In order to force overtime, Bill Gates finally figured out in his later years: Shouldn’t treat employees like that

can make the best technology company without working overtime.

Text丨 Chinese business strategy Xing Shubo

Employees are so "lazy", Microsoft is still rich and can lead innovation. This is not normal!

[1]

In 2008, Zhang Yiming worked as a manager in Kuxun, with 40 employees, which made him feel that he encountered a management bottleneck. So he crossed the mountains and rivers and became a Microsoft employee.

Zhang Yiming originally intended to learn management of a large company, but he chose to leave after only half a year. Speaking of his time at Microsoft, he used two words to describe it: boring.

"Working half a day, reading a book for half a day, the work doesn't have many challenges." Zhang Yiming said.

thinks that Microsoft's work is too easy and boring, and it is far from just a person like Zhang Yiming who wants to achieve great things.

A friend once said, "The group that just joined Microsoft was too busy, and the group leader was rarely seen. Occasionally, he talked about skiing and other entertainment."

Later, the friend transferred to another group , The reason is that this job is too idle and affects personal career development. The status of another busy working group is as follows: 10 am and 5 pm every day, seven-hour work system, and the highest local hourly wage.

▲The picture comes from the Internet

In the IT circle, Microsoft, Intel, and EMC are known as the "three major nursing homes", with leisurely work and "lazy" employees.

In 2020, Microsoft Japan announced that there will be three days off for four-day shifts, and the "three-break system" has been collectively started.This week, LinkedIn, a subsidiary of Microsoft, announced that all employees will take a one-week vacation with pay.

Microsoft also allows some employees to work freely from home on a regular basis, up to 50% of their working time per week. Even permanent remote work if the manager approves. Microsoft will pay for working from home for employees who work permanently remotely. It’s okay to go back to the office after working from home for a long time. Microsoft has temporary office space available at any time.

▲Microsoft's hardware lab in , United States , Redmond

, Washington State, allows home office

However, the lazy Microsoft has created amazing results.

Microsoft's current market value is $1.93 trillion, which is equivalent to three Alibabas ($661.8 billion) and five ByteDance ($400 billion). Up another 5% and the tech giant could join Apple in the $2 trillion market cap club.

In fact, on February 11, 2020, Microsoft once surpassed Apple to become the world's most valuable technology company.

Microsoft has the highest market share in the traditional operating system and office software , both above 97%; its innovative business cloud computing, AR business and game business also continue to lead.

For cloud computing, 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft's Microsoft Azure intelligent cloud service. In terms of

AR, Microsoft received a $22 billion order earlier this month. The IDC report shows that the global AR market-related spending scale will reach a compound annual growth rate of 54% in the five-year forecast period from 2020 to 2024, exceeding $70 billion.In terms of

games, Microsoft is also one of the three major console game brands in the world, and its Xbox console market share is close to one-third, reaching 26%; PC games are even more dominant.

In March 2020, Microsoft acquired Zenimax Media, the parent company of well-known gaming giant B. Company B owns many world-renowned 3A masterpieces such as " The Elder Scrolls ", "Fallout" and "Shame", and has a huge influence in the game industry. The Microsoft acquisition caused industry shocks and even led to joint scrutiny by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Union.

▲Microsoft's exclusive game

This leads to a question: Microsoft is so lazy, how can it be so successful and competitive? Can you lead innovation?

[2]

scolding employees for dropping their phones and recording license plates to prevent early departure, Microsoft has not always been a "good gentleman" in corporate governance.

In the early stage of startup, Microsoft was not friendly to employees. Employees not only need high-intensity work, but also face the dilemma of being humiliated anytime, anywhere; in the mid-term growth stage, Microsoft has encountered many anti-monopoly investigations, and its entry into the Internet has failed and performance pressure has increased, resulting in even more stringent requirements for employees; In the later stage of business transformation, in addition to shooting negative advertisements for competitors, Microsoft also threw the mobile phones of its own employees to the hot search list.

In an interview on the BBC's "Desert Island Records", Bill Gates admitted that in the early days of Microsoft, himself "was very crazy about his work", which was an unfortunate thing for his colleagues.

Microsoft was just established in 1975, the company was still in its infancy, with only a few employees.

In order to improve efficiency, Bill Gates not only turned upside down day and night, ate and lived in the company, and did not change his clothes for several weeks, but also imposed his almost crazy work habits on his employees. For a while, Bill Gates even controlled his employees' working hours by remembering their license plates, preventing them from arriving late and leaving early.

"I know everyone's license plates, so just by looking at the parking lot, I can tell when employees are commuting," says Bill Gates.

▲In the documentary "Decoding Bill Gates ", it is mentioned that although he is very busy, he still has two major interests: road racing and watching striptease. Come on, one of his clients is even more inhumane, even a workaholic can't stand it. That person was the later famous Apple founder Steve Jobs.

At that time, Apple 2 needed a set of office software. Bill Gates wrote the earliest office software such as Word and Excel for him, but he was often urged by Jobs.

Gates' evaluation of Steve Jobs is, "I am crazy about my work" and "I am very demanding."

When a workaholic meets someone who is desperate for work, especially when both of them are founders of a technology company, their employees suffer. In

" Silicon Valley Legend ", Jobs was short-tempered with employees in the early days, and he also cheated some stocks of co-founder Woznick .

Bill Gates participated in the product review meeting and took pleasure in swearing. The employees even used the number of times he said "fxxk" as a basis for evaluating whether their product design could pass smoothly.

Polsky, a Microsoft engineer, once wrote about Bill Gates in his blog:

"He doesn't really want to review your design, he just wants to make sure you have it in control. As he always does Standard, he'll ask harder and harder questions until you admit you don't know, then he can call you unprepared. What if you could answer the hardest questions he asked? No one really knows Because no one has ever done this before."

Bill Gates swears equally, not only to employees but also to co-founder Steve Ballmer. Among the multiple work emails exposed by the media, the conversation between Bill Gates and Ballmer can be described as "fierce rhetoric".

Under the influence of curse culture, especially after Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft, he also began to become hysterical.

September 2009 in Seattle, the weather was dry and the weather was dry. Microsoft is experiencing the failure of Windows Vista replacement, Windows Mobile is suppressed by Google and Apple's mobile operating system, and even music players such as Zune can not sell iPod. What's more disturbing is that Microsoft, which is jealous of Apple's iPhone, released two generations of multimedia mobile phones Kin1 and Kin2 within a year, and sold an exaggerated total of 500 units in the life cycle.

On September 14 of that year, Ballmer smashed an employee's cell phone at an internal Microsoft meeting.

At the time, Ballmer had just entered the venue, and he was as active as ever. But when he saw someone taking a photo with an iPhone, Ballmer rushed over and grabbed the iPhone, started taunting it, and threw it on the ground, trampling it with his feet.

Ballmer also threw a chair at an employee, and even yelled at an executive who jumped to Google: "I'm going to bury Google CEO Eric Schmidt! I'm going to destroy Google!" In the professional habits of Microsoft employees, so that in Microsoft's Windows 10 Dev Build 21313 version upgrade, the engineer wrote on the update page: "Configuring the update, please do not turn off the computer."

To this day, when Bill Gates became a kind-hearted old man, he began to reflect on his relationship with employees:

"I have to remind myself that I can no longer use my standards to require employees to work hard."

[3]

The predecessors planted trees, and the later generations enjoyed the shade. In Microsoft's 50-year history, from the corporate governance disaster to the present "career for the elderly", it is not so much that Microsoft actively chooses to seek benefits for its employees, but is actually forced to do so.

According to research by historian Thomas McGraw, between 1897 and 1904, 4,227 American companies merged into 257. By 1904, some 318 trusts controlled two-fifths of the nation's manufacturing assets. Since then, the United States has experienced three waves of anti- monopoly , and each anti-monopoly has promoted the improvement of employee benefits and corporate governance levels, as well as new technological advancements.

In the first anti-monopoly wave in 1890, the United States promulgated the Sherman Antitrust Act , Rockefeller , the Morgan family and other trusts were split, and new companies such as Ford and Chevrolet were able to develop. The eight-hour workday” and other systems have been implemented.

In the second anti-monopoly wave in 1970, telecom giants such as IBM and AT&T were punished and nearly split.The two companies respectively released monopoly technology to the market and corrected vicious competition and bundling. Open-source technology has enabled Microsoft, Intel, , HP, and other companies to develop, and the telecommunication industry has been criticized for overtime and other phenomena.

In 1998, the dragon knight Microsoft grew into a dragon and used the monopoly advantage of the operating system to encroach on the browser market. It was not until the release of Google's Chrome browser in 2008 that it ended the ten-year hegemony of IE browser. It is in this decade that the early Internet advantages of the United States have been exhausted. Internet companies such as China , India, Korea , etc. have developed rapidly, and Facebook , Amazon , etc. have begun to rise.

Microsoft, which has lost its monopoly advantage, found that the original method of gaining monopoly by squeezing employees to increase scale is no longer applicable. And Internet companies such as Facebook, which are relatively loosely managed, are aggressively robbing their talent. The method is simple and crude: higher wages, lower working hours, and a more flexible employment system.

Silicon Valley has entered a virtuous circle in employee benefits: talent is limited, but business expansion is unlimited. In order to get talent, companies have begun to spare no effort to improve employee benefits.

For example, Google has built a dedicated bicycle track for employees; Facebook has extended maternity leave, and male employees also have four months of leave; Apple has provided female employees with egg freezing fees of up to $20,000.

Microsoft has nothing but money, so in the face of competition for employee benefits from major Internet companies, Microsoft used its "money capability" to beat the market rate of Silicon Valley technology companies.

In the final analysis, Microsoft's improvement of employee benefits and corporate governance is the result of a combination of internal and external factors.

On the one hand, Microsoft's traditional business is shackled by the anti-monopoly iron fist, and it is difficult to make breakthroughs, and it is meaningless to continue to squeeze employees; Developing creativity can improve productivity more than crowd tactics and overtime madness.

On the other hand, in the past ten years, traditional technology companies have been hit by new Internet companies, and Microsoft needs to use employee benefits to recruit talents; developed markets such as Europe, the United States and Japan have serious problems with low birthrates, and there are no demographic dividends and engineer dividends. This is an objective improvement. The bargaining chip between employees and enterprises, because no one is available.

In addition, due to the harsh US "Labor Law" and "Employment Law" and other laws, large companies such as Microsoft face huge labor lawsuit compensation. Countless human rights lawyers seek exorbitant labor compensation through labor disputes. The labor union system is deeply rooted in the United States, and labor unions even provide free legal aid to workers in order to ask companies for mediation fees.

[4]

Regardless of whether Silicon Valley companies or domestic companies, now inevitably fall into the disease of big companies. On the surface, employees work overtime and work hard, but in reality, they are overworked and overworked under heavy pressure.

This disease is incurable, making the company bloated and difficult to adapt to market changes. Silicon Valley invented various management tools such as KPI (Key Performance Indicator), OKR (Objective and Key Results Method), agile development, garage plan, etc., but with little success.

The same is true of Microsoft and IBM. When the scale reaches a certain level, the disease of a large company occurs. Each department fights against each other. Compared to emerging companies, the gap is visible to the naked eye.

IBM's solution is to lay off staff and abolish business, control the company's scale within a certain range, reduce levels, and make business more flexible. Microsoft chose to face it directly. Around 2011, the current CEO Nadella started the reform from the technical layer with the least resistance, and finally carried out a comprehensive reform of corporate culture and corporate governance.

The most successful part of Microsoft under Nadella's rule is to break down departmental barriers and small circles, but it did not vote against the original departmental system.

According to the theory of Coase , when the organization is large enough, there is essentially a "enterprise boundary" between each department. This is an actual sociological phenomenon that does not depend on human will.

Microsoft actually tacitly acquiesced to divisional barriers and factions, because it was impossible to remove them. Even Bill Gates said, "The company has grown to a certain scale, and I have to relax this standard."

Microsoft's strategy is "the company serves employee growth": if an engineer wants to be cool, then create conditions to make him cool ; It is too cumbersome to find people by department, then find people according to specific functions, and be responsible for their own business, without being responsible for the department leaders.

In fact, Microsoft did not use the knife to the traditional departmental hierarchy, but empowered the lower-level employees. Instead, the goal was easier to achieve, and the efficiency was improved at the company level.

For start-up companies, employees are like a taut spring, and the company needs them to go all out to win the market; while for large companies, just like start-up companies, employees are regarded as springs, and if they are too full, they will eventually fail. gone back.

For example, after the implementation of Microsoft Japan's "four days off three days" system, Microsoft said that its labor productivity increased by 39.9% compared with last year. Between lengthening working hours and improving productivity, Microsoft chose the latter.

According to Microsoft's experience, Microsoft employees under Ballmer worked a lot of overtime, but the company's performance did not grow much; Microsoft employees under Nadella's rule were very happy, but it did not prevent Microsoft's market value from approaching two trillion US dollars .

Microsoft summarizes the experience of corporate governance system into three points:

First, improving employee welfare can promote productivity development, but not the other way around; especially in high-tech fields and creative industries, efficiency is more important than simply overtime;

Second, large companies The disease cannot be eliminated, but it can be accommodated;

Third, the level of corporate governance depends on the level of the top level, don’t expect the middle level and the bottom level, they have no obligation to contribute to the company culture, and the ultimate decision makers to decide whether employees work overtime are still the founders and employees. senior management team.

But it is undeniable that today, there are still companies and even super large companies that do not understand this.

Recently, Amazon, which is famous for squeezing its employees, seems to still want to continue the employment system of the Rockefeller era 100 years ago. It was strongly resisted by employees, 30,000 employees went on strike, and Amazon in Europe even faced a shutdown.

In addition to the e-commerce business, Amazon's cloud computing market share currently ranks first in the world, but its share continues to decline, from 45% in April last year to 31% in March this year. Under pressure, Bezos announced that he will step down as CEO in the third quarter of this year.

In contrast, Microsoft, which ranks second in cloud computing, has increased its market share from 7% to 20%, and new businesses such as AR and games continue to grow. It is also rated as one of the 25 companies with the highest employee happiness in the world.

Which of the two companies created by different corporate governance cultures has the last laugh, let time prove it.

[References]

1, "Bill Gates exposes himself to be a workaholic in the early days of his business, remembering license plates to check employee attendance" China News Weekly

2, "Amazon employees organize online strike next week" Sina Technology

3, "How the United States Antitrust" Chief Financial Observation

4, "Microsoft's official announcement that the game of B agency is exclusive to Xbox! PC gamers may be the biggest winners in the future" Tencent.com

5, "Gates says tech executive testifying before Congress reminded him of his own experience: "I bless them" "Future" Tiger Sniff

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