Wang Xing: Real masters are all working hard on their basic skills

Content source: compiled and summarized by the editor from public information and biographies on the Internet.

Editor | Ruofeng

Article 7724 : 7224 words | 15 minutes to read

Wang Xing attaches great importance to basic skills. In his opinion, the failure of most companies in business history is not due to the failure to master difficult skills, but to problems with basic skills.

How did Wang Xing master his basic skills?

1. Practice hard

In Wang Xing's view, suffering means adjusting your mindset.

The business world is full of opportunism and empiricism. In such an environment, it is important to practice basic skills and maintain a good mentality.

Wang Xing once said that in this fast-changing industry, you should always expect the unexpected, as the founder of Twitter said. This is a very interesting psychological state. If possible, do the unexpected yourself.

We need to continue to create value for our users, merchants and society through technology and innovation, always follow business rules and insist on doing the right thing. We need to look further ahead than ever before, to the next five, ten or even longer years.

China's economy has entered a new normal. The new era requires more endurance long-distance runners with a reasonable pace and even steps.

Over the years, Wang Xing has insisted that Meituan will not do everything, but will have more innovations.

Wang Xing has a very high tolerance for innovation and experimentation. He said that Meituan has made many attempts, but it is impossible for every attempt to be successful.

Seeing an opportunity may be an opportunity. Try it bravely. If it works, increase investment and quickly become a winner in the market. If it doesn’t work, it is not shameful to try and fail. It is shameful not to try.

2. Embrace change

As early as 2010, Wang Xing said on Fanfou that "embracing change" is not just a slogan for entrepreneurs, but a real thing.

" The word change is a very interesting word ," Wang Xing said. Many companies emphasize this word in their corporate culture. For example, Alibaba has a phrase in their corporate culture that says "embrace change"; there is an e-commerce company called Zappos abroad that has its own "Ten Commandments", one of which is "Embrace and Drive Change"; Obama's campaign slogan also emphasized this word the most, Change.

Embrace change and become the change itself is an old saying that Meituan people often mention.

From returning to China to start his own business in 2003 to now, Wang Xing believes that there are many things about him that have not changed: his love for life and his curiosity and passion for the world.

Of course, there are things that change. As he gets older, Wang Xing's personal life is changing and becoming richer. His perception and vision are also growing. He said, " I have never resisted change. "

In 2013, Wang Xing explained his understanding of embracing change internally:

Regarding "embracing change", I attended the Chinese Entrepreneurs Annual Conference some time ago. There was a theme about traditional companies' anxiety about the Internet. There were many traditional companies attending the conference, such as Kingdee, Motorola, and Suning.

After communicating with them, I found that traditional companies really don’t understand the Internet.

I said at the time that people should not think that the impact of mobile Internet is only one wave. After the wave passes, some people will be knocked down, while others will remain, and then it will enter a stable stage. This may be the understanding of many people on the changes brought about by technology.

But I don't think that's the case at all.

The thing about "change" is that it actually comes in waves. The time interval between each wave is getting shorter and shorter, and the impact brought by each wave is greater than the previous one.

From a longer-term perspective, the cycle of technological change is getting shorter, the magnitude is getting bigger, and the scope of impact is getting bigger. These are two completely different values.

We are now at the tail end of the PC Internet and the very beginning of the mobile Internet. Meituan started to engage in mobile Internet in 2011, and now we have nearly 2/3 of the market share on mobile. We caught up with this change and embraced it. If we had not engaged in mobile so early, the consequences would be disastrous.

The impact of mobile Internet is a little bigger and more powerful than that of PC Internet before, but there will definitely be other bigger changes in the future. This is the big external environment.

In the market, whether it is changes in competitors, partners, or customer demands, the overall environmental changes require us to embrace change.

In a relatively traditional industry, you can master a skill and work very stably for many years, but the technology industry we are in is completely different. This is true for the overall environment and also for the internal environment.

It’s hard for us to be customer-centric if we don’t embrace change.

For example, why do we develop mobile terminals? Because users have turned to mobile phones. Because customers have changed, whether their specific needs have changed or the way they need them has changed, we have to satisfy them.

If someone else can change faster than we can and meet customer needs better, they will win.

In our industry, winning and losing is the difference between life and death.

We must embrace change, but we should not use it as an excuse to cover up our previous shortcomings and wrong arrangements, and we should admit that not every change is correct.

But overall we must persist in "embracing change" to get closer to what we want.

Practice basic skills hard, practice is the core.

In the process of practicing basic skills, many seemingly simple movements need to be repeated over and over again, and you should strive to do them better each time. You need to improve a little bit every day and persist in doing so to produce an exponential effect.

1. Practice organization

In 2019, Wang Xing initiated a discussion among all Meituan employees on "A Better Decade". This time, the discussion did not focus on Meituan's business, but designed three major themes, focusing on organizational talent, technological trends, and social value. Among them, Meituan's organizational talent development for the next decade was listed as the top priority.

Wang Xing cares a lot about Meituan’s organizational talent development.

At the end of September 2019, Wang Xing once again shared the book "The Leadership Team" at an internal communication meeting, proposing that in the next ten years, Meituan should grow a new batch of leaders at all levels, which is an important source of Meituan's future competitiveness.

At the end of October, Wang Xing said at a company training session, "I am now thinking more about organization and talent. In the early stages of a company, development is related to trends and opportunities. The more a company needs sustainable development, the more it needs to build a good organization."

Wang Xing said: "Organizationally, what is more important now is to attract and retain a group of talents, and everyone should seek common ground while reserving differences as much as possible." Wang Xing said, "After a company develops for seven or eight years, its culture begins to take shape. We are at such a stage, which I think is a very critical period for the company's development. The next two years will lay the foundation for the situation that the company will form in five to ten years. This is when the organization is truly formed."

"We must work hard to establish a good mechanism and internalize it into the capabilities of our organization by practicing basic skills. If we practice the basic skills well, we can win 99% of the time."

2. Practice management

Wang Xing's management experience is, on the one hand, the result of his own hard work, and on the other hand he also asks others for advice.

Wang Xing said: " I have been learning how to transform from a technician to a better manager. I have read a lot of books in this regard, which has been very helpful to me. "

One is "High Productivity Management" written by Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel.

The reason why I like this book is that Grove was a scientist and engineer by profession, but he eventually became the CEO of Intel and was a very successful manager. He led Intel through a very big transformation, and he could understand management issues from an engineer's perspective.

For example, the book mentions three points:

First, a person’s output is not his personal output, but the output of the entire organizational structure he leads or influences;

The second basic concept is that you should spend your energy where the leverage effect is the greatest;

Third, like an athlete, strive for top performance in every part.

This allows the entire organization to excel.

There is also a very traditional book called "Su Shu". Legend has it that it was given to Zhang Liang by Huang Shigong of the Han Dynasty. It mainly talks about management issues, which touched me deeply. It does not talk about a set of theories, nor does it have a strict logical framework. It is more like a collection of quotations.

For example, "Tao, virtue, benevolence, righteousness, and propriety are five things that form one." Among them, "Virtue is what people gain, so that all things can get what they want."

This is a very interesting point of view, that is, he believes that "virtue" means "obtaining". Acting according to virtue and letting everyone get what they want is virtue. I never thought that these two words would have such a relationship.

He is right. To make a product, we must meet the needs of users. For a company, managers must meet the needs of employees.

A startup is like a football team. Everyone has to run, instead of the captain directing everyone where to run. Everyone uses their own judgment and follows the rules within a certain range, and finally forms a team.

If managers want their employees to build ships, what they should do is not to direct them to chop wood, but to inspire their yearning for the vast ocean.

" We only have less than 30,000 days in total, and I don't want to waste any day, " said Wang Xing.

3. Practice using people

Wang Xing has three important principles in employing people.

① Either be awesome or get lost

The story begins in the Spring Festival of 2011, when Wang Xing went to his sister's home in the United States to celebrate the New Year and visited Facebook. At Facebook, Wang Xing heard a sentence: "The gap between a good engineer and a bad engineer is 100,000 times." He was shocked at the time.

Originally, he thought the gap between good engineers and bad engineers was at most 10 times or 100 times.

Later, Wang Xing lamented: "Facebook has 500 engineers, more than 10 of whom manage 100,000 image application servers and process hundreds of millions of photos every day. In China, there are too many companies with more than 500 engineers, but their work efficiency cannot be compared with that of the United States."

Later, Meituan had a slogan for a period of time: "Either be awesome or get out", which was translated from Facebook's early slogan "go big or go home".

How does Wang Xing put this slogan into practice?

In the book "Nine Failures and One Victory: Wang Xing, the Founder of Meituan, Started His Business for Ten Years", there is such a story:

In September 2011, salesman Gao Chengguo joined Meituan's sales department. In just two years, he was promoted from a salesperson to a sales manager, but his team went from 10 people when he first arrived to only him - even his manager was eliminated.

Wang Xing is very confident about building a talent elimination mechanism. “We will eliminate those who cannot adapt to the job requirements. It sounds cruel, but I think it is the right thing to do. This was also the case in the early days of Alibaba.”

② Recruit senior executives without setting limits

That year (April 2011), the group buying war was in full swing, and Meituan co-founder and second-in-command Wang Huiwen took over the front line of the war - the marketing department.

At that time, the first thing Wang Huiwen did was to lobby advertising expert Chen Minming to join.

Chen Minming hesitated for a while. Wang Xing and Wang Huiwen discussed: We are still young and lack the ability to attract talent. Why not let him be the vice president and report directly to Wang Xing?

In this way, Chen Minming is on the same level as Wang Huiwen.

Chen Minming was very surprised, he had never seen such a practice - a manager recruited a subordinate to be in charge of a business, but as a result, this business was separated out and changed to a position at the same level as him.

In addition to Chen Minming, Wang Xing successively introduced the financial director, the head of mobile terminal, the customer service director, the COO...

In the book "Nine Failures and One Victory: Wang Xing, Founder of Meituan, 10 Years of Entrepreneurship", Wang Huiwen said: "Some of our competitors have never brought in capable professional managers, while others have brought in people at random. Bringing in an excellent executive will definitely take the company to the next level, while bringing in the wrong executive will take the company to the next level. With one step forward and one step back, the gap widens."

③ Establish your values ​​before introducing talent

“Talent introduction must be based on established values. Otherwise, the higher the talent, the higher the failure rate. A 5% success rate for introducing senior executives is considered good.”

In 2011, the group buying war was in full swing. Meituan's offline sales team was poorly managed and was being poached by competitors. Wang Xing went to Hangzhou six times to poach Gan Jiawei, then vice president of Alibaba B2B.

Gan Jiawei had a long career at Alibaba, earned a good salary, and lived in Hangzhou, so it was difficult to convince him to give up everything and move north alone. Moreover, his talent was also being poached by rival Lashou.com, which had just raised several hundred million yuan.

But after observing a Meituan city manager exchange meeting, Gan Jiawei decided to join Meituan.

Gan Jiawei said: "Meituan is very similar to Alibaba ten years ago. They bravely rushed into a very unfamiliar field and are very dedicated and careful. If I can use my experience over the past ten years on this group of people, I will feel very fulfilled."

Moved by the courage of Meituan people, Gan Jiawei later helped Meituan build a field sales team that was different from Alibaba's iron army, which became the core ammunition for Meituan to win the group buying war.

The sales team management mechanism created by Gan Jiawei is still in use in Meituan today.

From Wang Huiwen to Gan Jiawei, Wang Xing's vision in employing people is evident.

The wisdom of great people is always new when you read it.

We have compiled public information on the Internet and Wang Xing's biography, and sorted out five aspects of content: self-cognition, personal growth, entrepreneurial insights, organizational management, and workplace work, for everyone to learn and refer to.

Self-awareness:

1. Most people are willing to admit that they are lazy, but not that they are stupid. Therefore, it is very dangerous to say that you are smarter than others. It is much safer to say that you work harder and suffer more than others.

2. Good chess players usually know and accept that they are also chess pieces in a larger chess game.

3. Some people always think about what they have lost and forget what they have gained. I am not that kind of person. I am full of curiosity and passion for life, and "move forward with abandon" is my attitude.

4. I hope to enjoy every day because I believe that life is a process, not a destination. There is only one destination.

During this process, I hope to be passionate all the time. We only have less than 30,000 days in total, and I don’t want to waste any day.

5. The more confident you are about the future, the more patient you will be with the present.

6. The road to success is not crowded because there are really not many people who can persevere.

7. Only by continuous growth can you gain a sense of security.

8. You can lose everything, but you can't lose the future because you don't own it.

9. All things are difficult at the beginning, and even more difficult after the beginning.

10. Don’t spend more than five minutes reminiscing.

11. There are indeed many things that cannot be proven in advance, so you can only believe them. Believe it or not.

12. Every moment is the dividing line between your "first half of life" and "second half of life".

13. The biggest mistake people make is trying to own the past, the second is trying to own the future, and the third is trying to own the present.

14. After you graduate, when you enter society and enter the enterprise, you have to forget everything before. All past achievements have nothing to do with the future.

Personal growth:

1. Getting rich is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

2. An important feature of a good opportunity is that it often brings more and better opportunities.

3. Life is like walking on a tightrope. It is not easy to move forward, but it is more dangerous to go backward or stop and wait.

4. Some information becomes garbage after one day, some becomes garbage after one week, and some becomes garbage after one year . Only a few pieces of information can be used throughout your life. The type of information you spend your time on when you are young will have a direct impact on your life.

5. It is said that writing down ideas helps you think, because only when you think clearly can you write. So, I am trying to write more.

6. If you really "advance 30 kilometers every day", you can probably advance one million kilometers in your lifetime.

7. What is important is not the current position, but the direction, speed, and acceleration.

8. There are not many things in life worth fighting for, but there is no need for many.

9. When you think about it, there are only problems. Only when you do it, you will get the answers.

10. If you don’t understand time, you can’t understand the value of time.

11. You don’t know how difficult something is until you experience it.

Entrepreneurial insights:

1. You can’t start a business recklessly, you have to wait for the “great trend” to come. It’s most comfortable to start a business in line with the times and go with the flow.

2. "I'll do it, you can do whatever you want." This kind of courage is needed when you invite others to start a business together.

3. "What do you have, what do you want, and what do you give up" are three questions that are extremely important for both individuals and companies.

4. For entrepreneurs, "not admitting defeat" is a good quality, and "willing to accept defeat" is another.

5. We made many mistakes and paid a lot of tuition fees before we realized that there are no myths in this world, only some very simple truths:

7. Fight a protracted war strategically and a war of annihilation tactically.

8. You have to remind yourself and your colleagues from time to time: In business, nothing is free and nothing is priceless.

9. Always remind yourself: among the three, you can only choose two: speed, quality and cost.

13. The company's problems are opportunities for employees. The society's problems are opportunities for enterprises.

14. You don’t have to take others too seriously, but you must take your customers seriously.

Management principles:

1. As the CEO, I am responsible for everything that happens in this company. I am even more responsible for what should have happened but did not happen.

2. Management is not only about helping the team to achieve results, but also about helping subordinates to achieve results.

3. Good managers guide people around them to "see themselves, the world, and all living beings."

4. I talked with an old Lenovo yesterday, and the summary of "think clearly, speak clearly, listen clearly, and do it well" impressed me. The principle is not difficult, but it is difficult to do it.

5. The most important task every day is not to decide how to deal with something, but to decide which things should be dealt with as soon as possible and which things should not be dealt with for the time being.

6. Things you expect often won’t happen if you don’t try your best; things you worry about will always come if you are not prepared for them.

7. Self-management should start with time management. Time management should start with the time you wake up.

Management should focus more on input rather than output. Therefore, the real key is not what time you get up, but what time you go to bed. As long as you can sleep well, it will be much easier to get up early. On the contrary, going to bed late but wanting to get up early is naturally a painful struggle, and it is not sustainable and healthy.

8. Students, don’t panic when you encounter management problems. Management is never perfect.

Not to mention organizing thousands of people to complete a complex business process, even if you take a thousand people out and have them do nothing but walk around, it would not be easy to ensure that the team does not disperse, the speed does not slow down, and they do not get lost.

9. "The purpose of life is to serve, and making money is just a by-product," a retired entrepreneur from Taiwan told Jiang Nanchun, and this statement is indeed very insightful.

Work attitude:

1. The most important task every day is not to decide how to deal with something, but to decide which things should be dealt with as soon as possible and which things should not be dealt with for the time being.

2. A sentence from a young colleague at a meeting last Friday still echoes in my ears.

It was about 12 o'clock in the evening, and the discussion was coming to an end. Someone was needed to organize the meeting minutes. It would be better to use Visio to draw the flow chart. I asked her if she knew how to use Visio, and she said without hesitation, "I can learn it." There is infinite power in these four simple words.

3. Whether or not a person leaves home early on a snowy day to avoid being late is a simple way to determine whether he or she is result-oriented.

4. Willingness to take responsibility is an important sign of maturity.

5. Pursue excellence in a very few absolutely core areas.

6. Every day you must give the best you have to the job at hand, instead of saving it for later plans.

7. When I am fully focused on my work, I will temporarily forget my own existence, but when I look back later, I will feel gratified that I have existed so realistically.

8. In fact, persistence is not difficult, and change is not difficult either; what is difficult is to know what to persist in, what to change, when to persist, and when to change.

9. "The road of life is long, but there are only a few steps at the critical moment." This was the slogan on the cover of a book about college entrance examinations or filling out applications 20 years ago. The same may be true for companies.

10. For a lonely soul, work is the best container.

11. A golden sentence I heard tonight: Diligence has a prerequisite, which is good physical strength.

12. There are actually not many people who really "desire success", and even fewer who meet the second half of the sentence "willing to pay an extraordinary price".

13. Steve Jobs' life taught us that we should pursue perfection in everything we do, except squeezing our bodies.

14. “Sooner or later you will have to pay for what you have done,” almost everyone has heard this saying, but the strange thing is that many people always seem to think they are immune.

15. Only after you have held on to something tightly, are you qualified to talk about "letting go".

*The article reflects the author’s independent views and does not represent the position of NoteHero.

This article was authorized by the author to be published on Operation Party, and the copyright belongs to the original author.