Content source: This article is an excerpt from the book "Non-linear Growth-Career Development and Commercial Customs Clearance Strategies in an Uncertain Era" by the Electronic Industry Press, and Note Xia is released under the authorization of the Electronic Industry Press. About the author: Huang Youcan, currently the co-founder of Sanjieke.cn, and the author of "Operation Light" and "Operation Light 2.0".
Responsible editor | Wu De review | Jin Muyan on-duty editor | Hu Tiehua No. 5337 In-depth article: 5114 words | 10 minutes reading
Mode of thinking
Mr. Notes said:
In the business world, there are often two keywords that determine victory or defeat, one is value and the other is efficiency.
If you have been working for three or four years, you will often find that the same thing looks completely different in the eyes of different people. Some people see a single point, while others see a system.
Those who have the ability to think systematically on specific issues often have the ability to formulate high-quality strategies, relying on strategy to win the competition, rather than fighting for execution. In my opinion, the big difference between ordinary people and masters lies in their ability to think systematically and formulate high-quality competitive strategies.
1. What is systems thinking ability?
First of all, what is systems thinking? Let me give a simple example.
Once, I discussed with a few friends how to run an offline event well. Many people’s suggestions and feedback were like this:
We should find a few well-known big coffees to share dry goods.
Do we have some interesting interactive games before the event?
We should raise the level of the event in terms of site layout.
……
Then, a friend H suddenly stood up, wrote and said on the blackboard, and drew a picture.
As soon as this picture came out, the scene was suddenly silent, and everyone could only silently admire in their hearts.
He disassembled "how to run an event well" into two dimensions: event communication and event participation experience, and in the two dimensions, divided according to the pre-event, during the event, and after the event, to further disassemble the whole event , To find out some key elements that determine whether an event’s participation experience is good enough, and whether the event’s spread and influence are large enough.
In this way, you suddenly feel that the question of "how to run an event well" has become very three-dimensional and comprehensive in your mind, and you have a more complete system to think about the whole thing.
It is not just "how to run an event well". In fact, any type of work in daily life may have a system behind it.
The world we live in is made up of many systems. From a car, a community, a company, a river, or even a country, all can be regarded as a system.
There are large and small systems, but any system must exist:
1. The specific functions and goals of the system.
2. A specific system structure.
3. Many system elements that influence each other.
4. Various constraint rules in system operation.
For example, the basic function and goal of an enterprise is to pursue profit and commercial value maximization; its organizational structure and business structure are its system structure; similar to the strategic direction, market competition situation, talent structure, business model, etc. Many system elements in the business development process of a company; as for the various basic market laws that need to be followed in the business process, and even laws and regulations, they are binding rules.
The so-called "systems thinking ability" is a holistic way of thinking, requiring you to think from a system's goals, overall structure and various system elements, and finally find an optimal solution around achieving the goal.
Our friend H's thinking on "how to run an event well" above is the best example.
If you are a programmer, in the first few years of your career, you have improved yourself by learning various tools, familiar with various common codes and scripts, and learning various languages. However, at a certain stage, you must understand the system architecture and control Project management of large and complex development projects.
If you work in an investment institution, in the first few years, you need to be familiar with various information acquisition channels, do basic analysis of various industries, and be able to conduct a basic valuation of a company. Later, you must form your own system thinking structure and judgment logic for companies and entrepreneurs in different industries and at different stages of development in your mind.
2. How to improve system thinking ability?
Whether you want to become a top expert or a business trader, the improvement of systems thinking skills is your only way. So, how do you learn from masters and improve your system thinking ability?
First of all, you must have enough practice in a field and be able to solve various single-point skill problems.
If you are in charge of user growth in an Internet company, you have never practiced the basics of "how to improve the conversion rate", "how to write a copy to attract users more", and "how to analyze the low user retention rate", and do not know how to think. , Then when you get the proposition of "how to build a growth system for a product", you are destined to be confused.
Secondly, in the face of corresponding problems, you must be able to see and deeply understand a type of system model that has been proven to be effective, and use it to understand and think about some problems.
For example, in the direction of user growth, the AARRR model is a very classic model that has been used and verified by countless companies. You first fully understand it and use it to think about how to build a growth system for a product.
Third, you also need to see more related system models in the same field or the same problem, or system models understood by other experts or masters-in the face of the same type of problem, different masters may have complete Different thinking systems.
In this process, you must continue to think deeply about the relationships, differences, and the reasons behind more system models. Only in this way can your system thinking ability be gradually improved. In any field, you can only gain the improvement of systems thinking ability through repeated practice and self-cultivation in the above process. There is no shortcut.
Of course, you may realize that in all the systems we can see, business is a very large and complex system that directly affects our career growth. If you want to pass the game of professional growth, you must be able to gradually build up some basic understanding of business along with your professional growth and the improvement of systems thinking skills.
Only in this way can you better deal with various decisions and competition in the business environment.
3. Two high-quality thinking habits in the business world
Next, I would like to introduce you some important business cognition and systems thinking methods.
If "commercial competition" is regarded as a system, its goal is to allow all companies and individuals to fully comply with various commercial competition rules (ie, restraint rules), through formulating their own competitive strategies, rationally executing and winning competition. gain profit.
In the entire "commercial competition" system, a particularly important thing is the formulation of competitive strategies. In many cases, the victory or defeat of the confrontation between two business organizations often lies in the level of cognitive thinking of the decision makers and whether they can make high-quality decisions.
Strategies are formulated to win competition. In the business world, there are often two keywords that determine victory or defeat, one is value and the other is efficiency.
In order to gain a glimpse of the so-called "high-quality business thinking logic", I will introduce you to two very valuable thinking habits in business and professional fields around value and efficiency.
The first thinking habit is: always focus on value, rather than the execution path, difficulty, and past experience of specific problems.
When you are faced with a matter whether you want to do it or if you encounter a problem that is difficult to solve, you should give priority to "how much value is after the problem is solved".
Just like in 2015, in all online courses with longer learning time and more content, the open rate and completion rate of users are always a huge problem. The average completion rate of many high-quality online courses including MOOC is Hovering around 3%.
However, the three lessons identified the huge value behind the "class completion rate". He was stunned by this problem and slightly increased the completion rate of the three online courses from the earliest 15% to 30%, and then to 40%. %, 50%.
In the end, by the end of the first half of 2018, the completion rate of the three online courses had reached 60%. These investments and efforts have also brought considerable user value and commercial value. By 2019, three consecutive classes have completed three rounds of financing, becoming the leader of the new vocational education track.
The second thinking habit is: always thinking about and paying attention to the possibilities and opportunities of the existing work process and the efficiency of the business chain that can be increased by more than 2 times. This point is relatively easy to understand, so I won't repeat it.
These two thinking habits are dedicated to helping you find some "higher value" problems, so that you can get greater benefits from them, rather than still working hard on implementation.
At a lower level, these two thinking habits can help you continuously achieve personal improvement; at a higher level, in the current business era when the "demographic dividend" and "traffic dividend" are no longer available, they even bring you "very imaginative" Business opportunities.
Fourth, the three-level thinking method of competitive strategy
So, how do masters think in the business competition environment? Here I would like to introduce you a small tool-the three-level thinking method of competitive strategy.
When you face competition in an industry or position, you can try to think and ask questions from three levels to work out your better competitive strategy.
First, ask yourself the first question-what are the basic laws of your industry/business?
The focus of this question is more on the industry and the type of business you do. For example, film and television entertainment is an industry, while brokers are a specific business; education and training is an industry, and providing home-school management tools for primary and secondary schools and colleges is a specific business; medical and health is an industry, and provide Doctor online consultation is a specific business.
Next, ask yourself the second question-what are the competition rules/common gameplay in your platform/ecology?
You must first realize that in today's business environment, every major industry can be subdivided into N types of ecology, and every ecology has its own rules of the game.
For example, the same e-commerce platform, Taobao, JD, Pinduoduo and even WeChat, each platform has different rules and typical gameplay.
For example, Taobao, for a long period of time, "make explosive products to bring goods to other products through the cost-effective" is a more effective specific gameplay, and the time of an online store's goods on and off will partially affect the store's traffic; In the WeChat ecosystem, the more typical gameplay is to make derivatives based on personal IP, or build a distribution system similar to that of a WeChat business.
The third question-what kind of competitors do you face and what opportunities or advantages do you have?
If you have a deep understanding of the basic laws of your industry/business, and are familiar with the competition rules and common gameplay of your platform/ecology, then you have to evaluate the competitors you will face and yourself to find your greatest opportunity point.
You know, the interesting thing about competition is that it is never absolute. Every person or every organization has certain distinctive characteristics. Under one kind of competitive logic, this may be a disadvantage, but under another kind of competitive logic, this may also become an advantage.
Therefore, you need to fully understand your competitors, and be good at using your own uniqueness to develop strategies that are more suitable for you.
After understanding these tools, let's analyze the master's system thinking path specifically through cases.
5. How do masters think systematically?
Anyone knows that in terms of the ability to formulate strategies, the difference between an ordinary person and a top expert is not a difference between 1 and 2, but a difference between 1 and 100, or even between 1 and 1000.
Therefore, if you want to improve your ability to formulate strategies, it is best to learn from the top experts. First, learn to look at many problems and phenomena from a systematic perspective, discover many basic laws and restraint rules, and better follow the trend, within the scope of the rules. Earn greater benefits for yourself.
Around 2017, I developed a strong interest in e-commerce. That year I visited many e-commerce experts. The dialogue with them gave me a new understanding of the operation and competitive strategy of the e-commerce industry.
One of the e-commerce masters who impressed me most is sister Lan. Sister Lan is the first batch of e-commerce trainers in China and a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University. She was once the No. 1 lecturer of Taobao University. At that time, she had 14 years of e-commerce experience.
As of 2017, she has accumulated sales of several billion yuan under the Taobao ecology. She once led a new store to achieve a performance breakthrough from zero to 50 million within a year, and she also created and led a growth store to achieve sales from A miracle of 20 million yuan to 194 million yuan.
In my conversation with her, sister Lan gave me particularly valuable information in two aspects.
First, when I asked her "how to develop an e-commerce store's operating strategy", she shared with me two strategies she often uses:
The first is called a benchmarking strategy. Generally, it is more suitable when there is a stronger competitor than you in your category and track.
The basic logic of this strategy is to lock in competitors who are stronger than you to "kill". It is like selling the same brand of juicer in other stores. I will carefully study the product introduction, service and copywriting of competitors. , The law of price changes, etc., always find space to do better or more differentiated than the other party.
At the same time, in the promotion and placement, they will also grab keywords, grab the entrance, and fight the click-through rate with the other party until they completely overwhelm the other party. This is the "benchmark attack". Now the e-commerce traffic dividend period has passed. The competition among merchants on the platform has become more intense. Traffic and sales often fluctuate. As long as we can grab more traffic and sales from our competitors, our own competitiveness will be Can be improved, just like the game's monster upgrade is the same reason.
The second strategy is called the new strategy. General categories such as women's clothing and snacks often use this strategy.
The core of this strategy is to maintain a stable frequency of new listings, such as once a month or every quarter. In these categories, the purchase conversion rate of new products tends to be higher, and every time a new listing, you have the opportunity to get some platform Announce resources and traffic.
Therefore, as long as the selection of products is okay, regular updates are made, and the platform traffic operation and the promotion and operation for old users of the store are implemented in place with each round of newness, then each round of newness can bring you Nice growth.
I used the "three-level thinking method of competitive strategy" to deconstruct her answer, as shown in the following two pictures.
As a result, we found that the system thinking method of top experts is also based on the basic laws of the industry/business, platform/ecological competition rules and common gameplay, competitors and our advantages.
Faced with the same type of problem, different experts may have completely different thinking systems.
There is nothing right or wrong between these different thinking models, but each type of thinking model has its own scope and boundaries. Just like the answer given by sister Lan, it is especially suitable for the formulation of the operation strategy of the Taobao store, but if the problem you want to solve is how to do a good business in the WeChat ecosystem, her answer may not be applicable.
From the perspective of learning and growth, you can only see more systems thinking models in front of one type of problem, and think about their relationships, differences, and the reasons behind them, and use them to guide your decision-making and practice. System thinking ability is easier to improve.
The same is true for me. When I contrasted the original "three-level thinking method of competitive strategy" with sister Lan's e-commerce operation methodology, I also had a deeper understanding of the operation and competition in the e-commerce field.
Regarding system thinking, it also includes a lot of rich content, such as how top masters foresee the future, the simple rules behind their complex thinking, and how to seek the growth of systems thinking ability.
Due to space limitations, this article will cover so much. For more information, please refer to Huang Youcan's new masterpiece "Non-linear Growth-Career Development and Commercial Clearance Strategies in an Uncertain Era".
*The article is the author's independent point of view and does not represent the standpoint of Noteman.