On January 28th, the "2022 and Guangtong Morning" Zhenghe Island Annual Conference was held at the Innovation Building of Tsinghua Science Park.
Chen Wei, vice president and editor-in-chief of Zhenghe Island, shared the theme of "Grasping the Essence, Winning the Battle" at the annual meeting. This article is a compilation of the content of the speech, I hope to enlighten you.
Dictation: Chen Wei is the vice president and editor-in-chief of Masakazu Island
Editor: Flower Pioneer
Source: Zhenghe Island
At last year's annual meeting, I said we were going to do a book this year and try to surpass our previous "Essence."
At that time, some students may think that they are not bragging, because "Essence" sold very well at that time, selling more than 100,000 copies in 3 years. But looking back now, we weren't bragging, we were modest, we weren't overtaking, it was a spike — "Win the War" sold more than 100,000 copies in 5 months.
The two books "Essence" and "Winning the Battle" form the "red and black" of Zhenghe Island, and also constitute a profound internal logic, which is causal and conditional, respectively:
Because we have grasped the essence, we have won the battle; only by grasping the essence can we win the battle.
"The Godfather" says: The fate of those who see the essence of things in half a second and those who cannot see the essence clearly all their lives are destined to be different. I personally love the theme of essence, so today I share 3 thoughts related to essence.
01, the essence of networking
Everyone is paying attention to networking and operating connections, has anyone ever thought: what is the essence of networking?
Let's look at these 4 teachers:
The first one, Teacher Tian Tao, is a senior consultant of Huawei.
The second, Song Zhiping, is the president of the China Association of Listed Companies. Very powerful, made two Fortune 500 companies. It is very remarkable that great things have been accomplished in the cracks of state-owned enterprises, and there have been no accidents.
The third, Wang Zhigang, is a well-known planner and strategic consulting expert. In the past, when the media liked to create gods, Teacher Wang was called the "godfather of real estate", And Country Garden relied on his planning to make a hit, and the larger domestic real estate companies basically asked him to do planning.
The fourth, Jin Weichun, is the author of the best-selling book "There Is Only One Thing in Life". Mr. Jin is known as "the first talent in Taiwan's press" and is a figure that both Ma Ying-jeou and Li Ao admire.
What are the characteristics of these 4 teachers? It's all great and the level is high. But there is also a common denominator, both of our authors and good friends, and even at the dinner table of the liquor store, we are all called brothers in the bottom. At the beginning, I was also very afraid, everyone is the predecessor of everyone, we are a junior, why do we become friends, acquaintances, and forgetful friends with others?
After thinking about it calmly, the fundamental reason may be that we have created value, created a high-quality and widely recognized serious media, and provided an ideal speech position and ideological stage for others.
For example, teacher Wang Zhigang, when he first met and contacted, his old man had already planned to wash his hands and retire to the rivers and lakes. We asked him to write a public column, wrote it for two years, and the response was very good, and many senior leaders came to him. Later, he helped Teacher Wang publish a book, introducing Teacher Wang to Teacher Yu Minhong, and so on. Of course, Teacher Wang also contributed us a lot of 100,000+ explosive articles that were circulated for a while, and never mentioned the cost of the manuscript.
This is to bless each other and complement each other.
Therefore, we have a reflection on networking: it turns out that we think that networking is to go everywhere to find noble people, who can help us, but the real network is actually the person you can help.
Liu Run's sentence I think is very well said, "The essence of networking is to give value and exchange equally."
Value is fundamental, networking is only the result.
02, the essence of media
For our content team, the core is to do a good job in content quality and create media value. So, what is the essence of media?
These 4 people are known to be revolutionaries and liberators, but their first label is not actually this, they are media people.
They are the editors-in-chief of The Rhine, The Mars, The Xiangjiang Review, and New Youth.
Students who study journalism basically know that Marx has many views on press freedom; Lenin wrote about journalists in his early days when filling out personal information; Mao Zedong was very good at "pointing out the country and the mountains, stirring up words, and dung and soiling the ten thousand households in those years"; Chen Duxiu was well versed in old learning, but he was committed to using new media as a banner to lead new youth and shape new culture.
The media is a very powerful weapon in their hands. Mao Zedong called Lu Xun's essay "dagger and throwing gun", and Ding Ling's novel said that it was "a thin pen who is similar to, three thousand Maoser elite soldiers". It can be understood that in the revolutionary years, an article of 100,000+ was topped 3,000 AK47.
In the age of rationality, what is the role of the media? I very much agree that the communication science people McLuhan have several core ideas that are worth thinking about.
The first, the concept of the "global village", is known to have been proposed by him.
Second, the extension of the human body. Today we think that mobile phones have basically become half human organs, and McLuhan proposed decades ago that the medium is an extension of the human body.
Including hot media, cold media, media is information, etc., looking back, it is very insightful. In fact, we can expand the word information to see, in the etymological sense of what is "faith"? Integrity, belief, faithfulness, credibility, the "faith" in these words is related to reliability and certainty. "Rest", rest, rest, rest, live and breathe, is also related to stability and certainty.
In times of uncertainty, information has a soothing function.
Therefore, we will find that media has two effects:
In the revolutionary years, it could stir people's hearts and destroy decay;
In the age of reason, it can calm people's minds and lead people to goodness.
Marx famously said: Philosophers only care about explaining the world, but the key to the problem is how to change the world! If we change this sentence a little, we can come to the essence of the media— to transform the world by explaining it.
The media has never been just a reflection and mirror image of the real society, but has a powerful effect on transforming the real society. We have always had a pursuit to establish a new fashion and a new civilization in the business world. Is it a slogan? Is it high-profile? I don't think so, it's implemented in our very specific new media products.
For example, some time ago we wrote an article by Jiang Biwang of Nawei Company " A poorest rural baby, now the company is more than 30 billion!" This Fujian man, all by 6 words", Mr. Jiang said after seeing this article: "I am even happier to see this article you wrote than when the company went public." That's what he said. Including our report on The Homag Group ("China's "Lowest-key Company": The Boss Owes 960,000 Business debts, all employees do not punch in, but won the world's first"), but also received high praise from its founder Zhang Gongyun.
These articles were sent out soon after 100,000+ more, why? I think the main reason is that they are very much in line with the expectations of the public for entrepreneurs, they are all specialized in special new enterprises, and the real entrepreneurs are doing products, services, research and development, and technology. If we can dig out dozens of entrepreneurial cases such as Jiang Biwang and Zhang Gongyun this year, the public's perception of the image of entrepreneurs will be new.
03, the essence of the entrepreneur
We deal with entrepreneurs every day, study entrepreneurs every day, have you ever seriously thought about what the essence of entrepreneurs is?
The trip to Lushan the year before gave me a great inspiration. On the mountain, a taxi driver told me that before the epidemic, lushan had 60 million people going to lushan every year, why did so many people go?
To put it bluntly, it is still because Li Bai wrote a soft text for Lushan: "Flying down three thousand feet, it is suspected that the Milky Way fell for nine days", which is associative, and everyone wants to see this spectacle. After really going to the scene to see it, you will be disappointed, because there is only a small stream of water, so at that time everyone understood that there is a rhetorical technique called "exaggeration", but this exaggeration is also too exaggerated.
Why does the poem written by Li Bai more than 1,000 years ago still create such a great value? Why are the works of the "Axial Age" more than 2,000 years ago still read by modern people? At that time, I thought, what kind of person can cross the river of time and pass on his value all the way down? In the end, it was found that there were no more than 4 types of people:
The first category, artists.
The artist is the envy of us, because he is a genius and has two great freedoms:
First, freedom of personality. As long as he has good works, in fact, others do not care what kind of personality and character he is. Many artists have good works, but personality is actually rationalized, beautified and even deified in the process of circulation of works. If we really look at history, many artists are scumbags and scumbags.
Li Bai's description of Lushan Waterfall is only exaggerated, and the evaluation of the natural world is actually harmless, not to mention that this waterfall will also change in the long river of history, but his evaluation of people is not very reliable. For example, "Sheng did not want to seal the Marquis of Ten Thousand Households, but wished to know Han Jingzhou." When you listen to this poem, you will feel how great Han Jingzhou is, and you can give such a high evaluation.
But historians tell us that Han Jingzhou was actually a very boring and even incompetent bureaucrat, and Li Bai was really arrogant in order to get him to recommend himself as an official. So the artist has a lot of unreliability, but he has the freedom of personality, he has the work, so we don't mind so much.
Second, human freedom. Scientists have found that all human behavior is human. What are the characteristics of human nature? To put it bluntly, human behavior is related to survival and reproduction, but art is an exception. Hearing a beautiful song and seeing a beautiful painting has nothing to do with survival or reproduction, but you will be very happy.
The artist broke through the inhibitions of human nature and brought us freedom, so a van Gogh painting can top the income of many people for several lifetimes.
The second category is thinkers.
The "Tao Te Ching" more than 2,000 years ago, Zhang Ruimin is still reading it repeatedly today, and Plato's "Republic" is still a popular book for college students in Europe and the United States. Our scientific and technological achievements today are changing with each passing day, but many of the achievements of human thought have not actually surpassed some of the cognition of the "Axial Age".
If you watch "The Age of Awakening", you will also find that the understanding of Chinese and Western culture at that time was more profound than that of today's society in some aspects.
The third category is the specialist.
Scientists, historians, and so on, Hawking, Einstein, Toynbee will certainly be able to pass on to future generations.
The fourth category is pragmatists, mainly entrepreneurs and politicians.
So back to the entrepreneur itself, what exactly is entrepreneurship? There are many views, many discussions, in the past few years, everyone talked about adventure, but many people will also think that adventure is not only the characteristics of entrepreneurs, pirates will also take risks. Then someone said innovation, but politicians also had a lot of great innovations, for example, Deng Xiaoping had a lot of innovations. Therefore, this problem is more complicated, Zhang Weiying said that he has studied for more than 30 years or has not figured out what entrepreneurship is.
We feel that Schumpeter's statement is more reliable, "the entrepreneur is not a class, but a state".
This explains the questions of many people, such as whether Lu Zhengyao is an entrepreneur? If you use Schumpeter's theory to explain, he was an entrepreneur when he seriously did Shenzhou car rental, and he was not an entrepreneur when he was fraudulent. Does an entrepreneur who includes retirement count as an entrepreneur? According to this view, after retirement, he may not be an entrepreneur, because he is no longer in the state of innovation.
But this may not be deep enough to say what entrepreneurship is, not where it comes from. Entrepreneurs have been busy all their lives, investing their efforts, time and health in the furnace of their careers, and only a few people can succeed, which is not cost-effective from an economic point of view. So why are a few people willing to suffer a lot and lick a little honey on the tip of the knife? Why are they willing to die and become a bird in the crater?
If we study the entrepreneur not in terms of business and entrepreneurs, but on the entrepreneur as part of the excellent elements of mankind, we will find that the spiritual core of the entrepreneur and politicians, scientists, and thinkers actually has a strong consistency.
Let's examine these few words.
The first sentence is churchill said, everyone is a bug, but some bugs can fly and emit light. Then President Song Zhiping said at our annual meeting last time, this sentence in Dante's Divine Comedy, "Look at the peasant who ploughed the land, the god of death has always followed him." Also, the English poet Thomas wrote to his dying father, "Don't walk gently into that good night."
From this we can see a strong consistency, a rebellion against death and darkness, a search for freedom and light.
So, if you dare to draw a conclusion about entrepreneurship, I think the essence of entrepreneurship is to let yourself shine and illuminate others.
8 minutes of time may be almost the same, the last sentence of Wang Guozhen's words to everyone:
"There are endless scenery in the world, and I have an ageless mood."