CHAPTER 6Organization
Managers have the incentives to push the company to set more and more explicit rules and processes. This push is like gravity, which keeps pulling the organization towards more complexity. During this process, we must actively resist the gravity, and keep stretching the organization.
—Liang Rubo, cofounder of ByteDance and CEO since 2021
BYTEDANCE'S NEW CEO, LIANG Rubo, was in a discussion with a manager in the R&D team, who said that a really promising engineer had been poached by another company for twice the salary.
“If you really think this person is promising and valuable,” Liang asked, “why did you not match the incentives, instead letting a competitor take him away?”
It turned out, the manager had tried, but in the HR system the maximum salary he could secure was not enough to match the competitor's offer.
As Zhang Yiming decided to free himself from the day-to-day operations of ByteDance to focus on long-term strategic decisions, including international markets, cofounder Liang Rubo took over. Liang, who was Zhang's university classmate, now had to lead the 100,000-people organization. He needed to deal with challenges like this. On the surface, it is a people-related issue. But fundamentally it's an organizational issue.
Liang was taken aback by this episode. The manager had been with the company for a number of years, yet he was not able to act in the best interest of the company because of the system's limitations.
Liang and Zhang, both avid ...
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