Everyone knows and advises: leaders must closely monitor employees to grasp the situation.
But it is easy to say, difficult to do. A company of a few dozen people, or even 1-200, is ok to be close, greet, and even visit the employees' homes. But if the company has thousands, or even tens of thousands of employees? "Populist" leaders can still follow the old way, asking and visiting. But in reality, at best, they can only contact about 10% of the employees near them, and this group usually has some authority or has been around for a long time, so they often mistake it for "working people" who also have the same thoughts, which can lead to wrong decisions. So in the end, they often rely on the official reporting system according to the vertical industry to grasp the situation. (And if you force employees to make reports, as Mr. Hung Rau revealed in the book "Dek Knows Anything Also Progress", expect them to report "falsely" to deal with it.
In the book “Secrets of software success” by Detlev J. Hoch, there is a discussion about how to “feel” a large company in parallel with the reporting system and gives an example of an American CEO using technology, such as email (and now social networks) to maintain personal communication with 4000 employees. We also apply some of those techniques until now.
But when practicing qigong with Master Kao, and being shown how to understand the opponent's entire body by just touching one point, to strike at the right place, I suddenly had the idea that I could also apply the same technique to "understand" the company. That is, not needing to communicate too much, but needing to be at the right place.
At the Fsoft office in the HITC building in the 2000s, Phuong – Hiep Quan was such a “spot”. A shop serving instant noodles, chess and cards… purely from the sidewalks of Hanoi, right in the most modern office at that time. It turned out to be a point of information attraction, reflecting quite fully the mood of the company. Through that, if the leaders know how to exploit it, they can really get to know it deeply.
The interview of Nguyen Quoc Nguyen, a human resources employee of the two female owners, whose names were Phuong and Hiep, published in Cucumber newspaper in April 2005, clearly demonstrated that "close-knit" spirit. The introduction said "it is a place for many brothers to eat, drink, and chat, so it can be said that Phuong and Hiep know almost everything about Fsoft, without being assigned any tasks." In the interview of less than 200 words, we can have a lot of information about mysterious characters such as Mai Anh, HanhHM, Hoang Son and Hong Son, a virtual Phuong Hiep space, the brothers on the 1st floor (at that time Hitachi ODC) often escaped here to relax, the accident for a girl on the 5th floor (a trade representative of Taiwan)...
The interview was published in English. I didn't know we were so globalized back then.
(This article is reposted from the Facebook of Mr. Nguyen Thanh Nam - Author of "Know nothing, still go forward")