DeepSeek is a prelude to variations of the times, and 95% of people can only follow the trend

Wen| brocade

Peter Drucker is a management master whom I personally like very much.

As we all know, recently, various universities have adjusted their disciplines and majors, and some business school-related majors are among the list of abolishments, such as business management, marketing, and tourism management. Even if graduates can successfully complete their studies, their employment direction is mostly irrelevant to their major.

In fact, one question that many people want to ask is, is it meaningful to establish a major like marketing? As for corporate management, when did it come to college students who have just left school?

After all these years of graduation, I have no answer to this question, and may never have an answer, especially after the variations of the DeepSeek era. The only thing I can roughly confirm is that management is indeed an art. The temperament of leaders is innate. Excellent founders in entrepreneurship cannot be cultivated and can only be screened or eliminated.

What we can do is to either study listed companies and find excellent founders or companies with excellent long-term management capabilities, or manage ourselves through the scientific part of the discipline accumulated over the years.

01 Variations on the Times

Over the past century, the productivity of manual workers has increased 50 times. This can be attributed to progress in management or the result of continued specialization of production equipment. The world is recognized as the earliest person to conduct research on manual labor. In 1911, he published “Principles of Scientific Management” and is known as the father of scientific management.

Taylor’s thoughts are relatively simple and crude. He believes that there are no skills in manual labor, only simple and repetitive work. He broke down workers ‘work into several links, redesigned the tools that best suit these links, and ultimately improved the productivity of the production line. The core of Taylor’s theory is task decomposition plus specially designed tools.

Although Taylor has repeatedly emphasized that the subjective initiative of manual workers also plays a big role in business operations, the fact is that Taylor’s scientific management practice has caused the status of manual workers to continue to decline. In the 20th century, the most important asset of enterprises, especially manufacturing enterprises, has always been production equipment.

Taylor’s theory caused him to have trouble with trade unions in various industries, because trade unions have always believed that there is a technical threshold for manual labor and therefore need to take a larger share of the profits of the company. Taylor fundamentally denied the survival foundation of various trade unions.

The biggest achievement of scientific management theory is that it has greatly reduced the role played by so-called manual worker skills in the output of industrial products. To this day, this process is still in progress and there is no sign of slowing down.

For example, in traditional manufacturing factories, the penetration rate of robots is getting higher and higher, and assembly line workers are gradually replaced by production line engineers; industrialized prefabricated dishes are emerging in large numbers on restaurant menus, and the role that chefs can play is becoming smaller and smaller. Even the core element of restaurant chains is the standardization of kitchen chefs; in the field of logistics, a large number of robots have also appeared in manual sorting work, and machine vision has been widely popularized; Even in military operations, a large number of drones and robot dogs have appeared in traditional trench warfare.

However, the labor productivity of so-called knowledge workers, who correspond to manual workers, has not improved much. Drucker believes that in the future, the productivity of knowledge workers will increasingly become the key to the survival and prosperity of developed countries. The general direction of Drucker’s suggestions on how to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is contrary to Taylor’s. The result of Taylor’s theory is anti-human and uses manual workers as attachments to production equipment. Drucker’s purpose is to give full play to the subjective initiative of knowledge workers.

Drucker’s suggestion is that enterprises should regard knowledge workers as assets of the enterprise, not as costs like manual workers. Knowledge workers should self-manage, constantly innovate, and continuously receive education. The cost of knowledge workers should be measured by Quality rather than quantity. Most of the above suggestions are contrary to what is required for manual workers.

From the results, since Drucker completed his book in 1999, the productivity of knowledge workers has not improved significantly.

But the path to improve the efficiency of knowledge workers may be clear today, and that is artificial intelligence.

The biggest problem with knowledge work is that unlike manual workers, tasks are difficult to disassemble and there are no tools to complete the work. The biggest significance of deepseek’s exit during the Spring Festival of the Year of the Snake is to let the whole society see the possibility that the work of knowledge workers will be replaced.

The problem faced by knowledge workers is that the moat of personal skills has been completely or partially destroyed by the success of artificial intelligence.

We can list a long list of industries dominated by knowledge workers that may be disrupted.

Manual customer service: It was not that there was no artificial intelligence before. Jingdong Ali and many banks had robot customer service, but those were only mentally retarded. Deepseek proved that chatting with machines can be so smooth and can even provide emotional value. At least 80% of manual customer service will be cancelled, and the rest will be artificial intelligence engineers and a few backup positions.

Drivers: This profession is increasingly transforming towards manual workers. Drivers ‘skills are reflected in two aspects: driving skills and road recognition. Early drivers were regarded as a high-paying profession. After the promotion of mobile navigation, the skill point of identifying roads was abandoned, leaving drivers with only one skill point of pure driving. Looking at it now, smart driving may be implemented in 3-5 years, and there is a high probability that the professional group of drivers will face greater pressure to re-employment.

Accountants: The ability of artificial intelligence to analyze reports is actually higher than that of 95% of accountants. The market will still retain most accounting positions, but more will be limited to basic positions.

Lawyer: This is a hard-hit area. Currently, non-law majors have been restricted from applying for bar qualifications. Given that China is a civil law system, jurisprudence plays little role. Existing artificial intelligence can completely replace ordinary legal consultation. The main job of lawyers will shift to corporate consulting.

Doctor: The substitution is limited, but it is not without pressure. At least the artificial intelligence does a good job in watching movies.

Under artificial intelligence, more and more jobs whose output is normally distributed have become power-law distributions.

After the emergence of artificial intelligence, since artificial intelligence can replace about 95% of work, this means that except for the remaining 5% that will not be affected, the output of other employees is no longer recognized by society. For example, accountants ‘financial report analysis work, lawyers’ legal advice, and most taxi drivers.

Robtaxi’s operating results have shown that even if existing smart driving no longer improves, it can theoretically replace at least half of manned taxis.

The disruption of traditional industries by artificial intelligence has begun. If you haven’t felt it yet, it’s just that the time has not come yet. At the current pace, we will be able to feel the huge impact of artificial intelligence on our daily lives and work by the end of 2026 at the latest.

02 Manage yourself

For most people, self-management has always been a blank. Faced with changes in the times, we cannot stop us from trying to stop a chariot. We can only follow trends and manage ourselves.

A typical China child has a planned life. Especially in recent decades, there has been a surge of wind and waves, and the industry’s big beta has brought some people to the forefront of the times. The big wave faded and ruthlessly left them behind.

The reason why Drucker is called a management master is that he has feasible practical solutions.

The first step in self-management is to understand your strengths, and then concentrate on amplifying your strengths. This is actually a relatively counter-intuitive thing, because it is a big problem to choose subjects when reading, and barrel theory also explains this problem. But for individuals, in areas where they have an advantage, it takes much more time to improve from being unable to a lower-average level than it takes to improve from first-class performance to excellent. However, most people, most teachers and organizations try to concentrate all their efforts on getting people who are useless to reach lower-average levels.

The second step in self-management is how to get things done well. How to do things belongs to people’s personality. One must first judge whether one is better at reading or listening, and then it is very important that everyone’s learning method is also very individual. Some people learn by taking lots of notes, others learn by letting others listen to them, some learn by writing, and some learn while doing things. Everyone needs to understand the right way to do things for them.

Many professions inherently set limits on how people do things. This is what we often say: God rewards them.

Compulsory education is more suitable for those who are good at listening and learn by taking a lot of notes. When entering higher education, teachers only play a guiding role. Those who are good at reading and learn through writing will easily stand out.

Drucker said top writers usually don’t learn by listening and reading, the way they learn is by writing. This also means that if your learning method is not writing, it is actually difficult to achieve the best in writing.

To be an actor, one should be good at listening, and the way to learn is to learn while doing things. The way cross-talk actors learn is to let others listen to them and learn. If you are not, there will be a lot of pressure to do this job. The gene lottery is not just about appearance, but also about the way of doing things.

Management in small companies is often better at listening because the company is small and does not have as many documents. Executives in large companies are much better at reading. Because of OA, various documents are stacked on top of each other, and it will be very painful to be not good at reading.

For sales positions, dealing with customers every day and not being good at listening can be a real disaster.

For most people, how to do things is a blind spot. At the very least, we need to understand our supervisors and the ways our customers are best at doing things.

We all know that India, as a country, can be said to be complicated. But when Indians are in Europe and the United States, they are definitely full of attributes and mix well. The usual explanation is that Indians who went to Europe and the United States have a language foundation in English. In addition, because of Hinduism’s long history of debate, they are particularly good at expressing themselves. From the perspective of self-management, this characteristic of Indians must be quite in tune with the needs of European and American societies.

Rivers and mountains are easy to change, but nature cannot change. From the perspective of doing things, people should not force themselves to do work that is not suitable for them.

The ultimate test for doing things well is whether your own values are consistent with those of the organization. This is the same thing as saying that you can’t sleep with two types of people. When your personal values are inconsistent with your boss, parting ways in the long run are an inevitable result.

The third step in self-management is to determine what contribution you should make.

‘We can’t ask: What kind of contribution do I want to make,’ Drucker said. ”, cannot ask: What contribution does the organization want me to make? ”We should ask: What contribution should I make? ”, only then will you ask: Is this contribution commensurate with my advantages? Is this what I want to do? ”Do I find this contribution worthwhile? Is it motivating? ”, the last question is, in what ways can I achieve extraordinary results? How to create? ”

To sum up, if you have a choice, you must combine your advantages with the company’s needs and strive to maximize your advantages.

Human diversity is involved in self-management. What we realize is that history is an epic of heroes, and heroes are tools of history.

I am born to be useful. But throughout their lives, most people have never waited for the opportunity that suits them best.

03 Future judgment

Drucker has three main judgments on future trends: one is population aging, the other is changes in the distribution of disposable income, and the third is that enterprises must look at issues from the perspective of global competitiveness.

Let’s first look at population aging.

“The age distribution of the population is more important than absolute population numbers. Population aging has now deviated from predictions and become a reality. Our statement is also shifting from a demographic dividend to an engineer dividend.

Drucker believes that the biggest change brought about by population aging is the change in labor-employment relationships. Early retirement does not mean stopping working, but that workers no longer work full-time. “Employment relationships are likely to become increasingly personal and flexible, at least for the elderly.

It should be said that we have seen more and more freelance workers over the years, and there is indeed such a trend at present. As for whether the elderly have a higher propensity to consume, it has not been confirmed at present. No matter how old people are, people tend to live within their means. The current relatively certain impact of aging is that it has increased the need for financial management. Middle-aged and elderly people over the age of 45 have begun to reserve funds for their retirement life.

Second is the change in the distribution of disposable income.

“Generally, once a trend in the distribution of disposable income to a certain type of product or service is established, this trend tends to remain for a long time and is generally not affected by the business cycle.

Four sectors that remained developed in the 20th century include government, health care, education and leisure. In fact, due to the shift from real to virtual in Western developed countries, and the fact that China can provide cheap goods, the proportion of disposable income used to meet material needs is declining year by year, that is, economic development is increasingly tending to internal services. This trend may not last for so long.

In developed countries, governments reallocate 30%-50% of revenue. Standing in the present, the impact of government regulation may be greater. Because of the emergence of artificial intelligence, more and more positions will be replaced, especially those who are knowledge workers. In order to maintain social stability, the government needs to provide a safety cushion for employment in the entire society. Artificial intelligence will definitely eliminate some jobs, and normally create more jobs, but no one knows how this process will be achieved.

Finally, companies or organizations must regard global competitiveness as a strategic goal.

“Strategy is to invest today’s resources to realize tomorrow’s hopes. Recently, we may have a deeper and deeper understanding of the issue of global competitiveness. The competitiveness of a country’s industrial products depends on the sum of the country’s factor costs. In manufacturing, labor costs occupy an increasingly low position.

One of the core reasons why Europe is in today’s dilemma is that cheap energy has been interrupted, and energy can account for 30% of the total material cost of industrial products. We should actually find it strange that in a region, there is generally four days off for work, with paid leave for more than one month a year. The shutdown of public services caused by strikes can be seen everywhere, but this kind of good life can still last for 40 to 50 years.

If we go deeper into the seven sisters of U.S. stocks, we will find that these seven companies are among the few companies that the United States can currently produce with global competitiveness. Similarly, in this round of A-share bull market, the rising leader must also be globally competitive.

For us personally, when choosing a job, we must not only consider whether it will be automated and replaced by artificial intelligence, but also consider whether it will be equally competitive under the conditions of future globalization.

This problem is actually not far away from us. For positions such as food delivery, housekeeping, and drivers, China’s salaries are already very good in most developing countries.

04 Written at the end

A country or civilization has a life cycle. Regarding the replacement of national classes and human nature, China has a full history. No one can stay ahead forever. The east rising and west falling is just the result of a cycle, not a subjective wish.

The United States is a very unique sample because it has experienced more than a hundred years of industrialization. Whether it is business management or financial markets, it has stepped into many pitfalls, but it has indeed accumulated many experiences or cases in the context of industrialization.

These cases are also very meaningful.

Textbooks will only record the first person to taste crabs, but they will selectively forget the entrepreneur who made crabs into an industrial chain.

History books record that Watt was the inventor of the steam engine, but until his death, Watt believed that the steam engine had only one purpose: pumping water from coal mines. ”, the real father of the industrial revolution was his partner Matthew Bolton. ”Bolton promoted the steam engine to the British textile industry, resulting in the birth of the first mass market and the first factory. At the same time, modern capitalism and modern economy also entered the historical stage. ”

The history of Ford is also very different from the general impression of the public.

We basically believe that Henry Ford created the assembly-line production model and raised wages for employees. But in fact, this has little to do with Henry Ford. In 1912, James Cougens became the general manager of Ford Motors. He made three decisions at that time, and it was these three decisions that laid Ford’s century-old foundation. These three decisions are: one is to reduce the price of automobiles; the other is to adopt a modern assembly production line to reduce the production time of a Model T car from 12.5 hours to 9 minutes; the third is to expand the sales network and introduce more than 7000 dealers around the world. Kuzen was also the one who pushed Henry Ford to complete the salary increase.

Compared with Kuzyn, Henry Ford did not show high talent in operation. In 1919, Henry Ford fired Kuzinn and became his general manager. He fixed sales based on production. There was also the famous saying that no matter what customers needed, my car was black. In 1928, Ford’s market share was surpassed by General Motors.

Another interesting thing is that General Motors is a miserable image of Fira in our eyes, but that is now.

General Motors was once BYD. As the standard-bearer of new energy vehicles in China, BYD is definitely well-known in the industry for its cost control capabilities.

During William Durant (1861-1947) as General Manager, GM became the world’s largest and most profitable manufacturing company in just a few years. GM’s costs were 30% lower than all its competitors, including Ford and Chrysler, a situation that lasted for more than 30 years. It is precisely because of the foundation of Old Durant that General Motors has become one of the symbols of the United States. At its peak, GM President Charles Wilson later served as Secretary of Defense in President Eisenhower’s cabinet. He famously said at a Senate hearing: What is good for the United States will inevitably be good for General Motors, and vice versa. ”

Durant’s approach is exactly the same as BYD now, but through mergers and acquisitions. Durant has acquired many small but successful companies, such as Buick. Reduce costs through unified procurement and centralized sales. Later, Durant continued to acquire auto parts companies. In 1920, GM acquired Fisher Body Manufacturing Company, the largest auto body manufacturer in the United States at that time. After the acquisition, 70% of GM’s spare parts were produced by subsidiary manufacturing companies. In order to ensure the strong competitiveness of subordinate auto parts companies, Durant also mandatory that subordinate parts suppliers must export 50% of their products.

So how did GM become like this? To be precise, because of the unions. From the time General Motors unionized in 1936-1937, General Motors lost its cost advantage and continues to this day.

In the short 10 years from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Japanese cars conquered cities in the United States. In addition to Volkswagen, the largest market share was General Motors. On the contrary, Ford and Chrysler increased their share.

Therefore, the biggest question is not why GM has become like this today, but why GM has been able to last for so long despite such a huge cost pressure. I have to say that the foundation that Old Durant has laid for GM is really too thick. (Author: Foolish Old Man)