1996, he co-founded ACD Company with two alumni of Tsinghua University, and served as the company's president and CEO. In 2001, he successfully completed the merger between ACD Company and UTStarcom. Then he became the president of UT Starcom's ACD department. ACD currently provides the world's leading data network chips and overall solutions. Li Feng, President of Beijing Shenzhou Yipin Technology Co., Ltd.; Shao Xiaofeng, Vice President of Shenzhou Yipin Company.Feng Li, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT, has successfully created Photonify in the United States. In 2002, he returned to China with Shao Xiaofeng, the founder of Serv Gate, and founded Sino Yipin. With the support of the Ministry of Railways, he cooperated with Tsinghua University and Communication University of China to provide trains with two major services, including multimedia terminals and wireless Internet access.They participated in the formulation of China's wireless broadband technology standards, and won the bid for the infrastructure research project "Wireless Broadband System for the Olympics" of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission in 2004.

Zhou Yunfan and Yang Ning, classmates at Stanford in 1997, returned to China in 1999 and co-founded the ChinaRen website; in 2002, they founded Kongzhong, and devoted themselves to the development of 2.5G mobile value-added services such as MMS, WAP, and JAVA; in July 2004, Kongzhong successfully launched Listed on NASDAQ in the United States. The numerous cases listed above show that an entrepreneurial team with complementary advantages in R&D, technology, marketing, financing, etc. is a necessary condition for entrepreneurial success. Compared with starting a business alone, the success rate of a team entrepreneurial venture is higher because everyone can share resources and take risks. Share responsibility and work together.In conclusion, since no one person will have all the skills, experience, relationships or reputation needed to start and run a business, conceptually, a core team must be assembled if a startup is to be successful.

As for the number of cooperating personnel, this is not the key factor for success or failure. The key factors are: first, the principle of cooperation must be clear, mutual supervision must be possible, and finances must be clear; Crystallization, unanimous external, invincible; fourth, cooperation should complement each other as much as possible. For an entrepreneur, it takes years of hard work to succeed.There are many factors that affect the success or not, one of the most important ones is the choice of partners. Pan Shiyi, the "predator" of China's real estate industry, was once brought to court by three shareholders who used to work together to start a business. These original entrepreneurial partners believed that Pan Shiyi had cleaned up their shares through an overall transfer of equity, and demanded 100 million yuan from Pan Shiyi for this.It can be seen that close friends are not equal to the most ideal partners.Relevant surveys show that among Chinese joint venture companies, less than 5% of the teams are still intact after three years.Therefore, entrepreneurs must be cautious when choosing a partner, not only requiring that both parties have good complementarity in ability and personality, but also know the basics and trust each other.

Choose the wrong veteran, but closed the door Li Xuan, who majored in hotel management, has always dreamed of starting a catering company. In 2004, Li Xuan and a partner opened a company in Beijing that provides banquet delivery services.Her partner is a "returnee" with more than 10 years of experience in food delivery. He has been working overseas and has been in charge of five catering departments at the same time. He has rich management experience and professional knowledge. With the assistance of such a manager, Li Xuan Feel confident. At first, they organized several celebrations, company dinners and press conferences for the company in the office building near Chaoyang Park, which achieved good results and made a lot of profits for the company.

However, soon after, Li Xuan's company became more and more difficult to develop customers, and received fewer and fewer orders.Although her partner has rich experience in organizing banquets abroad, he has almost no customer resources in China and lacks interest in developing customers.In this case, the company decided to add work meals (fast food) business, because the working capital of making work meals does not require a lot of money, and the cycle is relatively short and flexible.She believes that there are many business circles in Beijing, the fast food market is relatively stable, and its development has matured day by day. Although the profit is not high, as long as the quantity increases, the profit is still obvious.In this way, the company focused on taking out banquets as its main project, and used fast food to ensure the balance of payments and maintain the normal operation of the company, and the business became busy again.

However, when the company was undertaking a banquet take-out event later, Li Xuan felt that there was not enough manpower, and she was a little powerless.However, fast food, which guarantees the balance of payments, cannot be stopped, otherwise the company's brand image and service quality will be affected, thus "lose-lose".At the same time, Li Xuan found that fast food was dragging down the company's business, and it was a wrong decision for them to also do fast food.Because although the company has been busy, it has been in a state of loss. The fast food market is actually very monopolistic, the industry is too passive, and there are too many rebates from the person in charge. In addition, the seasonal price difference of food is huge, and the small quantity leads to natural management costs. .At this time, due to limited energy, Li Xuan no longer had the opportunity to make more banquet takeaways to make up for the losses caused by fast food.The company has no funds to continue to operate.

Finally, in June 2005, Li Xuan and her partner reluctantly parted ways and closed the company.Li Xuan also got into debt because of this. Li Xuan felt that in addition to the failure of the company due to unclear target market positioning, excessive reliance on partners was also the reason for its failure.Although her partner is a "returnee" with more than 10 years of experience in food delivery and can endure hardships, what is ignored is the difference between Chinese and Western cultures and the overall social background.The long-term overseas life has made him feel unfamiliar with the domestic environment, leading to a deviation in understanding, so that he mistakenly believed that the food delivery market will be recognized by the domestic market. Facts have proved that his judgment is too advanced, at least the current market size is still very limited. Nor will it grow rapidly.Because businesses often compare the cost of activities with the benefits brought about by activities, this virtually slows down the development of the industry.In addition, partners do not have the awareness of customer accumulation and development, which means that there are great risks in doing banquet takeaway.Therefore, although many parties made up for it later, the loss caused by the wrong elder selection at the beginning has been irreparable.

Finding a suitable partner is, in a sense, the foundation of entrepreneurship and the key to the success of a business.And among the core team members, it is best to have complementarity.This kind of complementarity is not only complementary in knowledge, experience, and resources, but also complementary in character and ability.A good partner should be able to complement oneself in many aspects, not to be the same as oneself, and certainly not to be mutually exclusive.Of course, people have strengths and weaknesses.When choosing a partner, you must see its strengths clearly, and learn to tolerate each other's weaknesses.The so-called learn from each other's strengths to make up for your own weaknesses, which is the true value of the team.

those perfect partners The Polaroid Corporation was founded in 1937 by Edwin Land and George Will White.Rand was an inventive genius who hated the tedious student life as a freshman at Harvard and dropped out to focus on his fascinated inventions in chemistry and optics.It is said that the number of invention patents in his life is second only to Thomas Edison; Will White is good at marketing and management, and has the reputation of "perfect salesman".The two complemented each other's strengths and complemented each other's weaknesses. In the following 20 years, Polaroid was built into a "pioneering enterprise" leading the American economy. In China, Yang Ning and Zhou Yunfan are called "golden partners" by the business community. From classmates to colleagues, the two created the Chinaren website together, entered Sohu together, left together, and finally invested all their net worth to establish Kongkong.com, and fought side by side to push the company to the top Listed on NASDAQ.This duo was able to start a business successfully in the end. Apart from being hard-core brothers who can’t break up, there is another important reason-the two are very complementary.They move and stay still, open and relax, introverted and extroverted, just as Yang Ning said: "In business, you may make some mistakes. You often have impulsive moments, and another person will pour some cold water in time. Just like Yahoo The two founders of Jerry Yang and Fei Luo, Fei Luo is a technical genius, and Yang Zhiyuan has business thinking and acumen. The complementary personalities between such partners can often achieve great things.” When choosing a partner, we must pay attention to complementary personalities, complementary advantages, and complementary genders.It is impossible for one person to have a perfect personality, but several people with different personalities can form a perfect team.When starting a business, you must learn to apply the understanding and grasp of talent differences in talent allocation and team building, so that talents with personality differences can be optimally matched.In this way, your entrepreneurial team can always make more correct decisions. American management scientist Peter once put forward a concept of "barrel principle", which is as follows: the main function of a wooden barrel is to hold water, and the value of a wooden barrel composed of multiple planks lies in the amount of water it can hold. How much; but the key factor that determines how much water the barrel holds is not the longest plate, but the shortest plate.For a wooden barrel with an uneven round mouth, the height of a certain plank or several planks is useless. Instead, the shortest plank restricts the water capacity of the barrel and affects the overall strength. The barrel principle tells us that the shortest piece of wood in an enterprise determines the quality of an enterprise's operations.If an enterprise blindly gives full play to its advantages, ignores its shortcomings and fails to find a way to grow its shortcomings, then the enterprise management will fail.Therefore, in the process of starting a business, entrepreneurs should neither ignore the training and utilization of excellent people, but also pay more attention to the improvement of those who are not good enough. "Looking for an advantage" takes a detour He Lumin is the chairman and general manager of Beijing Yadu Technology Co., Ltd. He said that "Looking for Advantages" written by an American made his company take a detour for ten years.Because he was born in engineering at Tsinghua University, he has never studied management. When he founded Yadu Company, he had no experience in running a business. At that time, he found a copy of "Looking for Advantages" from a friend. He carefully read it many times and was deeply impressed by it. influences.This book is an introduction and analysis of the successful cases of more than 30 companies in the United States.The book summarizes the successful experience of these enterprises: they have adopted a very loose management method, giving employees a lot of autonomy, so that the enthusiasm and creativity of employees have been fully exerted. At that time, He Lumin felt that since it was a successful method, he should learn from others.Therefore, at the beginning of its business, Yadu adopted a very loose management model, advocating innovation and passion.He later discovered that this book misled his management thinking.The book introduces the experience of the American business community. The experience of American companies is based on the high maturity of American companies (there is a strict competition system and a complete legal system), and it is a correction of the original excessively strict and excessively standardized management system. Reflection - proposed to "loosen the ties". In China, there is neither a strict legal environment nor a gap in the establishment of a management system. If the enterprise management is in a state of freedom and relaxation from the beginning, it will be difficult to reflect the functions of enterprise management. Therefore, He Lumin said that if the capital suffers, it will suffer. in management.So much so that when Yadu was established ten years ago, it hadn't established a complete management system, and it didn't even have regulations on working hours.For those who are self-conscious, it is good to have no constraints.But those "short board" employees who are not conscious enough have seriously affected everyone's enthusiasm and the development of the company.After realizing this problem, He Lumin began to devote himself to promoting the progress of those "short board" employees, which also brought the development of Yadu to a new level. The focus of modern business management is uniformity.If you blindly emphasize advantages or longboards, it may have fatal effects.The theory of sustainable development requires enterprises to pay attention to the combination of short board and long board when developing.While focusing on the development of long boards, we must also pay attention to the serious hidden dangers that short boards may bring to the enterprise. Only the lengthening of short boards will bring about overall progress.The same is true for entrepreneurs. Only when all partners make progress together can the overall level of your team be effectively improved.Just imagine, two legs are not the same length, how can you run steadily and fast? There is a very strange phenomenon in China: in many successful enterprises, in the most difficult stage of entrepreneurship, everyone can work together to overcome difficulties and win harvests and success. Partners broke up unhappy, and even husband and wife separated. Such cases abound.Why can this multi-business founder share the pain, but not the joy? From the perspective of human nature, it seems that a clearer judgment can be drawn.In the "shared suffering", people's ability to control things is relatively limited, and they can only endure the constraints and restrictions of some objective conditions. Therefore, they will develop a mental pattern of tolerance and patience. The result of mutual tolerance and tolerance must be A harmonious situation emerges.And at the stage of "same sweetness", people's ability to control things has made a qualitative leap. At this time, people's subjective desires will increase and strengthen. Everyone wants to do what they want, so the original harmonious situation will disintegrate. After understanding this truth, what entrepreneurs need to do is to try their best to avoid such things from happening to themselves. Husband and wife who share adversity but cannot share wealth Although the rich man is no longer popular now, he was famous in the 1980s.As long as the word "big rich man" is mentioned, Hong Kong people will naturally think of nightclubs.Its boss is a husband and wife, and the two jointly established their kingdom, but they failed to stand the test in the end. The proprietress, Chen Jianxin, was born in a merchant family and has worked for the family's bed linen business since she was a teenager. At the age of 16, she married an employee under the arrangement of her grandmother and gave birth to 4 children. In the 1960s, due to poor business, she began to switch careers as a hawker and maid.Later, her husband "abandoned his wife and son" and disappeared from home. In order to raise children, she became a dancer and a massage girl, so she met Luo Zhuo, who was 6 years younger than her and ran a massage and beauty salon. Luo Zhuo was born in 1941 and came to Hong Kong from the mainland in 1962. He started as a casual worker in a construction site and became the boss three years later to run a massage and beauty parlor.Chen Jianxin worked for him at the beginning, and the two started to start a business side by side after they met and fell in love. In the mid-1970s, the two began to cooperate in investing in the "Big Rich" nightclub and achieved great success. The two began to get involved in other industries after they became rich in the business of the rich. In 1993, Chen Jianxin cooperated with Beijing Tongrentang to open a branch of Tongrentang in Hong Kong. In 1998, more than 10 million yuan bid for a property in Jifu Street, Tai Wai, as the headquarters of Beijing Tong Ren Tang in Hong Kong.In addition, the two also invested in mainland real estate, including Metropolitan Plaza, a Grade A commercial building in Tianhe District, Guangzhou. While the career is booming, the relationship between the two is on the decline.The two people who lived together because of love did not go through the marriage formalities at the beginning.It was not until 1991 that Chen Jianxin discovered that Luo had a daughter with another woman, which prompted her to marry Luo.Unexpectedly, marriage does not guarantee feelings.After 10 years of marriage, the two finally ended in divorce. Chen Jianxin transferred all the shares of the rich man under his name to Luo Zhuo, and the business of the rich man is not as good as before.With the passage of time, the business and relationship between the two have declined together. Adversity is like sailing in the same boat. If you are not in the same boat, the boat will capsize. After getting rich, more temptations are in front of you, and many things begin to become subtle.The same is true for enterprises. When starting a business, there is hope, and everyone works together. When there is a bit of sweetness, everyone wants to divide the luggage like Zhu Bajie.Most people are kind, so it is not difficult to firmly support each other in adversity, but more people are full of desires, so after getting rich, few people can restrain the impetuousness that grows in their hearts. In the process of starting a business, it is very common to have the situation that "we can only share adversity, not prosperity".Therefore, while trying to avoid such a situation, entrepreneurs should pave the way for the next link at any time during the business process.That is to establish a mature operating system, so that everyone has a clear division of labor and performs their duties. Even if there is a temporary vacancy in a certain link, there will be corresponding measures and talents to make up for it.Even if there is a problem at the core layer, the normal operation of the enterprise can be guaranteed.