The original idea was to force overtime to work unscrupulously, and Bill Gates finally figured out in his later years: Shouldn’t treat employees like that

You can be the best technology company without working overtime.

By Xing Shubo

The employees are so “lazy” and Microsoft is so rich and can lead innovation. This is unreasonable!

【1】

In 2008, Zhang Yiming served as the manager of Kuxun, with 40 employees under his hand, which made him feel that he was in a management bottleneck. So he crossed mountains and rivers and became a Microsoft employee.

Zhang Yiming originally intended to learn the management of large companies, but chose to leave after only half a year. Speaking of his time at Microsoft, he used two words to describe it: boring.

“Half-day work, half-day reading, work without many challenges.” Zhang Yiming said.

It’s not just Zhang Yiming who thinks that Microsoft’s work is too easy and boring.

A friend once said, “The group that just joined Microsoft is too idle. Basically, the group leader rarely sees it. Every once in a while, he talks about skiing and other entertainment.”

Later, the friend transferred to another group because he thought the job was too idle and affected his personal career development. And the status of another busy working group is like this: 10 mornings and 5 nights every day, a seven-hour work day, and the highest local hourly wage.

▲The picture comes from the Internet

In the IT circle, Microsoft, Intel, and EMC are known as the “three major nursing homes”, where work is idle and employees are “lazy”.

In 2020, Microsoft Japan announced that the four-day shift will have three days off, and the collective start “Three Rest System” .This week, Microsoft’s LinkedIn announced that all employees are paid Take a week off, It is not a statutory holiday, nor is it to circumvent labor supervision, but just to be happy.

Microsoft also allows some employees to work freely at home on a regular basis, not more than 50% of the working time per week. If the manager approves, you can even work remotely permanently. Microsoft will pay for home office expenses for employees who work remotely permanently. It’s okay to work at home for a long time and want to go back to the office. Microsoft has temporary office space available at any time.

▲Microsoft’s hardware laboratory in Redmond, Washington, USA, allows working from home

However, the lazy Microsoft has created amazing performance.

Microsoft’s current market capitalization is US$1.93 trillion, which is equivalent to three Alibaba (US$661.8 billion) and five byte beats (US$400 billion). With another 5% rise, the technology giant may join Apple’s ranks and join the $2 trillion market capitalization club.

In fact, on February 11, 2020, Microsoft once surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

Microsoft has the highest market share of traditional operating systems and office software, both at over 97%; its innovative business cloud computing, AR business and game business also continue to lead.

In terms of cloud computing, 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft’s Microsoft Azure intelligent cloud service.

In terms of AR, Microsoft received a $22 billion order at the beginning of this month. The IDC report shows that the scale of global AR market-related expenditures will reach a compound annual growth rate of 54% during the five-year forecast period from 2020 to 2024, exceeding US$70 billion.

In terms of games, Microsoft is also one of the world’s three major console game brands, and its Xbox console market share is close to one-third, reaching 26%; PC games are even the only one.

In March 2020, Microsoft acquired Zenimax Media, the parent company of the well-known gaming giant B. Company B has many world-renowned 3A masterpieces such as “The Elder Scrolls”, “Radiation”, and “Humiliation”, which have a huge influence in the game industry. The acquisition of Microsoft caused industry turmoil, and even attracted a joint review by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Union.

▲Microsoft exclusive game

This leads to a question: Why is Microsoft so lazy, so successful and competitive? Can still lead innovation?

【2】

Scolding employees for throwing their mobile phones and recording their license plates to prevent leaving early, Microsoft has not always been a “good man” in corporate governance.

In the early stage of entrepreneurship, Microsoft was not friendly to employees. Employees not only need high-intensity work, but also face the dilemma of being insulted by their personality anytime and anywhere; in the mid-term growth stage, Microsoft has encountered many antitrust investigations, failed to enter the Internet, and high performance pressure, which has caused its requirements for employees to become more severe; In the later stage of business transformation, in addition to shooting negative advertisements for competitors, Microsoft also smashed its employees’ mobile phones on the hot search list.

In an interview on BBC’s “Desert Island Records” program, Bill Gates admitted that in the early days of Microsoft’s founding, I am “very enthusiastic about work”, which is an unfortunate thing for my colleagues.

Microsoft was just established in 1975, and the company is still in its infancy, with only a few employees.

In order to improve efficiency, Bill Gates not only turned himself upside down day and night, lived in the company, did not change his clothes for a few weeks, but also imposed his almost crazy work habits on his employees. For a while, Bill Gates even relied on recording employee license plates to control employees’ working hours and prevent them from arriving late and leaving early.

“I know everyone’s license plate, so just look at the parking lot, you can know the employee’s commuting time.” Bill Gates said.

▲It is mentioned in the documentary “Decoding Bill Gates” that although he is very busy, he still has two major interests in his spare time: road racing and watching striptease.

Bill Gates is not a human being at work, but in his opinion, one of his clients is even more cruel and inhumane, even workaholics can’t stand it. That person was the famous Apple founder Jobs.

At that time, Apple 2 needed a set of office software. Bill Gates got up early to write the earliest Office software such as Word and Excel for him, but he was often urged by Jobs.

Gates’ evaluation of Jobs is “very enthusiastic about work” and “strictly demanding of me.”

When workaholics encounter people who work hard for their lives, especially when both of them are founders of technology companies, their employees suffer.

According to “Silicon Valley Legend”, Jobs had a grumpy attitude toward employees in the early days, and he also pitted some stocks of co-founder Woznick.

Bill Gates participates in the product review board, swearing for pleasure, and employees even use the number of times he says “fxxk” as a basis for evaluating whether his product design can pass smoothly.

Microsoft engineer Polski wrote about Bill Gates in his blog:

“He didn’t really want to review your design, he just wanted to make sure that you have control over it. According to his usual standards, he will ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can scold you. Unprepared. If you can answer the hardest question he asked, what will happen next? No one really knows. Because no one has ever done this.”

Bill Gates scolds people equally, not only scolding employees, but also co-founder Steve Ballmer. In the multiple work emails exposed by the media, the dialogue between Bill Gates and Ballmer can be described as “violent speech.”

Under the influence of curse culture, especially after Ballmer took over as Microsoft CEO, he also became hysterical.

In Seattle in September 2009, it was dry and dry. Microsoft is experiencing failure to replace Windows Vista, Windows Mobile is suppressed by Google and Apple’s mobile operating systems, and even music players such as Zune cannot sell iPods. What’s more disturbing is that Microsoft, who is jealous of Apple’s iPhone, released two generations of multimedia mobile phones Kin1 and Kin2 within a year, and sold a total of exaggerated…500 units in the life cycle.

On September 14 of that year, Ballmer smashed an employee’s mobile phone at an internal Microsoft meeting.

At that time, Ballmer had just entered the venue, he was alive and kicking as before. But when he saw someone taking pictures with an iPhone, Ballmer rushed to grab the iPhone, laughed at it, and threw it on the ground, trampling it with his feet.

Ballmer has also thrown chairs at employees, and even yelled at Google because an executive switched to Google: “I want to bury Google CEO Eric Schmidt alive! I want to eliminate Google!”

The irritable culture has also continued into the professional habits of Microsoft employees, so that during the upgrade of Microsoft’s Windows 10 Dev Build 21313, the engineer wrote on the update page: “Configuring update, please don’t turn off the computer”.

Today, when Bill Gates has become a benevolent old man, he has begun to reflect on his relationship with employees:

“I must remind myself that my standards can no longer be used to require employees to work hard.”

【3】

The predecessors planted trees, and the descendants took the shade. Microsoft’s 50-year history, from the disaster of corporate governance to the current “professional pensioners”, is not so much that Microsoft actively chooses to seek benefits for employees, but it is actually forced.

According to the research of historian Thomas McGraw, 4227 American companies merged into 257 from 1897 to 1904. By 1904, about 318 trusts controlled two-fifths of the nation’s manufacturing assets. Since then, the United States has experienced three waves of anti-monopoly, and each anti-monopoly has promoted the improvement of employee welfare and the level of corporate governance, and at the same time promoted new technological progress.

In the first wave of anti-monopoly in 1890, the United States promulgated the “Sherman Antitrust Act.” A batch of trusts such as Rockefeller and the Morgan family were split up. New companies such as Ford and Chevrolet were able to develop at the time. “Wait for the implementation of the system.

In the second wave of antitrust in 1970, telecommunications giants such as IBM and AT&T were punished and almost split up. The two companies have respectively released monopoly technology to the market and corrected vicious competition and bundling sales. Open source technology has enabled companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard to develop. The telecommunications industry has been criticized for improving overtime and overwork. The flat management and flexible working system have spread with the development of Silicon Valley.

In 1998, the Dragon Knight Microsoft grew into a dragon and took advantage of the operating system’s monopoly to infiltrate the browser market. It was not until the release of Google’s Chrome browser in 2008 that the ten-year hegemony of IE browser was ended. It is precisely this decade that the early Internet advantages of the United States have been exhausted, Internet companies such as China, India, and South Korea have developed greatly, and Facebook and Amazon have begun to rise.

Microsoft, which has lost its monopoly advantage, found that the original method of squeezing employees to increase the scale of monopoly benefits is no longer applicable. Internet companies such as Facebook, which are relatively loosely managed, are scrambling for their own talents. The method is simple and rude: higher salary, lower working hours, more flexible employment system.

Silicon Valley has entered a virtuous circle in employee benefits: talents are limited, but business expansion is unlimited. In order to obtain talents, companies have begun to spare no effort to improve employee benefits.

For example, Google built a special bicycle track for employees; Facebook expanded maternity leave, and male employees also had a four-month vacation; Apple provided female employees with up to 20,000 US dollars for freezing eggs.

Microsoft has nothing to do with it except being rich, so in the face of competition for employee benefits of major Internet companies, Microsoft used its “money capability” to beat the market dream rate of Silicon Valley technology companies.

In the final analysis, Microsoft’s improvement of employee benefits and corporate governance is the result of a combination of internal and external factors.

On the one hand, Microsoft’s traditional business is shackled by anti-monopoly gloves, and it is difficult to make breakthroughs. It will be meaningless to continue to squeeze employees; at the same time, Microsoft’s new business growth points are in cloud computing, AR, games and other innovative fields to improve efficiency and development Creativity can increase productivity more than crowded tactics and overtime madness.

On the other hand, in the past ten years, traditional technology companies have encountered the impact of new Internet companies. Microsoft needs to use employee benefits to recruit talents; the problem of declining birthrates in developed markets such as Europe, America and Japan is serious, and there is no demographic dividend and engineer dividend, which objectively improves employees. The bargaining chip in the game with the enterprise, because no one is available.

In addition, due to the harsh US “Labor Law” and “Employment Law” and other laws, large companies such as Microsoft are facing huge compensation in labor lawsuits. Countless human rights lawyers use labor disputes to seek sky-high labor compensation; the labor union system is deeply entrenched in the United States, and labor unions even provide free legal aid to laborers in order to obtain mediation fees from companies.

【4】

Both Silicon Valley companies and domestic companies are now inevitably falling into the disease of large companies:

The meaningless but endless meetings and PPT summaries, seemingly strict management but reducing the efficiency of the level of approval, the employees are working overtime on the surface, but under the pressure, people are overwhelmed with things, likes to go back and forth.

This disease is incurable, making the company bloated and difficult to adapt to market changes. Silicon Valley has invented various management tools such as KPI (Key Performance Indicators), OKR (Objectives and Key Results Method), agile development, garage planning, etc., but the results have been minimal.

Microsoft and IBM are also the same. When the scale reached a certain level, large company diseases occurred. Each department fought independently. The corporate politics obscured the voice of customers and the response was no longer agile. Compared with emerging companies, the gap is visible to the naked eye.

IBM’s solution is to lay off employees and abolish the business, control the company’s scale to a certain range, reduce the level, and make the business more flexible. Microsoft chose to face it directly. Around 2011, the current CEO Nadella started reforms from the technical level with the least resistance, and finally carried out a comprehensive reform of corporate culture and corporate governance.

The most successful part of Microsoft under Nadella was breaking down departmental barriers and breaking down small circles, but did not vote against the original departmental system.

According to Coase’s theory, when the organization is large enough, there is essentially an “enterprise boundary” between each department. This is a sociological phenomenon that actually exists, and it does not depend on human will.

Microsoft actually acquiesced to the establishment of departmental barriers and factions, because it is impossible to eliminate them. Even Bill Gates said, “The company has grown to a certain scale, and I have to relax this standard.”

Microsoft’s strategy is “the company serves employees to grow”: if an engineer wants to be cool, then create conditions to make him cool; find people by department is too cumbersome, then find people according to specific functions, and be responsible for their own business without being responsible for the department. The leader is responsible.

In fact, Microsoft did not use the traditional departmental hierarchical system, but empowered the employees at the bottom. On the contrary, the goal is easier to achieve and efficiency is improved at the company level.

For a startup company, employees are like a tension spring, and the company needs them to go all out to win the market; for a large company, if it treats employees as a spring like a startup company, it will not rebound if it is too full. Up.

For example, after the implementation of Microsoft Japan’s “four holidays and three holidays” system, Microsoft said its labor productivity has increased by 39.9% compared with last year. Between extending labor hours and improving production efficiency, Microsoft chose the latter.

From Microsoft’s experience, Microsoft employees under Ballmer did not work less overtime, but the company’s performance did not grow much; Microsoft employees under Nadella were very happy, but it did not prevent Microsoft’s market value from approaching two trillion US dollars.

Microsoft summarizes the experience of the corporate governance system into three:

First, improving employee welfare can promote productivity development, but not the other way around; especially in high-tech fields and creative industries, efficiency is more important than simply overtime;

Second, the disease of large companies cannot be eliminated, but it can be adapted;

Third, the level of corporate governance depends on the top level. Don’t expect the middle and bottom levels. They are not obligated to contribute to the company’s culture. The ultimate decision makers who decide whether employees work overtime or not are still the founders and senior management team.

But it is undeniable that, to this day, there are still companies and even super large companies that have not realized this.

Recently, Amazon, which is known for its squeezing of employees, still seems to want to continue the employment system of the Rockefeller era 100 years ago. It was strongly resisted by its employees. 30,000 employees went on strike. Amazon in Europe even faced a shutdown.

In addition to Amazon’s e-commerce business, although Amazon’s cloud computing market share currently ranks first in the world, its share continues to decline, from 45% in April last year to 31% in March this year. Under pressure, Bezos announced that he would step down as CEO in the third quarter of this year.

In contrast, Microsoft, ranked second in cloud computing, has a market share that has increased from 7% to 20%, and new businesses such as AR and games have continued to grow. It has also been rated as one of the 25 companies with the highest employee happiness in the world.

Two companies created by different corporate governance cultures can have the last laugh. Let time prove it.

【Reference Materials】

1. “Bill Gates revealed that he was a workaholic in the early stage of his business, recording license plates and checking employee attendance” China News Weekly

2. “Amazon employees organize an online strike next week” Sina Technology

3. Chief Financial Observer of “How the United States Anti-monopoly”

4. “Microsoft’s official announcement is that the B game is exclusive to Xbox! PC players may become the biggest winners in the future” Tencent.com

5. “Gates said the tech executives who testified before Congress reminded him of his own experience: “I bless them”” Squawk Box

6. “Entrance Controversy: The History and Future of Browsers” Tiger Sniff

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