Chapter 508 - You will Enjoy a Better View with Boss Pei, and then You will Understand (1/2)

“Yes… I should analyze the method that Director Lin was talking about.

“This concerns Otto Technologies’ future direction. The cell phone industry is constantly changing. A single misstep could lead to a thousand wrongs. We can’t afford to be shoddy.”

If Chang You was the same person as he had been when he first came to Tengda, he would not have overthought things. He would have handed the task down to his subordinates and made sure that they did what was asked of them.

However, after six months of rigorous training, Chang You felt like he had learned a lot from Boss Pei.

One of the most important lessons was that one had to have a keen eye and a sense of direction!

A famous entrepreneur once talked about the ‘Flying Pig Theory’. That meant that if one wanted to make it as an elite businessman, the most important thing he would have to do was look for the right opening.

The cell phone industry was undoubtedly the right opening in a constantly-evolving Internet age. Yet, not everyone would be able to benefit from finding this opening. Anyone who got distracted could easily be squeezed out of their competitive position, fall to their deaths, and break their bones!

In other words, one’s bottom line was determined by how hard they worked, but how far one went-depending on how keen their eye was.

Chang You had thought that he had a keen eye and that he was one of the top few players in the industry. Yet, after meeting Boss Pei, he realized that he had not seen enough of the world. He had thought too much of himself!

He could only see the opportunities that everyone else could see as well. Although he also had a good chance of succeeding, the competition was extremely stiff. He just had to lag behind slightly to lose everything. On the other hand, Boss Pei could see opportunities that no one else could. Such opportunities were rare and valuable. All he had to do was keep a firm grip on the opportunity; he did not need to panic because no one else was competing. Thus, after Otto E1 succeeded, Chang You became sure of one thing. Since Boss Pei had so much foresight and had such unique taste, Chang You had to give up his own view of the market and follow whatever Boss Pei instructed him to do.

If he could win while lying down, why would he choose to work his ass off to compete with the other manufacturers?

Still, the only problem was that geniuses were often strange.

Boss Pei was strange in a way that he enjoyed making his employees guess what was in his mind. It was almost as if he was training his employees to think independently and analyze every situation.

Thus, not everyone could understand Boss Pei’s puzzles, and not everyone could stand out among all the employees and leave a deep impression in Boss Pei’s mind.

It was a good thing that Director Lin had imparted to him the relevant skills to analyze Boss Pei.

Chang You frowned as he fell into deep thought.

“Director Lin once said that the way to start analyzing a problem is to begin from the most unreasonable point. “The most unreasonable point in this situation is that Boss Pei is overkilling. It would clearly be most appropriate for Fish-Catching Take-Out to work on the fitness application. Why did he pass it to us?” Chang You opened the document that Guo Licheng provided on his computer. The document was quite simple; it only contained a few sentences.

If Chang You was to rate this man based on the standards expected of product managers, Guo Licheng would get even fewer than three points.

What’s more, that would be out of a hundred points.

Yet, Chang You could not blame Guo Licheng. He was a fitness trainer to begin with. How would he know anything about the standards expected of product managers? Chang You studied the few sentences very closely. “This Guo Licheng is the man in charge of the shared gym, but he has very simple requests. “That makes sense, I think. After all, he’s new, and he doesn’t understand Boss Pei’s mindset very well. There’s still room for him to be trained.

“If Boss Pei simply wanted these requirements to be met, he could easily have engaged Fish-Catching Take-Out to develop the application.

“What’s more, these requests are obviously too sweeping. Someone should have edited and perfected the interface and designed all the functions from scratch before handing the task down to the programmers.

mers.

“Design…

“Did Boss Pei pick us because of our design skills? Yes, that’s possible. Our product managers are far better at designing than the employees of Fish-Catching Take-Out.

“In other words, Boss Pei has more hidden requirements for the application. Did he know that Fish-Catching Take-Out would not have fulfilled those requirements, and so he handed the task to us instead?

“Yes, that makes much more sense!

“What kind of hidden requests could there be…?”

Chang You thought that he had achieved a breakthrough. Thus, he stood up and started pacing

“All of those requests are enough for a functional application for the gym.

“If Boss Pei wants more, that means…

“The gym is only the beginning. Is Boss Pei’s real goal to break the boundaries of the fitness industry?

“Is that why he let us develop the application? Are we to fill in the gaps in this in-charge’s plans for the gym? Are we to use our knowledge of the Internet to come up with a holistic plan for this application?

“Yes, that must be it!

“But… if Boss Pei wants the cell phone business to collaborate with the fitness application, why wouldn’t he let us install the application as one of the bundled applications in the cell phones?”

Chang You pondered for a moment and finally broke through the final mental barrier. He looked like he had just been enlightened.

“I understand now. Boss Pei thinks that the application would contain a lot of content and that it would be extremely difficult to design it. Thus, he’s worried about the quality. “If we push the application out as a bundled application, the figures would only look good on paper. However, we would fail to tell how the application is really being received, and the misunderstanding would affect our follow-up work.

“At the same time, if the application’s quality is bad, Otto Technologies’ brand would be affected as well.

“So why isn’t Boss Pei allowing us to install our fellow subsidiary’s application in Otto’s cell phone?

“Boss Pei did not say ‘don’t install’, but ‘don’t make it a bundled application’. He wanted the application to be put through the full test in the market, so that every user of the Otto cell phones would install the application voluntarily and willingly!”

Chang You was done solving Boss Pei’s riddle.

He revised his entire thought process and realized that everything had come naturally to him. The plan perfectly coincided with all the benefits. He now had answers for everything that he had found unreasonable earlier.

It was no wonder that everyone loved cracking Boss Pei’s riddles.

Once they successfully solved the riddle, they would feel an immense sense of achievement and satisfaction!