The Art of Management: Start Big, Focus on the Details

Author: Xi Youmin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: In the vast world, some things are bizarre and others are ordinary, yet few people take the time to carefully examine them. Professor Xi Youmin does not adhere to conventional norms. While his thoughts in management research roam freely in the ocean of theory, his vision never leaves reality. When reality falls into the hands of management scholars, the strange becomes, the ordinary gives birth to truth. His book "The Way of Management" is like what Zhu Xi of the Song Dynasty said: "A single strike leaves a mark, a slap leaves a palm print," deriving profound insights from daily life. This book is a record of the author's years of thinking, its essence being fragments, each self-contained. Arranged by the author, it forms a framework, though its structure is clear, it cannot be equated with general expository books in terms of its coherence and logical flow. It starts from reality and moves towards the ideal. The Analects say: "The people can be made to follow, but not to understand." Zhao Longren interprets this as "You can make the people follow your instructions, but you don't need to let them understand the meaning of the instructions." This aligns with the idea of "It is difficult to understand but easy to do." Indeed, sometimes explaining can be exhausting and ineffective—just achieving results is enough. Therefore, when the mainland introduced modernized policies, it failed to explain various situations, leading to unsatisfactory implementation results. However, there are always some who want to know the reasons, and this bookfills this need.