Recently, I read an article in "Harvard Business Weekly" about dealing with corporate involution. It said that companies are not innovative, so they will involve. From this, I think that the same is true of personal introversion.
What is involution?
Involution refers to a state in which, in a competitive incentive environment, an individual contributes to increase competitiveness, causing other individuals to "voluntarily" participate. Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford, UK, gave a more comprehensive interpretation: the deterioration of the overall environment is accelerating and irreversible; individuals are unable to compete with the environment, and can only adapt to changes in the environment and join the ranks of involution middle.
The most typical example of involution is "fishing" style overtime . Everyone was supposed to be commuting to and from get off work on time. But at this time, a new employee suddenly came, and he voluntarily worked overtime for one hour every day. The boss appreciates this very much and praises it in public. Other employees are passively involved in overtime work, but the overtime work does not produce any output. It just takes an extra hour to "fish". This kind of overtime work increases the time cost of all employees. And did not bring profit to the company.
The same is true for enterprises, which are also prone to involution. For example, in the current mobile phone industry, other brands release products every year. Although I don’t have much innovation, I have to release new products. There is nothing to upgrade, so how much the benchmarking performance is improved, and how much the camera pixel is improved. To be honest, do users really need higher pixels and performance? I've always thought that today's phones are overkill for most users. With the new mobile phones in recent years, you will not feel much difference in normal use. This kind of pursuit of excellence in products that do not require excellence is also a kind of introversion.
How to deal with involution?
There are no more than two ways to deal with it: one is to join the competition and make the involution more involuntary. The other is to stay away from competition and choose to "lay flat".
However, although they are all lying flat, there are also positive and negative points. The positive lying down is a unique way to change the involution with a positive attitude. Negative lying down is a decadent and completely resigned way to deal with involution.
Whether it is an enterprise or an individual, you should choose to lie flat with positive meaning.
For enterprises, rather than involuntarily "better", for example, think more about how to make "different", it is better to be different than to be better. To do differentiated competition. Innovative enterprises are the most important means to crack the involution. Musk has an innovative method, that is, instead of trying to improve by 10%, it is better to think about how to do it 10 times better.
Enterprises want to have core competitiveness rely on technological innovation. The same is true for individuals. Think about it, those who are unique in the company and whose work cannot be replaced by anyone, does he compete with other colleagues? Therefore, in essence, involution is caused by the lack of personal core competitiveness. Think about what you are best at, and then strengthen this ability to an irreplaceable level.
When I wrote the article on the workplace ceiling earlier, I said what should I do if the workplace is so cumbersome? Read more than ten thousand volumes! Reading is indeed the most effective and cheapest way of coping for most people.