At the annual all-staff meeting on January 30, 2024, Liang Rubo, CEO of ByteDance, announced the company's annual keyword as "continuous innovation, beyond ordinary gravity", and listed enhancing crisis awareness as an annual priority. He stressed that the biggest challenge for the company is to avoid falling into mediocrity and not being able to achieve new breakthroughs.
From 2019 to 2021, ByteDance experienced rapid growth, with the number of employees surging from more than 10,000 to 100,000. However, Liang also admits that many people have reported that bytes have already had problems common to large companies. Using rockets as an example, he pointed out that rockets must reach a certain speed to get rid of the earth's gravity, otherwise they will fall, and similarly, the development of the company needs to reach a certain speed to get rid of the shackles of mediocrity.
Therefore,Liang stressed the importance of breaking complacency, raising standards, maintaining a sense of innovation and crisis, and increasing differentiation in incentives to attract top talent, so as to achieve the goal of "gravity beyond the ordinary".
The biggest crisis in the organization is mediocrity
In the past few years, ByteDance's talent has grown rapidly, even attracting the attention of Tencent and Alibaba, which has changed the landscape of the Internet industry.
At ByteDance's plenary session, Liang revealed the declining organizational efficiency he had noticed, including inefficiency, sluggishness, and lower quality standards. As an example, he illustrates that a simple internal system requirement that was initially expected to take 1,000 man-days to complete, but upon further investigation, it was found that it only took one person 15 days to complete.
Liang Rubo emphasized that this does not mean that employees do not work hard, but in an inefficient organization, employees may feel more exhausted because even if they put in great effort, they may not be able to achieve the desired results. He also talked about the sluggishness of the organization and the reduced sensitivity to opportunities, as well as the lowering of standards. He mentioned that while the company has always emphasized that documents should be concise, accurate, and easy to understand, in reality, many of them are lengthy and obscure.
Liang admits that he is not surprised that the company's efficiency is 30% or even 50% lower than that of other excellent teams, but he points outThis attitude in itself unnerved him, as it could mean that his standards were lowering.
Dr. Luo Rentong, an expert in the application and practice of the digital economy, pointed out that with the rapid development of ByteDance, the company's scale is also rapidly expanding, which inevitably leads to some common management problems of large companies. Like other large Internet companies such as Tencent and Alibaba, there are also ineffective reports and frequent meetings, which have become hidden obstacles to the company's further development.
In November 2021, the transfer of power to ByteDance was completed, and Liang Rubo succeeded Zhang Yiming, and a major adjustment of the organizational structure was made. Liang Rubo divided ByteDance into six business segments, including Douyin, Dali Education, Feishu, Volcano Engine, Chaoxi Lightyear and TikTok.
Since July 2022,He put forward the organizational goal of "fattening and thinning", aiming to improve management efficiency and ensure the flexibility and effectiveness of management. To this end, he adopted a strategy of controlling the growth rate of the organization and encouraging each business to flexibly adjust its OKRs.
To address these issues, Liang called for breaking complacency, raising standards, and building an efficient organizational structure to help ByteDance "escape the gravitational pull of melocrity."
Strive to retain and attract top talent
In stepping down as CEO, Zhang Yiming pointed out that as the complexity and scale of the business and organization increases, the CEO as the core tends to become passive. He mentioned that CEOs need to listen to a lot of reports and summaries every day, and make many approvals and decisions, which can cause them to get stuck in an internal perspective and slow down the speed of knowledge updating.
Zhang Yiming believes that an excellent organization should be composed of a large number of talents and"Plenty of context, little control"This ensures that transaction costs within the organization are minimized, while making high-quality decisions and unleashing more innovation.
At the meeting, Liang also mentioned that the average level and excellent level of the organization will directly affect the company's attraction to excellent talents. He said that good people choose jobs that are challenging, have the potential for high returns, and work environments that inspire each other. Therefore, ByteDance needs to increase differentiation in the incentive mechanism and make every effort to retain and attract excellent talents. When talent density increases, so does the efficiency and standards of the organization.
At the end of the all-hands meeting, Liang Rubo shared ByteDance's three goals for 2024. The first is at the level of organizational management and culture, "enhancing the sense of crisis, always maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit, and escaping the gravity of mediocrity". Second, we need to continue to increase the trust of society. Finally, it is to continue to focus on a few important things in the business. This is Liang Rubo's concept of "always starting a business" once again.
Shortly after taking over as ByteDance's CEO in June 2022, Liang Rubo adjusted ByteDance's internal culture "Byte Fan", elevating the status of "always entrepreneurial" from fifth to first. This is because ByteDance has been around for 10 years and has become a large company with more than 100,000 employees. Liang Rubo mentioned in the internal letter that as the scale of the organization increases, the negative scale effect is also increasing, and it is necessary to avoid over-reliance on resources to prevent the company from having a "large company disease".
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Luo Rentong, an expert in the application and practice of digital economy, gave a lecture
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