Chapter 4 "Chinese-style failure" Part 3: Lack of professionalism

When discussing "Chinese-style failure", in addition to system and system issues, we have to focus on "Chinese-style entrepreneurial character". Chris Achilles, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, once wrote: "Many highly skilled and gifted people almost always do what they set out to do, so they rarely fail, and Because they rarely fail, they never learn how to learn from failure." The entrepreneurs appearing in this book are all heroes of their generation.Compared with many reckless characters in the novel, an impressive difference is that many of them have enviable high education, including professors (Song Ruhua), inventors (Gu Chujun), doctors (Yang Rong ), military doctor (Zhao Xinxian), writer (Lv Liang), and Harvard Business School president class student (Sun Hongbin), etc.It's not that they don't care about risks. Song Ruhua from Top, for example, visited Mou Zhong and Shi Yuzhu who were in trouble at the beginning of their business, and asked them face-to-face for lessons from their failures.Even in terms of the company's standardized operation and strategic design, these companies are not the same as those in the past.Companies such as Brilliance, Delong, Sanjiu and Jianlibao have all hired the world's best consulting companies for their services. Delong's Tang Wanxin even has a strategic research department with 150 researchers.

However, the defeats came suddenly one by one like fate.In the eyes of the public, the appearance and internal causes of their overturning always seem to be shrouded in an inexplicable fog.However, after sorting them out, we found that although the scale of these enterprises is much larger than that of Sanzhu and Qinchi, there is no sign of improvement in terms of the "technical content" of failure. They are still lost to two factors - First, it violates the basic logic of business.The vast majority of failures are still related to violating common sense.In the cases of Top, Sunco, etc., we can see that when an entrepreneur ventures ahead, all the industry leaders and he himself know that this will be an extremely dangerous leap forward, which does not conform to the normal growth of an enterprise. Logically, regular operations cannot be guaranteed in terms of cash flow, team and operational capabilities.Therefore, their final overthrow became a "natural" defeat.From these defeats, we can draw the conclusion that most of the failures are due to ignoring the most basic principles of business management and losing the grasp of the essence of management.

Second, the expansion of entrepreneurs' inner desires.For entrepreneurs, it is difficult for you to distinguish the difference between "ambition" and "dream".Napoleon's famous saying "a soldier who doesn't want to be a marshal is not a good soldier" has been quoted so many times that it always seems to hold true.This is an arena that does not pay attention to origin and background. Opportunities always belong to those who are brave enough to pursue.However, business is a game of restraint after all, and any desire beyond the limit of ability will lead to dire consequences.

In "Big Defeat II", we see more of a "engineer + gambler" business personality model.They often have good professional qualities, superhuman intuition and operational talent in certain fields, and at the same time have an unstoppable passion for gambling, and dare to risk their lives when opportunities come.This is the most thrilling jump in the career of an entrepreneur. The winners go to heaven, and the losers go to hell. Its subtlety depends entirely on factors such as weather, location and harmony. Nothing is certain in business.If Sun Hongbin is satisfied with being a local real estate king in Tianjin, if Dai Guofang does not go to the Yangtze River to build his big steel factory, if Song Ruhua concentrates on running a software park, if Gu Chujun does not engage in other acquisitions after buying Kelon, if Tang Wanxin Just focus on his "troika", then maybe all the defeats will not happen.However, such an assumption is untenable, because they emerged in a frenzied business century, which gave those people in it too much temptation and room for imagination, and it made everyone dream that they could become To be a person beyond the ordinary.Therefore, the best and worst endings are often two sides of the same coin.But this is not to say that all tragedies will inevitably happen. On the contrary, if leapfrog growth is the path that Chinese companies dare to choose, then how to avoid and resolve all crises as much as possible in such a process is A very urgent and necessary proposition.

, The 19 cases provided by "The Great Defeat II" provide negative teaching materials in this respect.We have seen that the vast majority of failures are due to neglect of the most basic principles of business management, which to a considerable extent lead to a disastrous business failure and loss of self-confidence.When writing these cases, I couldn't help but think of the adage of Zhu Xi, an agent of the Song Dynasty, which has been cursed for hundreds of years-"preserve the principles of nature and destroy human desires".For entrepreneurs, "preserve business principles and eliminate human desires" may be a survival philosophy worth remembering.

This is an era that is not yet old. Every business story you hear is so fresh, and every entrepreneur you meet is full of unlimited ambitions.All that we learn from suffering, will not be without value.All sacrifices and failures are worth it for the future.Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt said many years ago: "How lucky we are. We have trouble and disaster from time to time, and we cannot hope to escape the dark times of our lives—for life is not often set in splendor or gold. some." This is true of life, of the country, and of course of the enterprise. For a not-too-short business history, failure is not terrible, and it is even worth looking forward to.In today's business world, the place with the highest failure rate is Silicon Valley, which is the heart of global business innovation.

Just like what I stated in the preface of my book six years ago, I still want to say that we should applaud tragedies, and suffering has always been the shadow of maturity.A young man asked Russian genius film director Sergei Parajanov: "What else do I lack to be a great director?" The latter said to him seriously: "You lack a prison sentence." In fact, for all Chinese entrepreneurs, they are experiencing a "prison experience" from wisdom to destiny. One final point I want to emphasize is that the failures described in this book occurred within a single experiment of great unprecedented proportions.

Richard Tedlow, a professor of business history at Harvard University, wrote in the beginning of a book about American entrepreneurs, "The Seven Business Giants That Affected History": "This book introduces the activities that Americans are best at— —establishing and creating new businesses.” What a confident and enviable way of describing it.I am also eager to use this language to tell the legends of Chinese entrepreneurs.In the past 30 years, a great "Chinese dream" is becoming a reality.In terms of business spirit, it is sometimes so similar to the "American Dream" in the early 20th century: a group of people without any capital background and without any business training created business myths one after another.As Tedro described his country's entrepreneurs: "These people who broke the old rules and created new ones, they created new worlds, and they decided to take control and not be controlled by others. , they serve markets with technologies and tools that their contemporaries do not yet understand, and in some cases they have to create markets themselves.”

Because they have to work hard to break through and create, they may succeed overnight, or they may fail instantly.When I recorded these bloody stories one by one in "The Great Defeat II", I often had unspeakable emotions in my heart.They are all dignified losers-although sometimes, they will disregard the bottom line of morality and destroy the business principles they themselves participated in establishing, but more often than not, they devote themselves to the greatest experiment of this era, and at the same time suffer The pains, sufferings and sufferings that are destined to be inevitable in a transitional society.At the cost of their own failures, they recorded all the glory, dreams and sorrows of an era.

Just before you are about to read all the failures, I really want to start my narrative in a Tedro-esque way: This book introduces the activities that the Chinese are learning - starting and creating new enterprises, they may succeed, and they may succeed. Might fail, but they're getting better at it now.