Byte Jump moved into AVIC Plaza in 2016, and it didn't have the temperament of a big company until it moved into this Zhouzheng building. On the day of the new office, the company released an intriguing all-staff letter, in which it talked about some experience:

The office should be comfortable, but avoid luxury.

This letter spent a lot of ink describing Starbucks Corp's headquarters: very ordinary, beautifully decorated and comfortable, but not luxurious and exquisite. In Starbucks Corp's perspective, if you design and build a headquarters with too complete and comfortable functions, it will be easy to isolate from the outside world and "internal perspective".

This experience has had an extremely profound impact on the company-from then onByte jumps into a company without headquarters.Or from the beginning, Byte Jump never thought of setting up a "physical headquarters".

If you ask some old byte people, they can only answer the byte-beating "spiritual headquarters"-the single-floor area of 5000 square meters of AVIC Plaza. With the rapid rise of the company, its square figure appears in the media more and more frequently, so much so that mapping software acquiesce that this is the byte-beating "headquarters".

But in fact, if someone searches for the word "byte jump" on mapping software, Beijing alone has nearly 20 different options. AVIC Plaza, including the later Fang Heng Fashion Center, is not a byte-beating headquarters.

Byte Jump has 110000 employees from 117 countries and regions. Stack their passports one by one, which is about 30 stories high. Its business covers 150 countries and regions, and every month, 1.9 billion users from different cultures, skin colors and native languages have a wide variety of connections with the huge byte-bouncing product matrix.

The company defines its mission as "Inspire Creativity, Enrich Life", which means that the eight words will have to be translated into dozens of other languages if they are to be understood by all employees.

A byte executive once explained the concept of "no headquarters": "We don't want our employees to be out of touch with society, not to make it into a small world, but to have sex with society." "

Byte Jump has more than 100 offices all over the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and many cities.

For such a company called a starfish organization, they need to pay close attention to what users are thinking and what is happening in the industry. Whether it is an avant-garde headquarters building with luxurious decoration, or a power center hidden deep in the headquarters building to give orders, it is an invisible burden.

If you manage 110000 people, where else can you be if you are not at headquarters?

During last year's epidemic, Beijing byte beat CEO Zhang Nan (Kelly) shared an article called "A Day at work from Home". A screenshot of the flying book calendar clearly shows whether Zhang Nan is busy or free at a certain time. In Feishu, every employee can search the Flying Book calendar to see the busy and idle status of the executive calendar bounced by bytes such as Zhang Nan, Zhang Lidong and Liang Rubo.

After the latest organizational restructuring, the business lines reported to Zhang Nan include Douyin, Jinri Toutiao, watermelon video, search and other businesses. If the person in charge of each business line needs to report to Zhang Nan face to face, or if every business adjustment needs to be discussed in a meeting, then the daily consumption of bottled water and disposable paper cups in this conference room will be a daunting number.

During the Spring Festival in 2020, under the premise of working from home, Zhang Nan and the Douyin team completed a series of work in just 36 hours, including contacting film companies, negotiating prices, signing contracts, research and development of industry special pages, stress testing, and so on. contributed to the "invite people all over the country to see" embarrassing Mom ".

In the second Spring Festival, byte beat completed the 2 billion Spring Festival Gala red envelope project within 27 days under the condition of being ordered in the face of danger. In the past, projects of this size had to be prepared for at least 4-5 months.

In the article, Zhang Nan wrote: in this process, Director Xu Zheng is also very concerned about our progress, constantly sending messages, such a big thingIt is amazing to think that I did not meet with the director offline and reached consensus and mutual trust completely through online tools.

Byte Jump has always been a company that is good at learning from others. For example, the organizational structure refers to Facebook Inc, the saying of eternal Day1 comes from Amazon.Com Inc, and the bimonthly meeting inherits from Alphabet Inc-CL C.

In byte, all management and business issues across departments are now unified at the bimonthly meeting.However, bimonthly is sometimes a stressful thing: on the one hand, it reduces the half-year summary of ordinary companies to two months; on the other hand, with the rapid expansion of the company's staff, the scale of bimonthly meetings is growing day by day.

This is also one of the opportunities for the birth of Flying Books-bytes realize that they need a new tool that adapts to their own working methods, rather than adapting themselves to existing tools. At the same time, Fei Shu has derived a new working method.

The idea of Flying Book is to let the document record and present the information, and replace the communication in the conference room with the comments of the document. At the same time, both sides of the communication are limited to the computer screen, so that the topic will not be drawn too far. This kind of "document-based communication" becomes internal to the byte jump."Flying Reader"。

At first, the Flying Book team was a little nervous about the exploration, and Flying Book CEO Xie Xin experimented directly at the bimonthly meeting of executives:In the first half of the meeting, the reporter first posted the flying book document recording the information to the group, and the participants could put forward questions or suggestions through comments while reading silently; in the second half, the reporter focused on answering the questions raised by the comments. and record the to-do items and relevant personnel at the end of the document.

Fortunately, it ended with a comedy ending: whether the attendees were present or not, they were immersed in the meeting to the greatest extent.

A typical bimonthly product would look like this: all product departments silently review the output and core indicators of the previous bimonthly, while writing down their opinions in the form of written comments. The core of the flying meeting is the "silent meeting", which focuses everyone's attention on the document, and the text not only takes the place of all kinds of discussions, but also isolates the quarrel-after all, with online documents, everyone can be in all over the world. can only be a "keypad warrior".

On the other hand, for byte jumps, documentation is almost the only way for hundreds of people to have online discussions about a business and a vertical unit at the same time without getting out of control. Can also precipitate the conclusion and the next thing to do, carry out the work.

After that, byte jump uses forms such as "flying reading" and online office work in meetings, interviews, and even daily work. In the second half of 2020, Sihan in Shenzhen applied for a byte-beating corporate culture position. It was not until she won offer,Leader that she was the second employee in Shenzhen, and more of her team colleagues were actually in Beijing and Shanghai.

This is usually the first deep impression left by the byte jump on new employees, many byte employees not only do not know where the headquarters is, but may even stay at the level of netizens in the relationship between colleagues and supervisors. Chairman Zhang Lidong and CEO Zhang Nan rarely meet offline, but hold regular online meetings once a week, and they often don't know where the attendees are.

For a large team scattered across the country and around the world,The byte approach is to make the whole company "run on flying books". The essence of collaborative tools is the embodiment of organizational values. As Byte Jump CEO Liang Rubo concluded: communication is fragmented collaboration, documents are structured communication.

More than 150 battlefields, may not require a hub.

In November 2019, the Atlantic published an article entitled "TikTok occupying India (TikTok is taking over india)", which mentioned one of the important reasons why TikTok defeated Facebook Inc in India at that time:

In India, many people who do not speak English cannot use Facebook Inc or Twitter, but TikTok supports 15 different native Indian languages, and there are stars, trends and markets in different parts of the country.

The byte-hopping business covers 150 countries and regions, including Douyin, TikTok, Jinri Toutiao and other well-known products with a total of more than 1.9 billion monthly active users, these users speak 75 different languages, corresponding to hundreds of localized development and operation teams. Open the recruitment website, from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to New York in the United States, you can see the byte beating office.

Among the 15 R & D centers and 240 offices around the world, only one destination for Top3's popular travel routes comes from Beijing.

Bin, an TikTok engineer from Google job-hopping to byte jump, mentioned three points when talking about the difference between byte jump and Google:

There is a strong sense of boundary within 1.Google, "how many resources should be allocated to our group, how many resources should be allocated to your group, and how should the performance be divided after this is done?" "

2.Google is used to push from top to bottom, which requires a supreme command standing in the center of everyone. Bytes are "spontaneous" from bottom to top.

3. The most typical example of the huge differences in work culture among different companies is the email-dominated American workplace culture, which is sometimes incredibly inefficient.

Like Sihan above, because of the epidemic prevention and control policy in the United States, many colleagues have not come face to face with Bin until now. Even from the interview to the entry, Bin is done online. What's more, Bin needs to manage two R & D teams across the Pacific, who are 16 hours jet-lagged from each other.

Bin later came up with a way to quickly record the work progress with flying book documents and videoconferencing when the team work in the United States was finished. When my colleagues in Shanghai arrive at the office, they can open a video conference to understand the current work progress. The two teams, who had never met offline, held a 24-hour relay race spanning 13 time zones and 14000 kilometers.

But this kind of collaboration has an important premise:Let the decision chain stay local.

First, provide tools and methods without restricting freedom:The byte-beating HR Yuki worked in a multinational consulting firm for more than three years. Most of the time, she is either on the plane, in the hotel, or on the way to the plane and the hotel. But now, byte global communication takes place every day, every hour, every moment, travel is bound to be unrealistic and unnecessary. "

The teleconferencing model has also gone through many iterations. A byte employee who used to be in charge of Japanese market development recalled that the early bimonthly connection between China, the United States and Japan was a pure video conference, and American colleagues tended to speak freely and discuss enthusiastically, while Chinese colleagues were introverted. However, they will also use all available space to express their views, but only the Japanese office is silent-there are East Asian introverted factors, but more due to the standard of English.

Until one day, Flying Books came online with the subtitle translation function of video conferencing. She cheerfully told her Japanese colleagues that from then on they could speak Japanese boldly in future meetings. After the flight reading, it is often "Chinese, Japanese and English" flying together.

Second, give local operations teams a high level of decision-making power:The Japanese market is an important stop for TikTok, and even if the advertising plan submitted by the operation team exceeds the budget, it will generally be passed quickly after full communication. This kind of situation is hard to imagine in other international companies.[5]。

When Bin was at Google, his employees just wanted to change the code and waited two or three days for approval messages. "if that person refuses to approve it all the time, he will pin the message, saying, can you take a look? that person only says that I will approve it when I am free. "

In India, local operations teams invite Bollywood celebrities such as Jaclyn Fernandes,Shahid Kapoor,Sharaddha Kapoor to market together. If the decision chain is artificially lengthened, the rapid growth of bytes around the world can easily become empty talk.

Finally, build a framework and system, rather than chapter by chapter:The bimonthly meeting has become an important form of management and decision-making of various affairs, and the bimonthly meeting of important business once has 400 to 500 people all over the world.

The essence of various conferences is a carrier of methodology, and the methodology behind it is as stated by Yuki:"We choose to convey the message clearly in a simple way. Because decisions are based on facts and logic, not on the people who make them; on the other hand, decisions are about efficiency, not hierarchy. "

In 2020, the Economist began to describe byte jumps in an article:It is the only technology company besides Apple Inc that has more than 100m users in China and western countries.

More than 200 offices, no power center.

Shortly after Yuki joined the job, the supervisor assigned a task specifically telling him that "there is no need to do PPT, only documentation is needed." Later, the supervisor was satisfied after reading it, so he said"I'll pull Rupo into a group, and you tell him. "

At that moment, Yuki was very shocked.

There are many casual places in byte culture. Do not do PPT, insist on using documents to summarize and hold meetings is one thing, there is no Tittle inside the bytes is another point. Even for a new intern, Zhang Yiming must be called "Yiming" and Liang Rubo must be "Rubo".

Byte jumps prohibit the use of job titles within the company, including "boss" and "teacher" and "boss". If you see a position like xx, it will only be used when communicating with the outside world. When Xu Yilong, deputy editor-in-chief of Jinri Toutiao, first took up his post in 2015, he was surprised by some scenes: if Zhang Yiming was late for a meeting, he would sit quietly at the end and no one would give up his seat.

In 2010, a small company called 37 Signals became the "coolest company" among geeks. His main business is to provide productivity tools for small and medium-sized enterprises, and it is famous for its work philosophy: more than half of its employees are scattered in eight cities on two continents, and all employees work remotely, without fixed offices and office hours. The founder wrote two books about the organization, one called "Getting Real" and the other "Rework".

The fame of the two books in Silicon Valley does not mean that this decentralized, self-driven organizational logic has become the mainstream of business. Even for an organization with hundreds of people, it is difficult to achieve the flattened management of "bringing Rupo in", let alone a huge collective of more than 100,000 people.

For byte jumps, the first step in dismantling the center of power is a high degree of transparency of information.

In the internal context of byte beating, there is a word called "open-book management". When Bin was at Google, he was used to boundaries between company departments, although this often caused him inconvenience. For example, in every inter-departmental collaboration, compared to how to do this, the first thing we need to do is to sit down and discuss how to divide the work, how much resources are allocated, and how to distribute the final results.

At one point, a colleague on his team needed someone to review a piece of code. It was a very simple job, but the other party put it off for three days. In desperation, colleagues can only send text messages to urge them. The auditor replied quickly, but asked him to send a new work email. But in the byte beat, it is difficult for Bin to feel the existence of "department wall".

Xie Xin introduced a man calledPersonal instruction manualInternal practice, which is a link to a flying book document hanging on the signature file, introducing your responsibilities, how to communicate and cooperate with yourself, and the help you can provide.

The implication behind this is that employees should spontaneously seek cooperation and collaboration, rather than waiting for instructions from an office or a red-headed document.

In addition to the disclosure of information, it is the unity of goals.

Any byte-beating employee can see the OKR of Zhang Nan, Zhang Lidong and Liang Rubo, which guides the operation of each chain from top to bottom.

In 2017, Byte Jump officially launched the Flying Book OKR system. OKR is used to enable even minor details in the organization to form a spontaneous scheduling, that is, to understand the meaning of the work first, and then to achieve the goal of the work, in the words of Xie Xin:

Tell each employee the overall goal and let him look for all kinds of possibilities and get the best way to achieve the goal. Behind this is respect for each individual, not only as hands and feet, but as a person with his own knowledge and wisdom.

Liang Rubo once mentioned that people naturally tend to follow the rules rather than break them, which weakens the company's sensitivity to new opportunities, and that various rules also raise the threshold of trial and error and break through the conventional threshold, which over time harms the enthusiasm of innovation. Especially when there are major changes in the industry and companies can no longer rely on inertia, the accumulated rules, processes and systems will be a great hindrance.

So where is the company's center of power? This may be a question that no employee can answer.

In 1942, General Motors Co invited Professor Drucker to General Motors Co for research. Drucker stayed at GM for 18 months and produced a book called the concept of the Company. But General Motors Co's senior management was so dissatisfied that he even listed it as a banned book for management.

The reason is that Drucker boldly compares General Motors Co with the US government and suggests that General Motors Co should also learn a credit system. The management master, who was not understood at that time, became a source of inspiration for Zhang Yiming. He mentioned in his internal letter that he understood the nature of the company by learning Drucker's theory of managers: "in a knowledge-based organization, everyone is a manager."

A poem by Exupery, the author of the Little Prince, mentions:"if you want to build a boat, don't always push people to pick wood, but be busy assigning jobs and giving orders. But to arouse their yearning for the vast sea. "

The end.

With the expansion of byte jump in the global market, they were once called "Chinese companies most like Google". As described in the Internet Bible redefining the team: how Alphabet Inc-CL C works: Google was the first to break the hierarchical corporate system of the industrial age, attracting the best talent in the world through flatness, openness and transparency.

On the occasion of the eighth anniversary of byte jump, they unveiled a goal of 100000 employees by 2020, with most of the new hires coming from outside China. For byte jumps, this is an unprecedented no man's land. There is no ready-made homework to copy the ideas, attitudes and methods they need.

The exploration of no man's land has many implications, such as the expansion of the business landscape, such as the optimization of organizational structure, such as the iteration of business logic. But the core link is to constantly find changes in the outside world, constantly understand the trends of the industry, and constantly observe the feelings of users.

In a travel note, Zhang Yiming once wrote:

After many companies moved their headquarters, they thought they were a "big company" and started a lot of messy things: for example, who has an office and who is not, who is in the new office area, who is in the old office area, whose office is big and who is small, whose seats have windows and whose seats face west, and some company executives need independent elevators, which need exquisite coffee tables and even tea rooms, and so on, so that these external unimportant things become a burden. Very tacky.

Then he made a highly general summary:Focus on the outside.