There is a saying in business circles that "first-class enterprises sell culture, second-rate enterprises sell brands, and third-rate enterprises sell products". Corporate culture refers to the value system formed or accepted by enterprise members, including beliefs, values and codes of conduct. Corporate culture can promote enterprises to improve business performance, enhance cohesion, improve management level, enhance core competitiveness and promote sustainable development of enterprises.
There is a saying in business circles that "first-class enterprises sell culture, second-rate enterprises sell brands, and third-rate enterprises sell products". Corporate culture refers to the value system formed or accepted by enterprise members, including beliefs, values and codes of conduct. Corporate culture can promote enterprises to improve business performance, enhance cohesion, improve management level, enhance core competitiveness and promote sustainable development of enterprises.
Denison's organizational culture model was founded by Daniel Denison, a professor at Lausanne International School of Management. Denison believes that an ideal corporate culture has four characteristics: external adaptability, internal integration, flexibility and stability. Each of these four features has three dimensions. Participation involves the cultivation of employees' working ability, sense of ownership and sense of responsibility, and its three dimensions are authorization, team orientation and ability development.
Consistency is used to measure whether a company has a strong and cohesive internal culture, and its three dimensions are core values, cooperation, coordination and integration. Adaptability mainly refers to the company's ability to respond quickly to various signals from the external environment (including customers and markets), and its three dimensions are innovation, customer first and organizational learning. The mission is to judge whether the company pays attention to immediate interests or formulates a systematic strategic action plan. Its three dimensions are vision, strategic orientation, intention and goal.
The two cultural characteristics on the left pay attention to change and flexibility. The two cultural characteristics on the right reflect the company's ability to maintain predictability and stability. The two cultural characteristics of the top management are related to the adaptability of the company to the external environment. The two cultural characteristics in the lower part emphasize the integration of the company's internal system, organizational structure and process. Among them, there is a contradiction between emphasizing flexibility and adaptability and paying attention to the consistency of internal integration. There is a contradiction between top-down vision (mission) and bottom-up participation.
Using the organizational culture model of Denison introduced earlier, this paper analyzes the corporate culture of Microsoft and Lenovo. Microsoft and Lenovo are chosen as sample enterprises because they have many similarities: they are both founded by computer technicians, and their core businesses are currently concentrated on personal computers, all of which belong to the IT industry, all of which belong to typical knowledge-based enterprises, with high staff quality (education level), all of which belong to the world's top 500 enterprises, all of which are young enterprises with less than 50 years, and so on. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Microsoft is the pride of Americans, while Lenovo is the pride of China. Therefore, the author believes that IT is very representative to choose Microsoft and Lenovo as samples to study the typical cultural characteristics of IT enterprises in China and the United States.
Before the analysis, let's briefly introduce Microsoft. Paul owns this company? 6? 1 Allen and Bill? 6? 1 Gates was founded in 1975. The product is Microsoft BASIC, with 3 employees, and the annual income is 16000 USD. BASIC was introduced to Japan on 1977. 1982, the European branch was established in Britain. 1986, Microsoft went public on Nasdaq. After the listing of 1986, the operating profit rate remained above 30%. By 1995, the annual income had reached $5.9 billion, with about 200 products and about 17800 employees. Microsoft controls 85% of the operating system, which is the most important part of the PC software market. As can be seen from the above introduction, in just 35 years, Microsoft has undergone earth-shaking changes, from a small enterprise to a Fortune 500 company. Its rapid development has complicated reasons. The following is only from the perspective of its corporate culture.
In order to facilitate understanding, the author combs and summarizes Microsoft's cultural characteristics and typical cases according to the dimensions of Denison's organizational culture model, as shown in figure 1: the dimensions of Denison's organizational culture model, the typical cases of Microsoft's corporate culture characteristics, participatory authorization, advocating freedom and respecting work personality; Employees have the right to make any decisions about their work. Unlimited working hours; Independent selection and layout of offices; Dress casually.
Team spirit (integrity, honesty; Passionate about customers, partners and technology; Respect others and treat each other sincerely; Face the challenge bravely and conquer it; Self-criticism, continuous improvement and pursuit of Excellence; Loyal to their duties). There are no permanent leaders and employees; Microsoft people have a strong sense of team: success or failure lies in the team; Everyone teaches and learns from each other; Dedicate and support each other; Encourage each other when encountering difficulties and communicate in time; Relying on group wisdom; Acknowledge and thank teammates for their work and help; Willing to be a supporting role.
Ability development encourages individuals to perform well; Stimulate individual potential and realize enterprise potential. Tutorial system (at least two, as you choose); Tailor-made training plan for each employee every year; There are many kinds of flexible training in personnel system, which employees can choose by themselves without approval; In order to let employees grow up with enterprises, Microsoft has a unique employee training system. They decide the content, time and target of training through the mode of "career mode+ability/skill gap+business demand". Enterprises will continue to investigate employees' learning needs and understand their needs for career development and career planning. Consistency, core values and passion; Technology first; Work hard; Innovation. All employees have the same personality characteristics: keen, intelligent, enthusiastic and enterprising; Bill? 6? Gates believes that the most important quality of a successful person is his enthusiasm for work.
Cooperate with open communication channel e-mail system; Non-hierarchical arrangement; General manager forum, dialogue to affirm personal dignity; "Speak freely" and "I suggest". Coordinate and integrate the release information. No matter which department or project team you are, whether you are a superior or a subordinate, you should publish your current work situation, project ideas, plan implementation, problems encountered and other information as much as possible. Adaptation, creation, change, self-criticism, continuous improvement and pursuit of Excellence; Innovative thinking: mistakes are good; Always on the battlefield. The mechanism of constantly improving new products and regularly eliminating old products; Microsoft instills in every employee the concept of treating failure correctly and respecting failure, and even puts forward that "failure means no effort"; Microsoft is only 18 months away from bankruptcy, and only 18 months forever.
Customer first, full of enthusiasm for customers, partners and technology; Pay attention to customer feedback. The customer satisfaction index has been added to the evaluation of 600 senior managers of the company.
Organizational learning is self-criticism, information feedback and resource sharing. Advocate the concept of lifelong learning for employees; Learning philosophy is: 70% of learning is obtained through work, 20% through managers and colleagues, and 10% through professional training. High-level "holiday meeting": identify a topic and discuss it as much as possible. Follow the mode of "defining the knowledge and skills to be learned, implementing the learning plan, and conceiving the new knowledge and skills needed to achieve the next goal", and so on, and gradually realize the learning goal.
Mission vision empowers people through excellent software-they can communicate and create at any time, anywhere and on any device. Bill Gates: Every morning when I wake up, I am extremely excited and excited to think that my work and technology will bring great influence and changes to human life. The company conveys the company's vision to its employees by telling stories.
Formulate the strategic direction and intention of long-term strategic objectives; Enthusiasm for products and technology. Produce software products with wide users and market prospects; Digital management; Make the company smaller; Give priority to efficiency and pay attention to results; Entrepreneurship; Recruit the best talents in the industry.
The goal is to maintain the first position in the "personal computer era" in the era of "networking" and "digitalization"; Develop a computer that can "see, listen and learn". Remember who your opponent is, once you master the market, you will regard yourself as an opponent-launch a new version every year to compete for absolute control of the market; Every employee knows that the main goal is to win the market share of 100%; Constantly invest in the research and development of new products and technologies. Table 1 Denison Cultural Model Analysis of Microsoft Cultural Sources: The author of this paper collates the cultural reports of Microsoft official website and its past years. From the analysis of the above table 1, we can get the following characteristics of Microsoft corporate culture:
First, it emphasizes the social responsibility of enterprises. The mission fully embodies the social responsibility and management consciousness of enterprises: only enterprises that create value for society can finally be recognized by society, thus achieving lasting and long-term development.
Second, we should highlight the importance of "people" and always emphasize the corporate culture and strategic concept designed around "people": whether it is corporate vision, the concept of customer first, or the authorization, team, ability development and learning organization built by enterprises, the vision is to create convenience and value for human beings, the customer first is to design around realizing customer value, and the internal cultural construction is to create opportunities for members to improve themselves and realize their self-worth. Around human beings, customers and employees, from macro to micro, it fully embodies the respect and satisfaction for people.
Third, focus on the future, emphasize development and innovation, dare to be the first in the world, strive to be the first, always be in the process of change and innovation, constantly criticize and deny yourself, constantly create, realize the progress of products and technology, the development of employees, and finally realize the rapid development of enterprises.
Fourth, build a multi-dimensional and multi-level balanced development system of corporate culture: the balance between corporate strategy and goal support for vision; The balance between innovation and failure; Respect the balance between the free development of personality and the coordinated development of the team; The balance between the coordinated development of the team and the overall development of the enterprise and so on.
Fifth, its core value system places great emphasis on passion, innovation, technology and learning: IT enterprises have always been established and developed with technology. Only by constantly creating in learning can they constantly upgrade and replace technology, and only by igniting the passion of life can they achieve the greatest creativity.
Sixth, in the construction of the whole corporate culture, we should pay attention to the dissemination and inheritance of culture: Microsoft corporate culture has a deep imprint of Bill Gates, and on this basis, it is constantly revised and improved, and it is continuously spread to employees through storytelling, discussion, training, learning and enterprise incentive mechanism, so that the value system of the whole corporate culture is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
The above has analyzed the corporate culture of Microsoft, and also the corporate culture of Lenovo.
First of all, let me introduce Lenovo. The company was established in 1984 with an investment of 200,000 RMB. 1 1 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It has developed into a large enterprise group with diversified development of information industry, and completed the acquisition of IBM's personal computer department in 2005. At present, new york-based Purchase has more than 65,438+09,000 employees worldwide, and has set up two main operation centers in Beijing, China and Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
Secondly, it summarizes the cultural characteristics and typical cases of Lenovo enterprises with the dimension of Denison's organizational culture model. See Table 2 for details: Typical cases of Lenovo's corporate culture characteristics in the dimension of Denison's organizational culture model. Participatory authorization (helping the horse to send another journey) will not be authorized, nor will it be authorized; Will not promote people, will not be promoted; Identify a good horse in a horse race.
Team orientation encourages family, cooperation and team spirit. Casting "spartak phalanx"-all employees have the same goal and coordinated pace. It is strictly forbidden to implement the company's business strategy and work together in a down-to-earth manner.
Ability development integrates employees' personal pursuit into the long-term development of enterprises. Continuous on-the-job training, and the annual expenditure on training exceeds150,000 yuan; A stage without ceiling: there is a lot of room for development; Everyone is an engine-to stimulate one's potential to the maximum, to explore the law with a high degree of consciousness, and to achieve future goals requires creative work. Consistency core values make customers, be accurate and realistic, be honest and responsible, and be innovative. Running a business is running a person; It will make all employees develop together with the enterprise and make employees get social respect for their contributions.
The cooperation of equality, trust, appreciation and affection requires everyone to talk more about mutual support; Advocate the concept of "mutual customer" and ask employees to "cooperate internally and be humble externally"; Can you make it clear when posting, so that the other party can understand the intention of posting and accept it easily? For the cooperation between departments, they are positive and positive, rather than shirking and slacking off; E-mail processing efficiency is timely. Coordination and integration cooperation * * * Enjoying the implementation of matrix management mode requires the mutual cooperation between departments and resources * * *.
Adaptable to create changes, ambitious, and gradually innovate in technology and organization. Never satisfied, dare to struggle and constantly surpass yourself; Employees are required to do their jobs well, take the initiative to take responsibility, respond flexibly to changes and challenges, persist in learning and pioneering, boldly try new methods and new things within the tolerable risk range, and constantly improve their work.
Customer first, customer first, honesty as customer experience, interactive participation and coordinated development; Personal home computer market.
Organizational learning and innovative learning "sewing insoles" and "making suits"—
First of all, we must sew the insole in a down-to-earth manner in order to make a decent suit; Conduct "mold entry" training for new employees; Continuous on-the-job training; Establish an interactive learning atmosphere among employees.
Mission vision provides information technology, tools and services for organizations and individuals, making people's work and life simpler, more efficient and richer; Help employees realize the value and quality of work and life; Create lasting maximum returns for investors.
R&D investment has increased year by year; The proportion of R&D personnel in the company's personnel is gradually increasing; The content of independent innovation technology in products has been continuously improved; The company's R&D field has been continuously broadened and deepened, especially from product technology and application technology to core technology field; Technology will not only increase the value of the company's products and make them more distinctive, but also become the direct source of the company's profits.
The goal is to ensure access to the top three markets involved in the business field; /kloc-become the world's leading high-tech company within 0/0 years. Buy IBM. Strategic orientation and intention of high-tech association; Service association; International association.
10 years later, more than 20% of the company's income comes from the international market; The company has a vision of international development and corresponding talents and culture; The management level of the company has reached the international first-class. Table 2 Denison cultural model analysis Lenovo cultural sources: The author of this paper collates according to Baidu Library's Lenovo Cultural Report 20 10 and previous reports on its culture.
From the analysis in Table 2 above, we can draw the following characteristics of Lenovo's corporate culture: First, we emphasize social responsibility and responsibility for employees and investors, and its mission is to build a trinity, provide convenience for organizations and individuals, provide opportunities for employees to realize value and improve their quality of life, and realize benefits for investors.
Second, the people-oriented concept emphasizes the value of enterprises to employees and customers.
Thirdly, it emphasizes teamwork, cooperation and coordinated development, individuals and enterprises need coordinated development, departments and the whole need coordinated development, and emphasizes standardized management.
Fourth, emphasize learning, innovation, change and development, and do things in a down-to-earth manner, and on this basis, continue to learn, surpass and innovate. Fifth, family management, typical "home" culture, paternalistic responsibility of enterprises to employees, considering the development of employees, and creating a warm organizational atmosphere for employees.
By analyzing the corporate cultures of Microsoft and Lenovo from the perspective of Denison's organizational culture model, we can draw a conclusion that both of them, as the top 500 IT companies in the world, can grow rapidly, and there are many homogenization factors in corporate culture construction.
First, pay attention to "people", people-oriented cultural center, and realize customer value, employee value and investor value.
Second, pay attention to innovation and development, especially the innovation and upgrading of technology and products.
Third, be ambitious, have a global vision and strive to be a pioneer.
Fourth, have a strong sense of social responsibility and constantly create value for society.
Although in the wave of globalization, enterprises learn from each other and corporate cultures tend to converge, the cultures of Microsoft and Lenovo are still very heterogeneous because they are rooted in different national cultures.
First, from the perspective of humanized management: Microsoft emphasizes releasing individuality, giving more freedom and managing employees more flexibly; On the basis of respecting employees, Lenovo emphasizes standardized management. This just reflects the cultural differences between China and the United States. American culture pays more attention to individuals and has a heroic complex. In China culture, the worship of the collective (organization) emphasizes consistency and standardization (no rules, no Fiona Fang).
Second, from the expression of vision or mission, Microsoft's vision expression is simple and focused, highlighting social responsibility; Lenovo's vision has built three dimensions, taking into account social responsibility, employee value and investor interests, which is comprehensive and complex.
Third, from the perspective of strategy and objectives, Microsoft clearly put forward to be the first in the industry, Lenovo put forward the top three in the industry and lead the world.
This can also be found in the cultural differences between China and the United States. Americans are confident and straightforward, and Microsoft's road to success encourages them to take the oath for the first time. And China people always like to "hide your strength and bide your time" and don't like it too early. Fourth, from the specific measures to encourage innovation, Microsoft clearly put forward the recognition and tolerance of failure, and even encouraged bold attempts and meaningful failures; Lenovo emphasizes continuous accumulation and learning, which is a conservative innovation and a gradual innovation.
Corporate culture is influenced by national culture, elements of the times and corporate mission. Therefore, it is difficult to be copied and imitated in a short time in the competition, which is a major factor in building the core competitiveness of enterprises. Because of this, when building and learning corporate culture, we should not blindly copy it, but learn from it selectively. Nevertheless, from the above analysis of the homogeneity and heterogeneity of Microsoft and Lenovo, we can still draw the following enlightenment:
First, the principle of simplicity is easy to spread and practice. When building corporate culture, the mission, vision or core values of the enterprise can be expressed in a simple and clear sentence, which can give people a deep memory.
Second, the principle of competition, in the era of rapid development of globalization, we must have a strong sense of competition, even if we have become the leader of the industry, we must constantly compete with ourselves and surpass ourselves.
Third, the principle of innovation Only by continuous innovation can enterprises achieve sustainable development, and innovation is the soul of enterprises.
Fourth, the first principle, any industry, only to be the first, can not be merged, have a good financing market, occupy the dominant market and survive for a long time.
Five, people-oriented principle, "people" is the driving force and source of enterprise development, and it is the obligation of enterprises to realize the value of employees and customers. Only by fulfilling this obligation can an enterprise truly become a first-class enterprise with a lasting foundation.