Prevent Matters before They Happen,and Prepare for Disasters before They Occur

At the morning meeting of all management cadres on Sept 16, 2022, Mr. Wang explained the management idea of “Prevent matters before they happen, and prepare for disasters before they occur”.

Lao Tzu said, "To do things before things happen, to cure things before things go wrong", which means to prevent and deal with matters before they happen, and to prepare for disasters before they occur. In this passage, Lao Tzu expounded on the principle of planning ahead and taking precautions in advance. The same is true for the internal management of an enterprise. The management work should be done ahead, and the summary of the previous work should provide direction for future improvement and provide services for current actions and practices.

Summarizing the past is preparing for the future

According to the needs of operation, the company organizes many meetings, such as daily prenatal analysis meeting and postpartum summary meeting; weekly regular manager meeting, third-rate meeting and department regular meeting; monthly operation analysis meeting, and annual strategy meeting and administrative expansion meetings, etc. Different meetings have different purposes. Some meetings are to achieve effective communication through brainstorming, some are to convey relevant information from superiors or other departments, some are for supervision and inspection, and some are for arrangement tasks or coordination of resources, some meetings are to expand thinking and develop ideas, etc. In most meetings, the presenter summarizes the past through charts such as line charts, column charts, pie charts, fishbone charts, etc. For management activities, summary is the identification of past work implementation results, the review and analysis of previous work, and the rational understanding of past work practices. If the summary cannot provide direction for future work, cannot draw nutrition and lessons from historical experience, and is not a preparation for current or future practical activities, then no amount of graphic analysis, no amount of summary reports, no amount of conference activities are substantive meaning.   

The future is a continuation of the past

The Bible says "there is nothing new under the sun". It means that if the lessons of history are not learned, what is happening now will happen in the future. During this time, I am reviewing the biography of Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger is the golden partner of Warren Buffett, the most important partner of Buffett, and some people call him "the man behind Buffett". Charlie Munger is a man who takes research failure to the extreme and succeeds from it. Charlie Munger has been studying failure cases all his life. The reason why he analyzes failure cases is because he wants to learn from other people's failure cases and avoid going the same way as others' failures. That is the reason why he likes a farmer's proverb "I just want to know where I will die in the future, so I will not go there". Summarizing the past, on the one hand, is to accumulate successful experience, on the other hand, we must analyze the problems and failure cases that occurred in the past, find the root cause of the problem, and formulate corresponding improvement or prevention mechanisms. That is what I often tell you: what happened in the past? Why does it happen? How to prevent it? The ancients said: People who are not saints and sages, who can have no faults. In daily management activities, it is difficult for us to avoid problems of one kind or another, but we must do "no anger and no two faults", that is, we must not allow similar problems to occur repeatedly, and we must not fall in the same place for the second time. In order to achieve "no two faults", we must find patterns in failures. For example, the inspection standards of a strategic customer have not changed, the inspectors have not changed, and the production and quality management personnel have not changed. Why does the inspection result still occur? This shows that we have not carefully summed up the rules and learned lessons. Everything in the world has its own law of operation, such as the moon waxes and wanes, and the seasons alternate. Only by finding out the rules can we work while we learn and learn while we work, apply the rules, and prepare for future management activities.

Be proactive and shape the future

Most of the glasses manufacturing industry is an order-based production model. Customer requirements such as order quantity, raw material materials, delivery cycle, product unit price, and quality standards are relatively determined. The production conditions such as factory capacity, raw material supply, staffing, and the number of equipment are also relatively fixed. If we combine profitability goals, customer requirements, and internal production conditions, we can predict what will happen in the future. For example, monthly output, raw material cost, auxiliary material cost, required working hours, wage cost can be estimated. It is also possible to estimate which positions will require overtime, which positions will require work breaks, and how much each employee will receive. Instead of waiting until the end of the month due to insufficient output, the employees' income is low, and the production manager runs up and down to find the human resources department and the finance department to apply for a salary guarantee. European strategist Clausewitz said "offense is the best defense". In the daily management work, we cannot go with the flow, cannot follow the trend, and cannot wait for the rabbit. We must turn passive into active, actively find ways, and effectively integrate resources, so as to reflect the value and significance of management. Among the eight dimensions of the company's operation, "two dimensions" are: operation informatization and information transparency. It can be said that our company's operational information is relatively transparent, and various operational or management indicators have also been incorporated into the early warning system. It is hoped that the person in charge of each module will take action, take measures, and improve based on the information provided by the company. Trends are moved in a positive direction through positive actions, results are better through team effort, and goals are achieved through changes in approach. At the same time, we must also form a mechanism to make the work continuous.

If the summary cannot provide direction for future work, cannot draw nutrition and lessons from historical experience, and is not a preparation for current or future practical activities, then no amount of graphic analysis, no amount of summary reports, no amount of conference activities are substantive meaning. Only by finding out the rules in past problems can we work while we learn and learn while we work, apply the rules, and prepare for future management activities. At the same time, we also need to find countermeasures and methods, make the trend develop in a good direction through positive actions, make the results better through team efforts, achieve goals through changes in methods, and form a mechanism to allow the work to have continuity and persistence.