Inscription: On December 20, 2020, the Peking University Development Institute hosted the Fifth National Development Forum, which took "Double Cycle: A New Pattern of National Development" as the theme, and invited Many scholars and guests such as Lin Yifu to bring in-depth sharing and public discussion from different perspectives of national development. This article is based on a speech by Zhang Weiying, Distinguished Professor of Peking University, Professor of the National Development Institute, and Director of the Market and Network Economy Research Center of Peking University.
The business school mainly teaches management knowledge, and mainly trains professional managers. This group of people and entrepreneurs are two types of people, but to make a business bigger, professional managers are very important, because entrepreneurs' decisions must be implemented and rely on professional managers. In fact, I judge that more than 95% of corporate decisions are management decisions, and probably less than 5% are entrepreneurial decisions. If this group of people and entrepreneurs cannot understand each other and solve management problems, it will be difficult for enterprises to do well.
But on the other hand, if a company pursues the standardization of management too much, it may not be able to live for a long time. When an enterprise is getting bigger and bigger, strict rules and section structure are indispensable, which will form bureaucracy at the same time, and the density of entrepreneurship will be gradually diluted.
Suppose a company wants to promote a senior manager from within, and the more suitable candidate is someone who has struggled for decades from the average employee to the management. But this person certainly does not have an entrepreneurial spirit, otherwise he will feel very uncomfortable in the enterprise, often want to escape, and can not last for decades. Many entrepreneurs in real life are because they can't stand the shackles of the department and finally come out to do it themselves. Entrepreneurs are not inherently "good employees."
Of course, the fact that enterprise management cannot be completely standardized does not mean that enterprise management should be abandoned, but that we should think about how to maintain and take into account the entrepreneurial spirit while standardizing enterprise management.
Entrepreneurial competence and innovation
One of the outstanding abilities of an entrepreneur is that he can think of what others cannot think of. This ability of the entrepreneur comes from his imagination, which is the ability to combine multiple knowledge. But imagination is not enough, but also the ability to turn imaginary things into real products and get market recognition.
There may be many imaginative people in this world, but there are not many people who turn imagination into action, into products, and are recognized by the market, and ultimately succeed.
For entrepreneurs, innovation is about solving specific problems, especially starting with solving technical problems, rather than talking about innovation in the abstract, as scholars or thinkers do. Every innovation of an entrepreneur has to solve a specific problem, and it may start out just to reduce costs or make the consumer experience better, not to change the world, but in the end it may really change the world, and the degree of change is completely beyond the entrepreneur's original imagination. For example, the original purpose of the steam engine was to replace artificial drainage in mines, and later under bolton's encouragement, Watt changed the steam engine from reciprocating to rotary motion, and the steam engine gradually replaced manpower, horsepower, wind power, hydraulic power, and finally became a general power, not only driving the stone mill rotation, driving the textile machine, but also pulling the train, pushing the ship, and also generating electricity, turning mechanical energy into electricity.
Protecting interests hinders innovation
Innovation depends on the rule of law. The constant emphasis on the rule of law today is a good thing. But in my opinion, people's understanding of the rule of law is still very inadequate, and it can even be said to be misplaced. For example, we often talk about protecting the interests of consumers, protecting the interests of investors, protecting the interests of minority shareholders, protecting the interests of employees, etc. These concepts are all wrong, because there is no way to protect interests. Protecting the interests of one part of the population may at the same time infringe upon the interests of another. For example, if I open a restaurant and do business well now, and someone opens a new restaurant, customers prefer to go to him, and I end up bankrupt, can I protect my interests? If I protect my interests, I may harm the interests of customers or new restaurants.
In particular, I would like to further emphasize that the concept of protecting interests is incompatible with innovation. Innovation needs to protect rights, not interests, and should not confuse rights and interests. The protection of interests is politics, not the rule of law, the essence of the rule of law is to protect rights, politics emphasizes the protection of interests, because politics is essentially a balance of interests.
Richard Ackwright invented the hydraulic spinning machine, a large number of hand-spinning owners went bankrupt; British engineer Stephenson father and son invented the train, resulting in the abandonment of the original huge canal transportation. Should the interests of hand spinners and canal companies be protected?
Edison invented the electric lighting system, which destroyed the traditional gas lighting system; after the emergence of the automobile, the original horse breeders, the people who provided the stables, the people who made the carriages, the people who drove the carriages, the interests were damaged; the final success of the steamship made the original sailing ship transport withdraw from the mainstream market; the invention of the printing press, which caused hundreds of thousands of scribes to lose their jobs; the emergence of electronic laser typesetting systems, so that hundreds of thousands of typesetters did not have jobs; the new media made the traditional print media and television media scenery no longer. It's even unsustainable; so on, and so on. Should we protect the interests of all these losers? In fact, there is no way to protect it unless we reject any innovation.
The emergence of each new technology will damage the interests of some people, from ancient times to the present. If the interests are protected, it inevitably hinders the process of innovation. Therefore, we need to recognize that the protection of interests conflicts with innovation.
Historically, there has hardly been an innovation that has not been resisted and opposed. For, as Schumpeter put it, innovation itself is a creative destruction that is bound to undermine the established interests of some people, who are naturally opposed to innovation. People whose interests are damaged are more concentrated and easier to organize, and the voice of opposition will of course be louder.
The biggest beneficiaries of innovation are consumers, who have more choices and have to pay a lower cost. But consumers, with a large number of people and not knowing each other, are simply stealing pleasure and are unlikely to make a pro-innovation voice, except for the preference for new products shown through the purchase behavior.
Therefore, an expert in the history of technology once said that every innovation is born in an unfriendly society, with many enemies and few friends, and only people with particularly good luck and special strength may survive.
The rule of law protects rights
The rule of law is not the protection of interests, the rule of law can only protect rights.
What are the rights? Rights are not privileges, but things that we can enjoy equally, you enjoy, I enjoy, compatible with each other.
Many rights in the real world are evolved by human history, for example, when we are in line, we pay attention to first-come, first-served, why should later people respect the rights of those who come before us? For if the latecomer does not respect the rights of the first-comer, those who are further behind him will also take away his first-come rights. Respect for rights is good for everyone.
Legally speaking, rights are, to a certain extent, the "absolute imperative" of Kant's ideas. Absolute command means that the rules must be universal and cannot be applied to only a subset of people. I myself am willing to take it as something of right, and I am willing to let others take it as a right. This is the right to truly equality. The rule of law becoming a rule means that it applies to all those involved, and it is an "absolute command".
Rights are also like Confucius said more than 2,000 years ago, "Do not do to others what you do not want." You should treat others how you want others to treat you; you don't want others to treat you how you should, and you shouldn't treat others that way.
Rights are fair. What Adam Smith calls "the just bystander" refers to the idea that when looking at what is justice, everyone should not stand in the interests of the parties, but from the perspective of an independent and impartial third party. The great political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls, had a classic metaphor --- the "veil of ignorance," that is, the rules of the game are only fair when the parties are ignorant of their future status. It's like we divide a piece of cake, the person who divides the cake doesn't know who will get which piece, and it will be fair when it is divided, otherwise it is easy to be eccentric.
The rule of law protects everyone's rights, but it cannot protect everyone's interests. Interests and rights are in conflict, and the damage to interests is mutual. Suppose that a new service infringes on my interests, and when the government bans the new service, it is actually equivalent to infringing on the interests of the other party in turn. If it is not prohibited, can the other party not live better and make more money? Many public opinions and policies propose to protect interests, which is very good, but it conflicts with the spirit of the rule of law and is even more detrimental to innovation.
I would also like to further emphasize that a society governed by the rule of law should not set restrictions on the areas of innovation, saying that innovation in some areas is right and innovation in some areas is not. In fact, all human innovation begins in traditional fields. The industrial revolution of more than 200 years ago began with the textile and metallurgical industries, which are very old industries and equally innovative fields. There is no industry that cannot innovate. Innovation grows out of an ecosystem, not planning. Ecology means that no species is superfluous. It is likely that some people are just for arbitrage, but they just provide opportunities for others to innovate. Don't think that if real estate developers are banned, high technology will appear.
What we should do is to let everyone's rights be protected, let everyone's creativity be freely exerted, what he thinks, says, and does is his own business, and the only thing to restrain is that he cannot infringe on the rights of others. As long as we insist on doing this, there will be historically changing innovations in China, and such innovations may not be imagined today.
Finally, I would like to emphasize one sentence: innovation is unpredictable, and it is left to entrepreneurs to judge for themselves.
Original article: Wang Zhiqin | Editor: Wang Xianqing