The enlightenment of the Dong Yuhui incident to people in the workplace

Recently, the Dong Yuhui incident has attracted wide attention from the media and the public.

Objectively, the editor's reply is stating the facts, but the mistake is that it should not be publicly opened with netizens on the Internet. Dong Yuhui also admits that there are roughly three types of small compositions, not all of which are original by himself: one is written directly by himself, one is to provide ideas by himself and collaborate with the editor team to create, and the other is to lead the creation of the editor team, and he only makes modifications or even does not revise them.

For an enterprise like Dongfang Selection, which has a total annual transaction volume (GMV) of goods of 10 billion yuan and more than 1,000 employees, it is completely normal and understandable that there is a division of labor and collaboration between Dong Yuhui and the Xiaobian team. After all, Dong Yuhui's personal energy is limited, and he alone cannot support such a big platform.

Feng Tang was a guest at Dongfang Selection before and asked Yu Minhong what he thought of Dong Yuhui. After Yu Minhong affirmed the value of Dong Yuhui, he turned to emphasize the importance of the management team. Feng Tang jokingly mentioned Dong Yuhui: You can be replaced, but the backstage, system, and management team have always been there.

This detail reflects Yu Minhong's true view in his heart: the system is more important than the individual.

Logically, Yu Minhong's point of view is also correct. Classical economics and management have long argued for this.

As early as 1776, Adam Smith first put forward the idea of the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations, and explained that the division of labor is conducive to increasing labor productivity and increasing national wealth.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Taylor, known as the "father of scientific management", put forward the ideas of standardization of labor methods and specialization of management functions, which greatly improved labor productivity.

Under the influence of this trend of thought, in 1908, Ford carried out large-scale assembly line assembly operations for the first time with a large number of general-purpose parts, which greatly reduced the cost and selling price of automobiles, and promoted the United States to become a "country on wheels".

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The trajectory of the development of modern enterprises is actually to pursue the maximization of efficiency and economic benefits, through the organizational form of the enterprise, through the professional division of labor for large-scale production, the process of replacing individual labor.

If you understand the operating logic of modern enterprises, you can understand why Dongfang Selection wants to "go to Dong Yuhui".

However, just like Dongfang's selection of "de-Dong Yuhui" has brought such a big negative public opinion. Although the professional division of labor is an efficient form of organization, it also brings a series of negative effects to individual workers.

The most prominent thing is that the enterprise is divided into departments through functions, and people in it are easy to see the trees and not the forest, and become a tool man.

They are just doing what they are doing, so that the white-collar workers sitting in the office are actually no different from the workers on the assembly line, and even in an invisible factory floor without knowing it.

Further, the individual becomes a screw within the organization, ready to be replaced.

See clearly the essence of modern enterprise operation: replace the individual with the system. So what can we, as individuals, do to enhance our ability to resist risks?

The answer that comes to my mind at the moment is: work productization, personal branding.

Second, the work productization

A product is used to meet a certain need or solve a certain problem of a consumer. The core feature of the product is that it can be replicated, that is, mass production.

And our job is essentially to solve problems for the company or the company's customers.

The so-called productization of work refers to the creation of one's own work as a product, and then summing up the methodology for completing that work. Rather than a simple, low-level repetition of certain things all the time.

The benefits of productizing work are clear, and if we can distill a methodology for completing a certain type of work, it means that past successes have a greater chance of being replicated in the future. This can be in a current company, in another company, or even in your own business.

In the past few years, I have come into contact with a lot of expert consultants from Huawei, who have used Huawei's successful practices and their own work experience to provide BLM (Business Leadership Model) and IPD (Integrated Product Development) landing coaching for other companies. In other words, they are actually productizing the work they used to do in Huawei's strategic planning and product development and selling it to other companies.

By the way, I am not sure about the actual consulting effect of these expert consultants, but the consulting fees are calculated in units of 10,000 yuan/day.

All Party B companies in the market are operating in this way. That is, the solution to a certain type of problem is sold to different Party A companies.

Back to the Dong Yuhui incident, in fact, Dong Yuhui's work is also very productized. As small as "small compositions" can be mass-produced, and as large as "knowledge-based anchors selling goods", the business model has been imitated by friends such as Gaotu Jiapin. Behind all this, they have identified that there are many readers who don't like to watch those vulgar anchors with goods, and at the same time retain a little decent and self-comforting spiritual space for readers.

This is also the reason why many companies do not hesitate to compensate Dong Yuhui for sky-high liquidated damages, because there is a high probability that he can replicate the success of Dongfang Selection.

3. Personal branding

There is no doubt that the Dong Yuhui incident finally ended with Dong Yuhui's promotion and salary increase, and Dong Yuhui's powerful personal IP gilded his body.

Looking back at the history of the development of brands, the first appearance in the commercial society is actually the personal brand, rather than the corporate brand that now occupies the mainstream.

The English word for brand, Brand, originally means branding. The guilds of the Middle Ages in Europe required craftsmen to affix their trademarks to their goods, using their personal credibility to vouch for the quality of their products. Similarly, the brick walls of the Great Wall of China would be engraved with the names of the firing workers to ensure the quality of the bricks.

Many of the brands we know are actually named after their founders. Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany & Co. abroad...; Domestic Li Ning, Xiaopeng Motors, Zhang Xiaoquan scissors...

Therefore, personal branding is the proper meaning of branding.

But in a country as introverted as China, when it comes to paying attention to personal branding, it's easy to mistake it for a person who likes to show off and sell himself without doing his job.

It's a misconception that the core of a brand isn't marketing, it's about building a sense of differentiation and trust.

Taking Dong Yuhui's IP as an example, the three words Dong Yuhui mean that the content of the live broadcast room is different from that of Brother Xiao Yang and Li Jiaqi, and it advocates rational consumption rather than impulsive consumption, which is full of humanistic atmosphere.

So how do we build a personal brand?

Drawing on the relevant theories in the field of branding, we can construct it from two aspects: personal ability and personal morality. When we think of the individual as a brand, the interaction and output of the work with others is marked by the credibility of the individual. Over time, it will form a personal reputation in the circle.

This Dong Yuhui incident, unlike other public opinion events, is almost one-sided support for Dong Yuhui on the Internet, and it is rare to see remarks criticizing Dong Yuhui. I think this is not only because people appreciate Dong Yuhui's literary brilliance (personal ability), but also because he has the simplicity, sincerity and kindness (personal morality) that are scarce in this era.

In a business, no one is irreplaceable. I hope that "work productization and personal branding" can give us more safe space for people in the workplace to move.

作者：Marvin 黎明，公众号：Growthmindset

This article was originally published by @Marvin Dawn on Everyone is a Product Manager and is prohibited from reprinting without permission

The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0

The views in this article only represent the author's own, everyone is a product manager, and the platform only provides information storage space services.