“What is this trait…?”
“We both have grievances with nowhere to air; we have a goal, but no one cooperates.
“Boss Ma, don’t worry, we’ll definitely be able to get through it! “In short, I’ll share all I can and will! We’ll make progress together!”
Have goals, but no one cooperates?
You are so right! Pei Qian thought in silence. He and Qiu Hong might have different goals, but they were both working hard to break free from the quagmire of failure and move towards a better tomorrow!
It seemed as though they could really become good friends from this point, eh?
Pei Qian was moved as well and clasped Qiu Hong’s outstretched hand tightly. “Okay, let’s do our best together!”
May 3rd, Tuesday…
At Otto Technologies…
The holidays were just over, and it was the first day of work at Otto Technologies. They started working at full swing in no time.
Chang You walked past the office area into his own office. His eyes swept over everyone, obtaining a panoramic view of the state of employees. “Could the influence of the Tengda spirit be so obvious?”
Chang You was slightly suspicious. He could feel the subtle change at Otto Technologies. Half a year had passed since Otto Technologies was established in November last year. The key employees, including Chang You, were all from Hongcheng Technologies. Boss Pei had never intervened in the daily affairs of the company. Director Lin, who was airdropped in, had never made any comments on the management of the company as well.
Therefore, the working method of Otto Technologies was exactly the same as Hongcheng Technologies. However, while the people were the same, everyone’s working style seemed to be constantly evolving according to Tengda’s working style.
One of the most notable manifestations was that everyone’s working hours had shortened, but their workload had not changed.
That meant that their overall work efficiency improved!
Chang You still remembered his time at Hongcheng Technologies. He could always see someone lazing around as he walked through his staff area.
Of course, he also would not point it out since he felt that it was impossible for everyone to sustain an efficient work state. It was natural for people to laze around occasionally.
Now, however, everyone was working effectively with very minimal lazing around!
These two states could be distinguished at a glance.
Take today for example. If one was in Hongcheng Technologies, then most people would be sorting out one’s work plan before lunch, reply to emails that accumulated last weekend, and then play with their mobiles for a while before the morning passed.
However, now, everyone was done with their work plan and emails in just after half an hour. They used the rest of their time for work, each more anxious than the previous one.
The most crucial was that Boss Pei seldom came over and had never requested them to learn from the Tengda spirit.
How did this subtle influence permeate and ‘lubricate’ everything?
The more Chang You pondered, the more he felt that Boss Pei had his way with project management!
Chang You always had to check attendance, set goals, and question from time to time. It was no longer necessary. The entire company acted like an entire arm. Everyone was very cooperative.
Chang You felt that he was simply too comfortable now with such a clever project management method. He no longer needed to waste any energy urging the staff on at all and could concentrate on the company’s development direction.
“I have to ask Great Master Boss Pei about management when I have the time. How did he achieve this lubricating effect? Does he have his own set of philosophy for project management?”
Chang You continued his work for the week after completing his daily illusions about Boss Pei’s Daily Life.
Today, he had to decode a mystery left behind by Boss Pei.
Boss Pei proposed a future plan for Otto Technologies previously: stop making new cell phones, extend the timeline to about 10 months to establish a software laboratory, make some useful applications, improve on the cell phone systems, and optimize the image algorithm.
Chang You had interpreted this point previously. He felt that Boss Pei’s strategy was very correct after some serious reflection!
The Otto E1 cell phone was a very expensive high-end cell phone, but it was also a cell phone filled with defects at the same time. What would the clients who had already bought the E1 cell phones think if they were to work on a new phone immediately?
‘I treat this phone as a baby while you treat me as rubbish?’
OTTO’s pricing strategy was to never reduce the price. However, if new phones were released too frequently, what importance would customers with old phones be?
They might provide old-for-new services, but the frequent behavior of new phones would inevitably dilute the initial brand value of the mobile phone.
Therefore, Boss Pei wanted to use one year to polish the software, including the operating system, image algorithm, various commonly used applications, etc. There were at least three levels of meaning to it.
Fulfill their promise to their consumers…
Extend the release cycle of new cell phones to one year, to ensure that more advanced and mature technologies could be used at that point… so that the next mobile phone would have more gimmicks. At the same time, be able to better preserve the value of the E1 cell phone…
Invest a lot of time in software research and development to increase the value-add of the cell phone, make up for its shortcomings, and make consumers feel value for money…
Chang You immediately decided to spend a huge amount of money to set up an image algorithm laboratory after seeing the deep meaning behind Boss Pei’s next stage policy. It would be dedicated to tuning cell phone lenses, optimizing image algorithms, and working hard on the software of photography! However, Boss Pei’s new directions came after hardly two days from when he decoded Boss Pei’s meaning
Chang You was confused this time.
Boss Pei actually asked Otto Technologies to develop an application for gym registration?The functional requirements of this application were very simple. It was put forward by someone called Guo Licheng. Customers could view their fitness data, make appointments for fitness, etc. Nothing more…
Chang You was very confused. Did they have to get Otto Technologies to develop something so simple? Our software team was capable of more complex applications. It’s just a simple app for gym registration that could be done by any team. Why did Mr. Pei give us this task? Moreover, this application was totally different from the general direction determined by Boss Pei previously.
The strangest thing was that Boss Pei emphasized that this software was not to be pre-installed in the cell phones.
Why?
Chang You arranged for someone to carry it out the moment he received this request. However, he still failed to understand the meaning behind it after so many days.
Someone with no ambition would complete the fitness software without any question.
However, Chang You was very sure that, after the success of the Otto E1 cell phone, the tasks Boss Pei personally gave seemed simple but definitely had other meanings to them.
Why would Boss Pei personally delegate the task out otherwise?
Chapter 508 - You will Enjoy a Better View with Boss Pei, and then You will Understand
“Yes… I should analyze the method that Director Lin was talking about.
“This concerns Otto Technologies’ future direction. The cell phone industry is constantly changing. A single misstep could lead to a thousand wrongs. We can’t afford to be shoddy.”
If Chang You was the same person as he had been when he first came to Tengda, he would not have overthought things. He would have handed the task down to his subordinates and made sure that they did what was asked of them.
However, after six months of rigorous training, Chang
You felt like he had learned a lot from Boss Pei.
One of the most important lessons was that one had to have a keen eye and a sense of direction!
A famous entrepreneur once talked about the ‘Flying Pig Theory’. That meant that if one wanted to make it as an elite businessman, the most important thing he would have to do was look for the right opening.
The cell phone industry was undoubtedly the right opening in a constantly-evolving Internet age. Yet, not everyone would be able to benefit from finding this opening. Anyone who got distracted could easily be squeezed out of their competitive position, fall to their deaths, and break their bones!
In other words, one’s bottom line was determined by how hard they worked, but how far one went-depending on how keen their eye was.
Chang You had thought that he had a keen eye and that he was one of the top few players in the industry. Yet, after meeting Boss Pei, he realized that he had not seen enough of the world. He had thought too much of himself!
He could only see the opportunities that everyone else could see as well. Although he also had a good chance of succeeding, the competition was extremely stiff. He just had to lag behind slightly to lose everything. On the other hand, Boss Pei could see opportunities that no one else could. Such opportunities were rare and valuable. All he had to do was keep a firm grip on the opportunity; he did not need to panic because no one else was competing. Thus, after Otto E1 succeeded, Chang You became sure of one thing. Since Boss Pei had so much foresight and had such unique taste, Chang You had to give up his own view of the market and follow whatever Boss Pei instructed him to do.
If he could win while lying down, why would he choose to work his ass off to compete with the other manufacturers?
Still, the only problem was that geniuses were often strange.
Boss Pei was strange in a way that he enjoyed making his employees guess what was in his mind. It was almost as if he was training his employees to think independently and analyze every situation.
Thus, not everyone could understand Boss Pei’s puzzles, and not everyone could stand out among all the employees and leave a deep impression in Boss Pei’s mind.
It was a good thing that Director Lin had imparted to him the relevant skills to analyze Boss Pei.
Chang You frowned as he fell into deep thought.
“Director Lin once said that the way to start analyzing a problem is to begin from the most unreasonable point. “The most unreasonable point in this situation is that Boss Pei is overkilling. It would clearly be most appropriate for Fish-Catching Take-Out to work on the fitness application. Why did he pass it to us?” Chang You opened the document that Guo Licheng provided on his computer. The document was quite simple; it only contained a few sentences.
If Chang You was to rate this man based on the standards expected of product managers, Guo Licheng would get even fewer than three points.
What’s more, that would be out of a hundred points.
Yet, Chang You could not blame Guo Licheng. He was a fitness trainer to begin with. How would he know anything about the standards expected of product managers? Chang You studied the few sentences very closely. “This Guo Licheng is the man in charge of the shared gym, but he has very simple requests. “That makes sense, I think. After all, he’s new, and he doesn’t understand Boss Pei’s mindset very well. There’s still room for him to be trained.
“If Boss Pei simply wanted these requirements to be met, he could easily have engaged Fish-Catching Take-Out to develop the application.
“What’s more, these requests are obviously too sweeping. Someone should have edited and perfected the interface and designed all the functions from scratch before handing the task down to the programmers.
mers.
“Design…
“Did Boss Pei pick us because of our design skills? Yes, that’s possible. Our product managers are far better at designing than the employees of Fish-Catching Take-Out.
“In other words, Boss Pei has more hidden requirements for the application. Did he know that Fish-Catching Take-Out would not have fulfilled those requirements, and so he handed the task to us instead?
“Yes, that makes much more sense!
“What kind of hidden requests could there be…?”
Chang You thought that he had achieved a breakthrough. Thus, he stood up and started pacing
“All of those requests are enough for a functional application for the gym.
“If Boss Pei wants more, that means…
“The gym is only the beginning. Is Boss Pei’s real goal to break the boundaries of the fitness industry?
“Is that why he let us develop the application? Are we to fill in the gaps in this in-charge’s plans for the gym? Are we to use our knowledge of the Internet to come up with a holistic plan for this application?
“Yes, that must be it!
“But… if Boss Pei wants the cell phone business to collaborate with the fitness application, why wouldn’t he let us install the application as one of the bundled applications in the cell phones?”
Chang You pondered for a moment and finally broke through the final mental barrier. He looked like he had just been enlightened.
“I understand now. Boss Pei thinks that the application would contain a lot of content and that it would be extremely difficult to design it. Thus, he’s worried about the quality. “If we push the application out as a bundled application, the figures would only look good on paper. However, we would fail to tell how the application is really being received, and the misunderstanding would affect our follow-up work.
“At the same time, if the application’s quality is bad, Otto Technologies’ brand would be affected as well.
“So why isn’t Boss Pei allowing us to install our fellow subsidiary’s application in Otto’s cell phone?
“Boss Pei did not say ‘don’t install’, but ‘don’t make it a bundled application’. He wanted the application to be put through the full test in the market, so that every user of the Otto cell phones would install the application voluntarily and willingly!”
Chang You was done solving Boss Pei’s riddle.
He revised his entire thought process and realized that everything had come naturally to him. The plan perfectly coincided with all the benefits. He now had answers for everything that he had found unreasonable earlier.
It was no wonder that everyone loved cracking Boss Pei’s riddles.
Once they successfully solved the riddle, they would feel an immense sense of achievement and satisfaction!
Chang You immediately left his own office, in search of Deposit Fitness’ in-charge.
“There will be changes to the proposal.
“You only requested for the basic functions before. We want to expand based on those requirements! Apart from satisfying the daily needs of the gym, we want to create more functions for the application.
“For example, we want to create a calculator that would come up with a training plan for customers based on their weight and body fat percentage, which would be measured from the gym. Trainers can then refer to this training plan.
“Apart from using the application to make bookings, customers could also use it for regular reminders for training, meals, or rest. Trainers would not have to follow up with them for 24 hours a day, and the reminders can be in-built with smart technology. “We can also create another segment to upload workouts, recipes, facts, and tips. That way, customers would be able to understand the meaning behind Deposit Fitness’ model.
“Many people don’t understand why one would have to regularly make reservations to train in advance or why their fitness meals are bundled. That’s why they find it hard to accept our model.
“If we can popularize this science, everyone would find Deposit Fitness’ model increasingly acceptable!
“On top of that, we can even create an interface for Deposit Fitness to upload videos demonstrating perfect form for various movements in the future. That would allow customers to corr
ect their own form or train at home…”
The man in charge of Deposit Fitness’ app quickly took all of those things down.
Once he was done, he looked up in confusion. “Boss Chang, those things go way beyond the requirements. According to the previous list, Deposit Fitness only asked us to create an application that would allow customers to book slots in the gym, right?
“Would this be… appropriate? Would they be unhappy when we hand the application back to them?”
Chang You smiled. “What? They asked for a simple application, and not only would we meet their requests perfectly, but we would also throw in many more useful functions. How could they get angry? “I think they’ll be beyond grateful!”
The man in charge of the application scratched his head and mumbled, “But I don’t think this is necessary…”
Chang You smiled subtly. “It is. Of course, it is!
“Once you take my place and spend time working with Boss Pei, you would enjoy a much better view of the world. Then, you will understand why I am doing this…
“You have a lot to learn!”
May 4th, Wednesday… At about 10 PM, after sending the last group of guests out, Lin Canrong instructed the waiters and cleaners of Ming Yun Private Kitchen to pack up and prepare to leave.
Logically, Ming Yun Private Kitchen’s workflow should have stabilized by now. As a branch manager, Lin Canrong could slack off once in a while without affecting the restaurant.
However, he continued to work hard and meticulously every single day.
After all, he was a chef with a reputation in Jingzhou. What’s more, after earning Boss Pei’s appreciation, he had been the branch manager of Fish-Catching Internet Cafe and the man in charge of Fish-Catching Take-Out.
After being made the branch manager of Ming Yun Private Kitchen, he had had the chance to speak to many people of different backgrounds in Jingzhou, which only made his career increasingly smoother.
Lin Canrong cherished this opportunity greatly. At every moment, he was thinking about how to improve Ming Yun Private Kitchen, not only to repay Boss Pei for trusting him but also to take his own career one step further.
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