As the end of the year approaches, Brother K was invited by a number of consulting clients to participate in their strategy meetings, and did a lot of in-depth exchanges with those bosses and executives in public or private. I also shared with them some of my predictions for 2024, and most of the entrepreneurs gave feedback that they were very rewarding and agreed. Today, I am also here to communicate with you for your reference.
Prediction 1: Dividends are exhausted, and consumption shifts to the left
In the new year, from a more macro perspective, there is a high probability that there will still be a superposition of uncertainties and a lack of growth momentum. At the beginning of January, the "World Economic Situation and Prospects 2024" report released by the United Nations pointed out that the continued high interest rates, the further escalation of conflicts, and the weakness of the international market will be huge challenges. The report also says that global economic growth will grow from 27% slowed to 24%, which is lower than the pre-pandemic growth rate of 3%.
From the perspective of the domestic economic situation, the fundamentals of the real estate industry have undergone fundamental changes, and the inflection point has been clearly established, so there is no need to talk about it; The Internet industry will also accelerate its elimination, especially in the original "tuyere" fields, which are almost wiped out, such as the previously prosperous metaverse, blockchain, and autonomous driving, but now they are all in a trance, and large factories are cutting meat and exiting, and capital is in a dilemma. At the beginning, some small factories that blindly followed the trend and did not have enough strength were either miserable or had cooled down. The new consumption track is also bleak, with all kinds of emerging Internet celebrity tea restaurants pouring down, and the money-making routine has been reduced to cheating franchises and cutting leeks. In short, in the context of the exhaustion of industry dividends and the saturation of all tracks, it is difficult for all walks of life to live.
Enterprises are not good, income is unstable, and when it is mapped to the public, it is an obvious leftward shift in consumption. To give two related examples: the first is Pinduoduo's financial report in the third quarter of last year, with a large increase in performance, and its market value once surpassed that of Ali, which scared Boss Ma and Dongge out of a cold sweat. Pinduoduo's product and user positioning, everyone knows very well that it can be "alive" in front of the "sick" ** and Jingdong, and its essence is that the consumption is moving left. Another example is the famous "ice cream assassin" Zhong Xuegao, who once reported the news of wage arrears and production stagnation, which is also a side reflection of the leftward shift in consumption.
In the future, if you want to start a business, the correct idea must be to work intensively, practice internal skills, fight for service, do quality, and make a little money. From last year's Zibo barbecue to the current Harbin phenomenon, in fact, it is the concrete embodiment of this logic, barbecue and ice sculpture with their own characteristics, which is "intensive cultivation" from a small place and from a specific level, and takes the lead in providing various conveniences for tourists, which is "fighting service"; Local businesses are not allowed to raise prices and rip off customers, which is to "make a little money". Even cities and ** are still like this, what do enterprises have to say?
Prediction 2: The rise of super individuals
Zhang Yiming once said such a sentence at Byte's internal meeting: "The global trend is that large companies become bigger, and small companies become smaller or disappear." There is no shortage of billion-dollar companies in China that will either lose the competition, delist, become smaller, or choose to become branches of the giants. "Brother K very much agrees with this point of view, and I firmly believe that not only will the miniaturization of enterprises become a trend, but also the trend of super individuals personally.
Whether it is a super individual, a one-person company, or Luo Zhenyu's "U-disk survival", in fact, it means the same thing, that is, to let yourself have some kind of super ability, you can directly provide customers with valuable products or services, without joining any company or organization, you are a company and a team. The reason why Brother K thinks that this model will be popular is mainly based on two considerations:
1. A constantly changing and insecure workplace environment
Compared with the early years, today's workplace environment is visibly grim, with worse and worse stability and more serious involution. According to layoffsAccording to FYI, a company that tracks layoffs at startups and tech companies, there were almost no layoffs in the two years before the pandemic. Starting in the second half of 2022, the number of layoffs has risen sharply, involving almost every industry. As of mid-November 2023, the tech industry has lost more than 240,000 jobs, up 50% from the same period last year, and counting. As many as 1,119 technology companies, including Google, Meta, Amazon and other giants, have laid off employees. The same is true for domestic large and small factories, every time the bigwigs shout "reduce costs and increase efficiency", behind them is a bloody drizzle. The sense of security in the workplace of the workers dropped again and again, and finally they suddenly found that the end of the part-time job was to work alone. With this awareness, all that remains is how to prepare and choose the timing.
2. With the blessing of AI, one person can become a team
With the blessing of new technologies represented by AI, personal productivity is like adding leverage, which can be amplified n times, so that "one person is a company" and "one person is a team" have become a reality from an ideal. Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Midjourney, Runway) can make it easy and efficient for a person to do a job that would otherwise require many different employees to work together. Moreover, the emergence of various new platforms has also made the monetization of personalized products and services full of opportunities and possibilities.
Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old Internet celebrity in the United States, has 1.8 million followers on a social network. Later, he cooperated with a company to train a voice chatbot - Caryn AI through his own more than 2,000 hours of **, and was used to pay for chatting for $1 per minute. In the first week of the beta phase, Caryn AI attracted more than 1,000 paying followers and generated 7US$160,000 (about 500,000 yuan).
In the future, stories like this kind of super individual rise will become more and more common, even if not as magical as in the story, but in the low-cost, more flexible, more diversified light entrepreneurship model, as long as you have a skill, support yourself, and give yourself a sense of security, it will be less and less of a problem.
Prediction 3: 35 years old + middle-aged, return to the workplace
At the age of 35, he has always been regarded as the line of prosperity and decline in the domestic workplace. In the eyes of some enterprises, after this line, workers will automatically change from "human resources" to "labor costs". However, this situation may be greatly improved in the future, and the workplace status and role of 35+ middle-aged people will be set right and re-examined and evaluated.
I don't know if you have noticed, recently, there have been frequent downtime incidents on major factories and platforms, and topics such as "* has collapsed again", "Xianyu has collapsed", "Aliyun disk has collapsed", "DingTalk has collapsed" and other topics have been on the hot search one after another, and Didi downtime has lasted for nearly 12 hours. Laymen look at the excitement, insiders look at the doorway, seeing such news, Brother K's first thought is how many "natural disasters" and "man-made disasters" there are in this matter. Although I don't know the "proportion" of each, years of experience in workplace management have taught me that there must be human negligence behind these incidents.
As early as March last year, Vipshop had a serious downtime accident, resulting in a loss of more than 100 million yuan in the company's performance and affecting more than 8 million customers. In a later announcement, Vipshop admitted that "the accident exposed the lack of disaster recovery emergency plans and risk prevention measures", and also said that "failure to do the work will lead to a failure, and require every employee to reflect on their daily work and examine the loopholes in delivery..."Vipshop's announcement almost clearly tells us that the downtime is caused by human causes, and we can also see that this "human cause" obviously includes problems in work ability, work experience, work attitude, etc.
When I was a technical executive in a listed company, I would definitely arrange experienced, careful and thoughtful veteran employees in similar positions. It's not that Brother K denies young employees, but that older employees are relatively more experienced, more thoughtful, and calmer, and in some positions they are indeed more suitable and reassuring than younger and less senior employees. And these are precisely the workplace advantages of 35+ middle-aged people.
Middle-aged professionals have other advantages that many young people do not have, such as because of the pressure of raising a family, they cannot change jobs willfully like young people, and they need a stable working environment, more loyalty and stability. For another example, after years of social beating and experience, they are no longer covered in thorns, but are more likely to empathize with others, understand empathy, and communicate more easily. And these are exactly what the large enterprises that have passed the period of rapid expansion and entered the period of stable convergence are needed.
Prediction 4: Job seekers are polarized
The Matthew effect is generally used to describe the phenomenon of "the strong will always be strong, and the differentiation will intensify" in social and economic development. Later, Robert Morton, an American researcher in the history of science, extended this concept to a wider field, and believed that any individual, group or region that achieves success and progress in a certain aspect (such as career, money, reputation, status, etc.) will produce a kind of cumulative advantage, and will have more opportunities to achieve greater success and progress. Nowadays, the "Matthew effect" in the job search scene is becoming more and more obvious. I can see this clearly in the private messages of readers.
More than one reader friend sent a private message to Brother K, telling me that his major or resume is in the direction of AI, and now he has offers from several large factories, and the salary conditions given are very good, and asked me how to choose? Someone else told me that he is now in a large factory, and another large factory has doubled the offer to poach him, so should he consider .....On the other hand, there are also many readers who have told Brother K that he has been unemployed for several months, and his job search has been rejected, and he is very stressed, and he hopes that I can give some advice or help.
In Brother K's view, this job search differentiation is likely to intensify in the coming period. Your major, your previous work history, and the skill direction you are good at will largely determine whether you are "the strong will always be strong" or "the weak will be weaker". In the face of this situation, many graduates choose to lie flat, postpone their graduation, and take the postgraduate entrance examination and other coping strategies. Brother K feels that even in the face of job differentiation, he should still deal with it with a positive attitude. For example, the current children's family pressure is generally not large, you can appropriately reduce the salary requirements, go to your favorite field first, occupy the pit, or take advantage of various learning opportunities to constantly strengthen your longboard, so that you can achieve the transformation from ordinary to excellent to excellent, and naturally win more attention and opportunities. Instead of blindly running away for the sake of escaping, the differentiation between you and others will only get bigger and bigger.
Prediction 5: Self-a**, big outbreak
A few days ago, I chatted with a friend who worked as HR in an advertising company, she complained to me that it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit excellent talents, and asked her why, and my friend replied that "many young people with active brains, ideas and creativity have gone to do their own self-improvement, why are they still willing to work for the company".
Brother K also has his own ** company, and he has deep feelings about this matter. Some time ago, at a forum event, I communicated with a very good young man, and I loved talent for a while, and asked him if he would like to come to Brother K's company, but I didn't expect the young man to tell me that he is now doing knowledge self-a**, and he can also have an income of twenty or thirty thousand yuan per month, and he will not consider other opportunities for the time being....
More and more young people are flocking to self-development, not only the external pressure of the sluggish employment environment, but also the internal factors of young people in the new era who are eclectic, pursue individuality, and like to express themselves and show themselves. Some young people who dare to do things have started to do their own work in their freshman year, with energy, ideas, and no baggage, and many of them have done well, and they have become influential KOLs without waiting for graduation, and they have made a lot of money by the way. Although some people have different views on this phenomenon, it will be difficult for the trend of self-outbreak to be transferred by the will of some people.
It is not a good thing for young people to use their profession, expertise and knowledge reserves to continuously output and share their own cognition and experience, not only to help others, but also to create their own IP, form their own brands, and even hire more young people in turn.
In The World of Yesterday, Zweig says, "Only those who have lived through light and darkness, peace and war, prosperity and decay are considered to have truly lived." With this sentence, I encourage everyone, no matter what happens in 2024, take it as the best arrangement, bless everyone.
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