Chapter 17 Chapter 14 Organization and Efficiency · Ming

The concept of Zhang Juzheng's examination into law, plus Pei Ji's suggestion that the supervisor should hire staff by himself, as well as the check and balance of the two chiefs, if the three systems are used together, the administrative efficiency can indeed be improved to a certain extent.The dual heads are a system like the Western Han Dynasty, where the powerful and capable heads are separated.In other words, the emperor has the power, the prime minister has the ability; the chairman has the power, and the general manager has the ability; one is responsible for the overall policy scheduling, and the other is responsible for the implementation of the policy, check and balance each other.And the head of each level has his own subordinates, responsible for implementing his policies.Coupled with the daily tracking of the test method, such an administrative system will be quite efficient.Zhang Juzheng once said: The affairs of the world are not difficult to make laws, but difficult to implement them;With the combination of these three methods, talented people can be employed so that the reform can be truly implemented to the end.

The scale of enterprise organizations is smaller than that of the government, with fewer departments and fewer levels. Enterprise organizations should not have any difficulty in implementing the above methods. Finding talent is another important lesson.Is the selection of talents well trained?Still recruiting?Recruitment refers to the former examination and imperial examinations; training refers to the cultivation of specialized talents.In fact, these two methods can go hand in hand.Hire people who are generalists, have macro knowledge, and can be high-level decision makers.He not only has a certain understanding of the industry, but also is quite clear about other aspects.The trainees are specialists. In every line of work and every industry, specially trained people can have the most refined skills for this job.Generalists can also be trained from professionals, and potential people can be trained to take up high-level decision-making work.The coordination between generalists and specialists has been a problem since ancient times.In the past, officials and officials were two disjointed lines. Officials had no chance to be promoted to officials. Their social status was low, their salaries were meager, and they had no professional education.Officials are educated by generalists, and they only have a superficial understanding of some professional knowledge.The division of these two fields was a very serious problem after the separation of officials and officials in ancient China.

This is the last section in which we discuss the situation of the senior chief himself.From the discussions in the previous sections, we can see that the prime minister of the Han Dynasty had greater autonomy. The prime minister was the head of the government, and the emperor was a supervisor and the highest decision-maker.Under the Han system, ordinary administrative affairs were handed over to the prime minister, and the prime minister had independent powers.Relatively speaking, after the Tang Dynasty, there was more than one prime minister, who was the emperor's adviser and staff group, and no longer really managed administrative affairs.Except for a few people like Zhang Juzheng and Wang Anshi, they can gain the emperor's trust and implement their own policies.But this kind of trust has to pay a price. It has to pay the price of eliminating political opponents, and it has to pay the price of having a considerable relationship with the palace.That is to say, outside the system, he must have a personal relationship in order to be an executive head with exclusive power and autonomy.

The above two modes of getting along with the emperor and the prime minister, if we call the situation in the Han Dynasty is type A, and the situation after the Tang Dynasty is type B, then there is a big difference between type A and type B. Type A pattern: The relationship between the emperor and the prime minister has a clear boundary, and there are relatively few conflicts between them.If the prime minister's promotion of administrative affairs is on track, the next people can continue smoothly, and the system will be established.But in the Type B model, the relationship between the prime minister and the emperor is very unstable.If the monarch and his ministers trust each other, the prime minister can implement his opinions to a certain extent.However, if the monarch and ministers cannot cooperate with each other, or the emperor changes, or the prime minister loses political supporters, then the policy of this prime minister will often fall by the wayside.This is the reason why Wang Anshi's new policy and Zhang Juzheng's success in examinations did not become a long-term system in the Song and Ming dynasties.Wang Anshi was demoted to Nanjing after his failure; after Zhang Juzheng's death, his family was also severely persecuted, all of which make history readers feel sad. Compared with Type A and Type B, it is clear that Type A is much better at maintaining political stability and administrative efficiency.

If Type A and Type B are used in private enterprises or organizations, we can also make a comparison.Of course, the chairman of a board of directors is not as authoritative as the emperor.If he is the founder of the company and he founded the company, such a chairman will have greater prestige, because his prestige, status, and everyone's belief in him are all right.But he is not the emperor after all, but the leader of a private group.He must consider the interests of the entire company in everything he does, and he cannot do things just according to his preferences.A headstrong entrepreneur is rare.Everyone has a time to retire. When he retires, the next successor may not still have his prestige and status. At this time, the board of directors must maintain a certain degree of stability.If the board of directors is not stable, there is no way to manage the entire company, and there is no way to hire a professional general manager.Similarly, if there is no way to get the authorization of the board of directors in a stable and coordinated situation, the general manager has no way to implement the policies of the board of directors. This is the case of type B.

The source of authority is the company's board of directors. When the source of authority is unstable, the company cannot operate normally.Any internal strife or disagreement in the board of directors will lead to unclear policies and unstable power, which will make the company's business unable to carry out, or even face failure.The stability of the board of directors is of course very important. The board of directors is a collective organization. Entrepreneurs must formulate certain rules and orders in the board of directors, so that the system will continue when people leave.Otherwise, people will die and the government will die, and the entrepreneur will retire, and the company will collapse.Therefore, an entrepreneur must determine the organization of the board of directors during the tenure of the chairman, determine the method of generating directors, and determine that the board of directors is a place for collective discussion and contribution of wisdom.Only the power generated under the centralized wisdom will be effective.The relationship between people is very strange. When several people are put together, there will always be disagreements.If relatives are all members of the decision-making unit, or partners who jointly start a business are members, there will be no problems in a certain stage. It is not the elders or the big brothers that everyone admires, who can control the situation.But when the board enters its second generation, with new members joining and old ones retiring, then struggles are inevitable.There may even be struggles between brothers, father and son and uncles.There are many such examples in ancient and modern China and abroad.

After all, the board of directors is a complex group, unlike the emperor who is an individual.Coordination within the board of directors is itself a rather complicated issue, and it is impossible to hire an expert as a director like a general manager or a professional.Directors represent equity, the power of company owners, and cannot be replaced by operators.Operations can be experts, and management can be experts, but the company's decision-making and the direction of the company's operations must be jointly formulated by all shareholders or their representatives. These representatives are the board of directors.How to achieve consensus among these stakeholders?In addition to having a leader, sometimes an objective person is needed to coordinate, mediate and lubricate.This person does not necessarily have a great relationship with the ownership of the company. It may just be a person recognized by the society as fair, or a representative sent by an investment-related institution such as a lending bank.These people are not the owners of the company, they see things more objectively, and they are not easy to form cliques.Adding such objective and far-sighted people to the company's board of directors will make it easier to dilute the spark of conflict, making the board of directors discuss things calmer, and everyone will be more able to jump out of the purely short-term perspective.Few boards, at least among Taiwanese private companies, are willing to include such a person in their decision-making process.However, the organization of the board of directors in the UK, Germany, and the US is quite different.Several organizations that have developed for a long time and have developed well, their board of directors are not purely in charge of profit, they will consider the long-term effectiveness, the possibility of sustainable operation of the company, and the role of the company in society. Therefore, they recruit people with credibility in the society to join the board of directors to reduce the company's profit-oriented color and deviation in profit-seeking decision-making.A company needs someone to perform the functions of balance, communication, and arbitration. It is also because of the presence of outsiders from these objective perspectives that face-to-face conflicts can be minimized.

A stable board of directors that can accommodate different opinions and look at issues from different perspectives can determine a long-term effective policy for the company that will bring long-term benefits and make the company sustainable.Such a board of directors has determined the policy and direction, and they can hire an expert who meets their needs and can realize their ideals and implement policies as the general manager.The general manager can know where his power scope is, where his tasks are, and where his time limit is, so he can let go and implement this policy as an expert.He can also hire experts from different businesses to help him implement various programs.This method approximates that the board of directors is like the brain, the general manager is like the hand, and various experts are like the fingers. The process from the brain to the hands and from the hands to the fingers is very smooth.Of course, under these assistants, there are many routine affairs and many technical tasks. As long as he knows who can be used and who can't, he can hire the right people to do the right job.

A company also needs several permanent executive units, one is the accounting department.The accounting department is independent. It has the power to control the use of the budget and the balance of the final accounts. It does not need to be directed by the general manager because it is a matter of accounts; the accounting department should be under the command of the board of directors.The other is the auditing and inspection unit, which can also be sent by the board of directors, or some people selected by the board of directors, in the name of supervisors or auditing offices, can do the assessment work on the sidelines.The procedures and performance of the general manager's work will be checked by someone at any time and reported to the board of directors for attention. This will not only not hinder the operation of the company, but also achieve higher stability.The third unit is the archives room. The management of the archives should be managed by a group of people who will not change due to the resignation of the general manager. These people are in charge of records.When the new general manager takes office, he must look at the original records, from which he can know the previous achievements, the way of working in the past, the reasons for the success and failure of the predecessors, and the records of customers... Therefore, the archives room should also be a permanent unit.

These three units are permanent units: one is accounting, one is auditing, and the other is archives.In addition, the leaders of other units should be directly hired, managed and commanded by the general manager, so that the general manager has a group of people who can be dispatched, and there will be no people who cannot be dispatched by him.All members of the board of directors, including the chairman, should not interfere with the way the general manager employs people within his authority, spends money within his budget, and does things within the tasks assigned to him. .In this way, the duties and powers of the general manager and the board of directors are clearly divided, and the evaluation of the board of directors is also relatively easy. No general manager will say what I want to do, but the people assigned to me by the board of directors cannot be dispatched or have insufficient ability, which makes my job hindered.When the general manager has the opportunity to make such a statement, the board has no reason to blame the general manager for not fulfilling the task they gave him.

This division of power is even clearer than the A-type model in Chinese history we just talked about. Everyone understands their own powers and tasks.Speaking of the overall results, both the guests and the host benefited. The board of directors believes that the company has obtained due profits and due tasks; the general manager and his subordinates have completed the tasks well. rewards.Those who have made contributions will be promoted to a certain extent, the business expansion of the company, the expansion of the company, and the increase in job opportunities for employees will benefit everyone.