Chapter 9: For the Enterprise: The Evolutionary Path from “Empire” to “Ecosystem”

Friends, in the deep history of the business world lies a vast and silent “graveyard of empires.” There stand huge, marble-carved tombstones, engraved with names that were once thunderous and thought to be immortal.

Let us approach a few of them to pay homage to the kings of yesteryear.

The first to catch our eye is the tombstone of Kodak, a yellow giant that once defined the warm memories of billions of people worldwide with the “Kodak moment” and occupied ninety percent of the film market. However, with great irony, the world’s first digital camera was born in Kodak’s own laboratories. But the empire’s decision-makers at the time, fearing that this “immature” new technology would impact their lucrative and perfect “film money-printing machine,” chose to shelve it. In the end, Kodak was not defeated by any competitor, but was buried by its own biological son, the one named “the future,” whom it had personally strangled.

Next to it is the tombstone of Nokia, a Finnish giant that once ruled the global mobile phone market with its indestructible products. At its peak, its brand value even surpassed that of Coca-Cola. However, when Steve Jobs pulled the iPhone from his pocket, a device that redefined the “mobile phone” species, Nokia’s empire began its irreversible collapse. A Nokia executive tearfully said at the final farewell meeting: “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” This sentence has become the most heartbreaking and most thought-provoking epitaph in business history.

What did Kodak, Nokia, and the countless other once-great names in this graveyard do wrong?

The answer is, they did nothing wrong. They simply pushed “sustaining innovation” to the extreme in their own old era, polishing their products to be better, managing their processes more efficiently, and building their imperial barriers stronger. They were the most perfect and most diligent dinosaurs of the old paradigm. But they did not realize that a meteorite named “discontinuous change” was roaring in from the depths of the universe, from outside their cognitive range. And when this meteorite struck the earth’s surface, the entire climate and ecosystem of the old era would undergo a fundamental, irreversible change. In this new environment, the dinosaur’s proud massive body and hard scales became precisely the most fatal burdens preventing their survival.

Friends, digitalization was that meteorite, and the mobile internet was the subsequent ice age. They jointly buried a generation of giants.

And what we have to face today is an ultimate “paradigm shift” that will far exceed the former in terms of magnitude, speed, and the thoroughness of its disruption. Artificial general intelligence, this “super-meteorite” that is accelerating its fall, will not just change the ecosystem of a certain industry or a certain product, but the underlying physical laws of “value creation” upon which the entire business world operates.

In this coming, more violent “mass extinction,” the “elephant” type enterprises of today, which seem the most powerful, with their strict organizational hierarchies, precise strategic planning, and “control and efficiency” as their core competitiveness, will precisely be the most fragile and most dangerous species.

So, who will survival belong to in the future?

The answer is, it will belong to those organizations that can proactively abandon the rigid “empire” form and evolve into a new, vibrant, and resilient “ecosystem” form. It will no longer be a top-down “pyramid” pursuing precise control, but more like a bottom-up, uncertainty-filled, species-diverse, self-regulating, and evolving “tropical rainforest.” In this rainforest, the role of the leader will no longer be the “general” who gives orders, but the “gardener” who nurtures the ecosystem; the strategy of the enterprise will no longer be to compete for a fixed “market share,” but to influence the fluid “user mindshare”; and the culture of the organization will no longer be to “tolerate” failure, but to proactively and strategically “embrace” failure.

And the core task of this chapter is to provide a clear, executable evolutionary guide for all the enterprises and organizations of our time, a guide from “empire” to “ecosystem,” from “pyramid” to “tropical rainforest.” We will, from the two most fundamental levels of “strategy” and “organization,” delve into the new survival laws and action programs for the future commercial life form.

This will be a path of self-revolution, full of pain and also full of hope.

Section 1: The Shift in Strategy: From “Market Share” to “Mindshare”

I. Establishing a Mission-Driven Brand Value System

(1) The Twilight of Product-ism—The Arrival of the “Homogenization Singularity”

Friends, in the magnificent business history of the twentieth century, what we celebrated were almost all victory songs of “product-ism.” It was an era of heroes, where the main battlefield of business competition was clear and pure—the product itself. Its inner logic was like an Olympic race: higher, faster, stronger.

Sony, with its “Walkman,” defined the musical lifestyle of an entire generation with its ultimate industrial design and miniaturization technology. The German automotive industry, relying on its almost faith-like, excellent pursuit of mechanical engineering and driving experience, established an absolute benchmark of “quality” worldwide. Procter & Gamble, through its vast laboratories and consumer research systems, continuously carried out “higher performance” and never-ending “formula upgrades” for the most daily fast-moving consumer goods like shampoo and toothpaste.

In that era, “a better product” was almost synonymous with “the final victory.” The core strategy of an enterprise was a “moat-building” project centered on the “product,” digging inward. Your technology patents were the moat; your unparalleled supply chain efficiency was the moat; your six-month lead in the R&D cycle over your competitors was the moat. It was a beautiful, relatively fair era of reaping what you sow.

However, friends, the “product moat,” which was once wide enough to fend off any enemy, had already been narrowed by several technological waves even before the ultimate force of AGI arrived.

The first impact came from the “globalized supply chain.” When the blueprints designed in Silicon Valley could be transmitted overnight to factories in Shenzhen and be manufactured with impeccable yield rates and astonishingly low costs, any quality barrier based on “manufacturing process” began to become unreliable.

The second impact came from the “information transparency of the internet.” When consumers could, in a few seconds, through online price comparisons and reviews, gain insight into the performance parameters and pros and cons of all similar products on the market, any brand premium maintained by “information asymmetry” began to become precarious. Consumers were armed to be unprecedentedly shrewd “rational calculators.”

The third impact came from the “open-source movement and modularization.” In the software and technology fields, a large amount of freely available open-source code and standardized technology modules allowed latecomers to, like building blocks, quickly “assemble” a “good enough” product, thereby greatly reducing the barrier to innovation and making the technological advantage of the pioneers increasingly short-lived.

These three waves had already turned the business competition of the late twentieth century into a “red ocean” hand-to-hand combat. And the arrival of artificial general intelligence is no longer about creating another wave. What it does is to directly heat, evaporate, and bring this entire ocean into a new “era” where the physical rules have changed.

AGI is the ultimate “reaper” of “product-ism.” It will, with an irrefutable force, bring about a new business norm that we call the “homogenization singularity.”

“Singularity,” a concept borrowed from physics, refers to a critical point where old laws and models completely fail. And the “homogenization singularity” refers to the state where, under the empowerment of AGI, the differences in “quantifiable indicators” such as function, performance, and quality of most products and services will be infinitely flattened, eventually reaching a “singularity” state that is almost imperceptible to consumers.

Let’s describe this AGI-accelerated scenario in detail.

Imagine in the near future, two arch-rival tech companies are both preparing to launch their next-generation flagship smartphones. In the past, this might have been an “arms race” that took years and was full of countless variables. But in the AGI era, the picture of this race will be completely changed.

In the “design” phase, the R&D teams of both companies, almost simultaneously, issue similar commands to their respective AGI design systems: “Based on all our past user data, the latest global consumer aesthetic trends, and all existing feasible materials science and engineering constraints, generate the optimal design plan for the next-generation smartphone.” A few hours later, thousands of aesthetically impeccable design plans, which have undergone simulations for aerodynamics, heat dissipation efficiency, ergonomics, and structural strength, are presented to the decision-makers on both sides. And because the underlying data and physical laws they are based on are common, the “optimal solutions” ultimately chosen by these two companies will be strikingly similar in appearance, feel, and structure.

In the “production” phase, the design plans of both sides are instantly transmitted to the flexible manufacturing network uniformly dispatched by AGI, scattered across the globe. From the procurement of chips, to the packaging of screens, to the final assembly, every link in the entire supply chain is precisely and dynamically optimized by AI from a “God’s-eye view.” In the end, the two phones roll off the production line with almost identical costs and the same impeccable yield rates.

In the “marketing” phase, the AGI marketing systems of both sides have already analyzed the hundreds of millions of conversations, images, and videos about “smartphones” on global social networks. They have precisely perceived the most hidden desires and anxieties of every potential consumer and have tailor-made advertising copy and visual solutions for them that can achieve the “maximum conversion rate.”

Finally, when the CEOs of the two companies proudly display their masterpieces at their respective launch events, the global audience will be stunned to find that these two “flagship products” from different companies are like two flawless “twin brothers” from the same gene pool.

They both have screen resolutions far exceeding the limit of human eye recognition; they are both equipped with powerful processors that can complete the post-production rendering of an ultra-high-definition movie in a few minutes; they are both equipped with cameras with ultra-large apertures and computational photography capabilities that can, in the hands of a professional photographer, capture the starry sky and the Milky Way.

This is the ultimate embodiment of “performance surplus.” Both competitors, in order to surpass the opponent by five percent in parameters, have invested one hundred percent of their R&D resources, only to, in the end, provide consumers with a series of “dragon-slaying skills” that they will almost never use in their lifetime.

And this kind of self-consuming, involutionary development, which is for the sake of competition and cannot bring any real value-added, is precisely that desperate term in economics and sociology—”involution.” Both companies are trapped in a meaningless war of attrition that cannot be won by being “better and faster.” The only outcome is an endless price war, until the profits of both sides are reduced to dust.

So, friends, this is the horror of the “homogenization singularity.” It means that in the near future, any advantage based on product function, quality, or price will become extremely short-lived, like the dew on the grass leaves on a summer morning, which evaporates the moment the sun rises.

The era of business competition centered on the “product,” which we were once so familiar with, its twilight has come. And we must, in this twilight, find for ourselves a new, dawn-welcoming, and viable high ground of value.

(2) “Meaning” as the Ultimate Moat

Friends, after we have jointly gazed into that unsettling future driven by artificial general intelligence—a business singularity where products and services are infinitely “homogenized”—upon that barren plain where all “product moats” have been filled, we are left with an ultimate question concerning the survival of enterprises: when “what to do” and “how to do” can no longer constitute a competitive advantage, how on earth do we find a solid reason for the uniqueness of our existence?

Now is the time to reveal the answer.

This answer is both simple and incredibly profound. It lies hidden in the question that is often brushed aside in our business planning, the one that seems most “abstract”—that is, “Why.”

The renowned management thinker Simon Sinek once proposed a highly penetrating “Golden Circle” theory. He found that all great organizations that can endure and have a charismatic appeal follow the same pattern in their thinking and communication. This pattern is like a target with three concentric circles: the outermost circle is “What”—the specific products or services a company provides; the middle circle is “How”—the unique technology or process a company uses to realize its products; and the core, and most crucial, is “Why”—the company’s mission, belief, and fundamental reason for existence.

Most mediocre companies think and communicate from the outside in. They will clearly tell you “what” they do, for example, “we make high-quality computers.” They might sometimes tell you “how” they do it, for example, “our computers have a user-friendly design and powerful performance.” But they rarely, if ever, think about the core “why.” Great companies, on the contrary, think and communicate “from the inside out.” They first clearly define their “why,” and then they implement this belief in every aspect of “how,” and finally, it is embodied in the “what” of their products and services.

In the past, the difference between these two models may not have been fatal. But in the AGI era, this will be the fundamental dividing line between greatness and extinction. Because AGI, this ultimate “master of efficiency,” its entire reason for existence is to provide humanity with perfect, optimized solutions in the two outer circles of “what” and “how.” It can help any company to make “high-quality computers” and design “user-friendly interfaces.” Thus, the “what” and “how” of all companies will inevitably tend towards homogeneity. And the “why” at the center of the target, the one concerning belief and meaning, is precisely the sacred ground that algorithms can never set foot on.

This is not just a philosophical choice of business positioning; behind it lies a profound, unavoidable biological principle. Our brain structure is also highly isomorphic with this “Golden Circle”: the part responsible for processing rational information and data like “what” is our outermost, youngest “neocortex”; while the part responsible for processing information about trust, emotion, and belonging like “why” is our deeper, more ancient “limbic system.” The limbic system is the true “central nervous system” of all human behavior and decision-making, but it has no language ability. This also explains why we often make “gut” decisions even if we cannot clearly explain the logic behind them with language. When we are moved by the “why” of a brand or a leader, this feeling of trust and loyalty is a “chemical reaction” that occurs directly within our limbic system. It is far more profound and lasting than any “rational judgment” based on performance parameter comparison that occurs in the neocortex.

Let’s use a concrete case to feel the immense power of this “chemical reaction.”

Please imagine two companies that both manufacture high-end electric cars. Company A is a typical “outside-in” thinking company. All its publicity and communication focus on “what” and “how”: our car has a super-long range of 800 kilometers (what); it uses the world’s leading integrated die-casting manufacturing process (how). This is a perfect, rational, “persuasion” model based on product-ism.

Company B, on the other hand, is an “inside-out” thinking company. Its core communication always begins with the grand “why”: “Our purpose is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Then it tells you “how” they do it to achieve this magnificent “why”: we must design stunning electric cars that surpass all gasoline cars; we must build a charging network that eliminates range anxiety for users. And finally, you see “what” they do: one high-performance electric car after another.

With similar product performance, these two companies will have completely different fates. Company A’s customers are “consumers.” They chose Company A because its product performance was better, but once a competing product with better performance or a lower price appears on the market, they will not hesitate to turn away immediately. Theirs is a fragile, easily replaceable “transactional relationship” with Company A.

A portion of Company B’s customers, however, will be elevated to “loyal fans.” When they buy a car from Company B, they are not just buying a means of transportation; they are “buying” an identity, a “ticket” to participate in a great cause. They are casting a “vote of approval” for Company B’s “why” with their money. They have built a powerful “tribal relationship” and “emotional connection” with Company B that transcends the product itself.

Where is the power of this connection manifested? When Company A’s product has a quality problem, public opinion will be overwhelmingly critical, and the company’s brand will be severely damaged. But when Company B’s product has the same problem, you will find that a considerable number of “fans” will proactively and spontaneously stand up to defend the company. Because in their view, this is not a flaw in a “product,” but a temporary, surmountable “setback” in “our cause.”

This is the power of “why.” It can elevate a commercial brand from a cold “economic organization” to a warm “spiritual symbol.”

And the power from “why” is not limited to its external appeal to consumers; it is also a powerful, inward “organizational force field.” First, a clear and great “why” is the only “gravitational singularity” for attracting top human talent in the AGI era. When AGI can replace the vast majority of “executors,” the few human elites with top creativity and strategic thinking will no longer be just pursuing high salaries, but a “sense of mission” to which they can dedicate their talents. A company that can only offer a “what” can only attract “employees,” while a company that can clearly answer “why” can attract “partners.”

Second, a deeply ingrained “why” is the “internal compass” on which the future “ecosystem-type” organization depends for survival. We mentioned in the preface that the future organization will evolve from a rigid “pyramid” to a bottom-up “tropical rainforest.” In this decentralized, uncertainty-filled organizational form, it is impossible for leaders to provide clear instructions for every specific action. So how can the organization avoid falling into the chaos of “a headless mob”? The answer is the common “why.” It is like a “decentralized command” pre-installed in the heart of every team, every employee, and even every AGI agent, ensuring that even without top-down command, all independent, dispersed actions can ultimately coordinate with each other and converge towards the same “North,” like sand forming a tower.

So, friends, answering the question “Why do we exist?” is no longer an abstract “image project” that can be outsourced to the brand department. It is the most fundamental, most hardcore “strategic decision” a company must make in the AGI era.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” This sentence also applies to the fate of an enterprise. A company that truly knows its “why” can endure any shock and disruption concerning “how,” because its soul has already been anchored in a deeper and more permanent dimension of meaning that transcends specific products and processes. This is the only ultimate moat in the AGI era that cannot be homogenized and is therefore the only one that is indestructible.

(3) From “Consumers” to “Fellow Travelers”

Friends, after we have established that “why” is the “North Star” for enterprises to traverse the desert of the homogenization singularity, we must immediately delve into how this answer can be transformed from an abstract “philosophical concept” into a pragmatic “business model” that can completely reshape the relationship between enterprises and consumers. Because a great “why,” if it only stays in the founder’s mind or on the company’s vision wall, is at most a powerless slogan. It must find a powerful “container” to carry it in order to truly and continuously release its amazing energy.

This new “container” is the core concept we will delve into in this unit—the “fan community.” And its birth must be premised on the death of a very familiar, old-paradigm business concept: the “target audience.”

In the business textbooks of the entire twentieth century, “target audience” was a sacred and inviolable term. It represented a scientific, rational, almost military-minded marketing paradigm. In this paradigm, the enterprise played the role of a calm “hunter,” and the vast consumer group was the “prey,” defined by a series of precise data. We used demographic characteristics like age, gender, income, and region to draw their “physical portraits”; we used psychographic characteristics like interests, preferences, and lifestyle to surmise their “mental portraits.” All our work—from product development to advertising—was to “aim” and “capture” this group more accurately. This was a one-way value transfer, from the outside in, with “persuasion” and “occupation” at its core.

This “hunter” and “prey” relationship was undoubtedly efficient in the era of product-ism. But in the AGI era, when every “hunter” is equipped with an “AI-powered scope” and can fire an endless stream of “marketing bullets” at the same “prey” with perfect accuracy, this hunt inevitably degenerates into a meaningless war of attrition. The concept of “target audience” has thus reached the end of its historical journey.

The rules of the game on the future business battlefield will undergo a fundamental change. Victory will no longer belong to the companies that are best at “hunting,” but to the organizations that are like spiritual magnets, best at “attracting.”

A company that is truly centered on “why” will no longer proactively and clamorously “hunt” a vague “target audience” with broadcast-style marketing. On the contrary, what it will do is to quietly raise its own “banner” in the center of the world, a banner inscribed with its unique beliefs and values.

This banner is its “why.” Its purpose is not to “cover” as many people as possible, but to allow those “wanderers” in the vast sea of people, who already hold the same beliefs deep in their hearts, to see it, recognize it, and finally gather under this banner. This is a two-way value identification, from the inside out, with “resonance” and “summons” at its core.

And those who are summoned by this banner are no longer “consumers” or “users” in the traditional sense. They are elevated to a new species with a much deeper relationship—”fans.” And the organic, vibrant network spontaneously formed by these “fans” is the “fan community.”

We must clearly distinguish the fundamental genetic differences between a “target audience” and a “fan community.”

   First, is the difference between “functional consumption” and “identity affirmation.” The core driving force for a target audience to buy a product is the “function” it provides, to solve a specific problem. The core driving force for a fan to buy a product is the “meaning” it symbolizes, to confirm and express the philosophical question of “who I am.” A rational “target audience” buys an outdoor brand’s jacket for its excellent waterproof and thermal performance. A “fan” buys a Patagonia jacket to declare to the world, “I am a person who loves nature and is committed to environmental protection.” This jacket has become the “skin” and “badge” of this fan’s personal values.

   Second, is the difference between “passive reception” and “active co-creation.” The relationship between a target audience and a company is passive. He receives the ads pushed by the company, he uses the products defined by the company; he is the “consumer” at the very end of the value chain. The relationship between a fan community and a company is active and co-creative. They will spontaneously create the most sincere and moving “user stories” for the brand; they will, like the most loyal “praetorian guard,” defend the brand’s reputation and counter all false attacks on the battlefield of social media; they will also, in the most stringent and constructive way, provide suggestions to the company on product improvement and future development. They are no longer “consumers”; they are the “co-owners” and “chief evangelists” of the brand.

   Third, is the difference between “price sensitivity” and “value tolerance.” A target audience, due to the fragility of their connection, exhibits extremely high “price sensitivity.” Any small discount or promotion can easily make him “defect” to a competitor’s camp. A fan community, due to the depth of its connection, exhibits an amazing “value tolerance.” We argued earlier that when a “why”-centered company makes a mistake, the fans are often more willing to interpret it as “a setback in our common cause” and give it the precious time and patience to fix the problem. Because what they believe in is not the “perfect product,” but the “great why.”

   Finally, and most crucially, is the difference between “individual value” and “network value.” For a member of a target audience, the value he gets from a brand comes only from the product itself. For a member of a fan community, the value he gets comes not only from the product, but also from the “presence” of other fans in the community. The brand becomes a “social totem,” a “campfire” that allows lonely individuals with the same beliefs, originally scattered around the world, to recognize, connect with, and warm each other. The enterprise is thus elevated from a mere “seller” to the “community host” and “servant” of this spiritual tribe. The “network effect” born from this “shared belief” has a stickiness and a barrier that no product-level advantage can compare to.

So, friends, when a company has successfully completed the perilous leap from “managing a target audience” to “cultivating a fan community,” its entire business model will undergo a qualitative change. What it sells will no longer be products, but “meaning”; what it manages will no longer be a marketing funnel, but a “community culture”; and what it pursues will no longer be short-term “market share,” but long-term “mindshare.”

And this transformation also places unprecedented, more demanding ethical requirements on the company itself. Because a fan community is an extremely precious but also extremely fragile “asset” based on “belief.” What sustains it is not a business contract, but “sincerity.” All of the company’s business activities must be highly consistent with the “why” it professes. Any “hypocrisy” of inconsistency between words and actions will be seen by the community as an unforgivable “betrayal” and may, in an instant, lead to the collapse of the entire community of belief.

This is the ultimate shift in corporate strategy in the AGI era. We must abandon the “hunting” mentality, the arrogance of trying to turn everyone into our customers, and turn to a more humble and wiser “gardener” posture. We no longer pursue the breadth of “coverage,” but the depth of “connection.”

The great ancient Chinese thinker Mencius once proposed the debate between “benevolent governance” and “hegemony.” He believed that conquering the world through military force and strategy is “hegemony,” while winning the hearts of the people through benevolence and virtue is the “kingly way.” Hegemony may win for a time, but only the kingly way can build an enduring enterprise. In the AGI era, this ancient wisdom has a new real-world significance: any “hegemonic” enterprise that tries to conquer the market with superior products (military force) and more precise marketing (strategy) will ultimately be defeated by that more powerful “ultimate weapon”—AGI. And only the “kingly” enterprises, which win the “mindshare” and following of users with a sincere and great “why,” can build a “great wall of hearts and minds” composed of countless fans, a wall that AI can never touch, and ultimately establish a truly endless, meaning-driven business kingdom on this homogenized scorched earth.

(4) Mission as the “Universal Gravitation” of an Organization

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed how a great “why” can penetrate the fog of the homogenized market and elevate a cold “transactional relationship” to a warm “fellow traveler relationship,” we must turn our vision from the external brand world to the internal of the organization, to examine a more profound and more fundamental role that this mission can play.

Because the value of a truly great mission is by no means limited to its being a “banner” that can rally fans externally. It is, moreover, a “gravitational singularity,” as powerful as a celestial body, that can cohere energy and guide direction internally.

Before the advent of the AGI era, traditional enterprises relied mainly on a combination of two forces to cohere themselves: one was the “power” endowed by a clear hierarchy, and the other was the “interest” provided by a compensation system closely linked to performance. An organization was like a rational “mercenary army,” composed of a power skeleton and interest sinews. Everyone gathered temporarily for a common economic goal, but the underlying connection was relatively fragile.

However, in a future where creativity and strategic thinking become the core value of humanity, this organizational paradigm based purely on “power and interest” will become increasingly ineffective. Because the top, most creative human minds have long since surpassed the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What they seek is no longer just a “high-paying job,” but a “meaningful cause” to which they can dedicate their talents.

At this point, a clear, sincere, and grand mission becomes the one and only answer for attracting and retaining top talent in the AGI era. It is no longer an optional “corporate culture” embellishment; it is the most core, most hardcore “talent strategy.” It is like a star ignited in the center of the universe, which, with its immense mass, warps the surrounding “talent market spacetime,” forming a powerful “gravitational field.”

This gravitational field will play a dual role. First, it will act like a “sieve,” automatically and precisely rejecting the purely “mercenary” types whose values do not align. Because a great mission is necessarily accompanied by an almost obsessive adherence to values, which, for a pure interest-seeker, often means “inefficiency” and “unprofitability.” They will instinctively stay away.

Second, and more importantly, this gravitational field will, with an irresistible force, attract the “Knights Templar,” scattered around the world, who already hold the same fire in their hearts. The primary driving force for these top talents to choose to join is no longer the level of salary, but because they have seen the projection of their personal mission and life values on the “why” banner held high by this company. They are not here to “find a job”; they are here to “find an organization,” a “community” where they can place their souls and, together with other like-minded people, achieve a greater goal.

The strength of the connection between the members of an organization attracted by a mission will be exponentially different from that of a traditional mercenary army. And this attraction will not be limited to top employees; it will further radiate to the entire business ecosystem. Partners, suppliers, and even investors with the same or similar values will be attracted by this gravity, thus forming a more stable and more resilient “value community.” When a company is no longer just an isolated economic entity but has become the “gravitational core” of a vast ecosystem, it possesses the deepest moat that AGI can never simulate.

However, the internal value of a mission is far more than just “attraction.” It will also play an irreplaceable role as an “internal decision-making compass” in the daily operations of future “ecosystem-type” organizations.

We predicted at the beginning of this chapter that the future organizational form will evolve from a rigid “pyramid” to a bottom-up “tropical rainforest.” This means that decision-making power will be, on a large scale and irreversibly, decentralized from a few centralized leaders to countless small, autonomous teams and individuals at the periphery, and even to countless AGI agents working in collaboration with humans.

This decentralized, agile organization, while greatly increasing its responsiveness to market changes, also brings a fatal risk: when thousands of independent decision-making units are acting autonomously, how can the organization avoid falling into the great chaos of “a headless mob”? How can it ensure that all these micro, dispersed efforts can ultimately converge into a macro, unified strategic force?

The answer, again, is the common “why.”

A mission that is deeply internalized by all members of the organization is like an invisible, underlying “cultural algorithm” or “decision-making grammar.” It provides a clear “value North Star” for every decentralized decision-maker to refer to at any time.

Let’s imagine a few concrete scenarios. A product manager on the front lines, when faced with two product feature options that are equally feasible in terms of technology and commercial return, no longer needs to report layer by layer to wait for the judgment of executives. She only needs to ask herself one question: “Which option can better embody our company’s mission of ‘making knowledge accessible to all’?” This mission is the highest standard of right and wrong for her to make a choice.

An AGI agent responsible for optimizing the supply chain, its objective function will no longer be the singular “cost minimization.” A “mission constraint” with the highest priority will be implanted in its core instruction set: “While pursuing cost efficiency, we must never violate our core values of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘labor rights’.” This mission is the insurmountable ethical “red line” set for the cold algorithm.

A customer service representative handling a customer complaint, when faced with a tricky user request that far exceeds the company’s explicit regulations, will have the granted “discretionary power.” And the sole basis for his judgment will be, “Which handling method can best defend our mission of ‘customer first’?” This mission is the warm, “humanized” guide for him to make a choice between rigid processes and living humanity.

Friends, this is the full meaning of mission as the “universal gravitation of an organization.” It can not only “attract” the most precious “matter” (talent, capital, and partners) for the organization from the outside, but can also provide a powerful, invisible “centripetal force” and “order” for this increasingly decentralized, uncertainty-filled organization from the inside.

The core of Chinese Taoist thought is the character “道” (Tao). It is not a set of specific, cumbersome rules and regulations, but the most fundamental, invisible underlying law that drives the harmonious operation of all things in the universe. The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao often does nothing, yet there is nothing that is not done.” The highest state of a great organization is the same. It no longer relies on thousands of specific, top-down “instructions” to manage, but relies on the one and only “mission Tao,” to which everyone aspires, to lead. When the “Tao” of the organization is clear enough, and deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, the leader can “do nothing,” and the spontaneous, creative actions of every member of the organization will, under the guidance of the “Tao,” “do everything” to jointly achieve the grand vision of the organization.

This “Tao” of the organization, defined by “why,” is the ultimate leadership that any AGI-era enterprise can possess, a leadership that transcends all “technical” levels.

II. From “Control” to “Empowerment”: Building a Symbiotic Business Ecosystem

(1) The Boundaries of Empire—The Growth Limits of the “Control Mindset”

Friends, after we have jointly established “mission-driven” as the “North Star” for enterprises to traverse the desert of the homogenization singularity, we must immediately begin to reconfigure the fundamental way in which enterprises relate to the world. Because a company’s strategic choice is like a person’s underlying character; it determines what kind of instinctive reaction the company will have when faced with opportunities and challenges.

Looking back at the entire twentieth-century commercial civilization, its most mainstream and most successful strategic paradigm can almost be summed up in one keyword: “control.”

The business giants of that era were like the ambitious monarchs of ancient times. They believed in an “imperial” philosophy of growth, with the core belief that an organization’s sense of security and competitiveness is proportional to the scope of resources it can “control.” The boundaries of the enterprise had to be constantly expanded like the territory of an empire, and every link in the value chain had to be firmly brought under the jurisdiction of centralized power, like the provinces of an empire. This was a “control mindset” aimed at eliminating uncertainty, maximizing economies of scale, and ultimately building an impregnable monopolistic barrier.

The ultimate embodiment of this mindset was the spectacular wave of “vertical integration” in the industrial age. Let’s turn our gaze to the awe-inspiring “River Rouge Complex” created by the auto king Henry Ford. That was not an “automobile assembly plant” in our modern sense; it was a self-sufficient, closed-loop industrial kingdom. In order to “control” every variable in automobile production, Ford bought iron mines, coal mines, rubber plantations, and glass factories; he owned his own fleet and railway to transport these raw materials; he even built his own power plant to provide an uninterrupted blood supply for this huge industrial heart. From an iron ore from the mine to a brand new Model T that could be driven out of the factory, almost all the links involved were completely and thoroughly internalized by the Ford empire with an almost obsessive attitude.

In that era, this was the most advanced and most powerful business model. By exerting ultimate control over the supply chain, it eliminated the dependence on external suppliers and the risk of price fluctuations; by exerting ultimate control over the production process, it created unparalleled cost advantages; by exerting ultimate control over distribution channels and marketing voice, it mercilessly drove countless weaker competitors out of the market. This was a strategy of “digging deep moats, accumulating vast grain, and slowly claiming the throne,” with the ultimate goal of building a business empire that was so daunting that any external challenger would be deterred.

However, friends, the greatest risk to a seemingly impregnable city wall often comes not from external attacks, but from the slow, systematic sclerosis and decay within, caused by the loss of material and information exchange with the external ecosystem.

The powerful empire created by the “control mindset,” after reaching its peak, inevitably planted three seeds of its own decline. The first seed is the “curse of complexity.” In a highly vertically integrated empire, the management hierarchy and coordination costs will grow exponentially with the expansion of scale. The huge body that was once its advantage gradually becomes a heavy burden that prevents it from turning around. It becomes slower and slower, and its response arc to market changes becomes longer and longer, just like a prehistoric dinosaur. Although it had an unmatched size, when the environment changed drastically, its massive nervous system might even need several minutes to transmit the signal of an attack on its tail to its brain.

The second seed is the “innovator’s dilemma.” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has already profoundly revealed this: in a successful, “control”-oriented organization, all its resource allocation and incentive mechanisms are designed to continuously “optimize” and “perfect” its existing, successful “main business.” This makes it exhibit a structural, physiological rejection and disregard for those “disruptive innovations” that are full of uncertainty, have a very small initial market, but may represent the future. We need not repeat the tragedy of Kodak; we only need to remember that what kills an empire is often not a more powerful enemy, but the empire’s own incurable “path dependence” on its past successful paths.

The third seed is the “loss of information power.” The empire model relies on the “monopoly” of information and channels. But in the internet age, information began to flow like air, completely and pervasively, which, for the first time, allowed the more flexible, more net-savvy “nomadic” small challengers to bypass the multiple barriers set up by the empire and directly dialogue with and build connections with consumers. The empire’s city walls were not breached, but new business activities had begun to flourish outside the walls.

And the arrival of artificial general intelligence is no longer like the past technological waves that just impacted a certain section of the empire’s city wall. It is the ultimate “siege weapon.” What it will do is to completely and structurally dismantle the very “foundation” on which the entire empire depends for its existence.

First, AGI will thoroughly “arm” those who were once unarmed “barbarians.” In the past, only great empires could afford the top designer legions, the largest marketing teams, and the most precise strategic staff. But in the future, a startup company with only three people can, through a subscription model, easily obtain AI strategic analysis capabilities that are more powerful than the empire’s staff, and AI content generation and delivery capabilities that are more precise than the empire’s marketing legion. AGI has, in an unprecedented way, achieved a super-democratization of “core business capabilities.” The “scale advantage” that the empire was once proud of will be greatly diluted in this wave of “capability equality.”

Second, AGI will shift the “main battlefield” of business competition from the “mass market,” where the empire excels, to the “micro-niche market,” to which it is completely unsuited. The empire’s massive, standardized production and distribution systems determine that it can only serve the “head” of the demand curve, where it is fattest. AGI, however, drives the marginal cost of “personalization” to infinitely approach zero, which for the first time makes it profitable to serve the endless, highly personalized “long tail” and “ultra-long tail” demands. The future business world will no longer be a stable continent divided by a few large empires, but more like a dynamic archipelago composed of millions of ever-changing “city-states” serving various small tribes.

So, friends, we must soberly recognize that the imperial era, with “control” as its core faith, has irrevocably drawn its curtain. Any attempt to seek a sense of security today by “building high walls” is no different from building a castle on the sand. Its final fate will only be to be completely swallowed by the next wave.

The Great Wall of China is the most magnificent physical symbol of the “control mindset.” It was once effective in repelling the harassment of nomadic peoples from the north. But when we look at history, we find that the fundamental reasons that ultimately led to the demise of the Central Plains dynasties were rarely because the Great Wall was breached head-on, but more often due to the empire’s own internal sclerosis, corruption, and inability to adapt to new changes. That seemingly impregnable “Great Wall” ultimately only gave the empire a false sense of security, causing it to lose the courage and ability for self-reform in a fatal “path dependence.”

The same is true in the business world today. A company’s true “Great Wall” lies by no means in how many patents, how many factories, how many channels you control, but in whether the speed of learning and evolution of your company, as a living organism, can surpass the increasingly accelerated speed of change in the external world. And this requires us to bravely set sail from the old continent of “control” to explore that new world named “empowerment,” a world full of uncertainty but also full of infinite vitality.

(2) The Logic of the Ecosystem—From “Zero-Sum Game” to “Positive-Sum Symbiosis”

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed how the business empire, with “control” as its core faith, has inevitably reached its growth limit due to its own rigidity and weight, we have arrived at a critical strategic fork in the road. The old map has been proven to be unable to lead to the future. So, what lies before us are two completely different new worldviews that will determine the ultimate fate of an enterprise.

The first worldview is a continuation of the “zero-sum game.” It assumes that the market “pie” is ultimately finite, and the essence of business is still a cruel war for “dividing the existing stock.” On this path, AGI will become the most powerful “armament” in history. Every participant will use it to wage a “scorched-earth war” more efficiently and more ruthlessly, a war that is destined to have no winners. This is a dead end leading to collective “involution” and value destruction.

The other path requires us to make a more profound cognitive leap, a leap from the very foundation of our worldview. It requires us to completely abandon the old “empire” metaphor, which originates from military confrontation, and to seek new wisdom from an older and more vibrant system. This system is the “tropical rainforest.”

This is the new business philosophy of the AGI era that we are about to delve into—the great leap from “zero-sum game” to “positive-sum symbiosis.”

Let’s first feel the fundamental difference between these two worldviews. An artificially planned, single-species economic “plantation” may, in the short term, produce standardized fruits with extremely high efficiency. But its ecosystem is fragile and extremely susceptible to collapse due to an unexpected pest infestation. This is the world of the “zero-sum game,” where stability depends on the ruthless “control” of all “variables.”

A real tropical rainforest, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It has no centralized “chief designer,” and no single species can achieve absolute “dominance.” Its prosperity comes precisely from its internal, seemingly “chaotic,” extreme “diversity” and “interdependence.” The towering trees provide shelter for the shade-loving ferns; the vines clinging to them build a ladder to the canopy for the birds living there; the birds and insects, in the process of feeding on nectar and fruits, complete the pollination and seed dispersal for the plants; finally, when these lives come to an end, they will be decomposed by countless microorganisms and return to the land as “nutrients” that nourish the entire forest.

In this complex and exquisite “symbiotic network,” the prosperity of each species is, in some direct or indirect way, creating better conditions for the survival of other species. This is a typical “positive-sum system.” The overall vitality and the “value pie” of the whole are continuously “enlarged” through the joint “collaboration” and “empowerment” of all species.

And an “empowerment-type” corporate strategy is, in its essence, to proactively and consciously imitate and build such a “positive-sum,” ever-thriving “business rainforest” in the commercial world.

The core of this great leap from “zero-sum” to “positive-sum” lies in a profound shift in the logic of value creation. In the old “zero-sum” world, the core proposition of an enterprise was how to more efficiently “divide” an existing pie, and the focus of strategy was on “value capture.” In the new “positive-sum” world, the core proposition of an enterprise will shift to how to, together with more partners, jointly “bake” a new, much larger pie, and the focus of strategy will therefore shift to “value co-creation.”

Apple’s App Store ecosystem is the most perfect interpretation of this logic. Are Apple and the tens of millions of app developers in a “life-or-death” competitive relationship? Quite the contrary. The huge success of any phenomenal app, such as a globally popular game, not only brings rich returns to the developer, but also, in an irrefutable way, enhances the “playability” and “value” of the iPhone as a piece of hardware, thereby attracting more consumers to buy the iPhone. And the continuous growth of iPhone sales worldwide further provides all developers with a larger and more monetizable “golden market.”

This is a textbook-level “positive-sum flywheel”: the success of the developers contributes to the success of Apple, and the success of Apple further empowers the success of more developers. Their fates are tightly bound together by a “you do well, I do better” symbiotic relationship. The huge value pie they jointly created, named the “mobile app economy,” has long since far surpassed the limit that either party could have reached alone.

The open-source software movement provides us with another, purer ideal model of “positive-sum symbiosis.” Great creations like the Linux operating system or Wikipedia are not the product of the planning of any single “empire.” They are “public wealth,” jointly “nurtured” in a self-organizing, decentralized way by tens of thousands of anonymous developers and contributors worldwide with a common belief. Each participant, while contributing their own wisdom to this system (such as fixing a bug, writing an entry), also receives far more value from this system, which has become increasingly powerful due to everyone’s contributions, than they have put in.

This is the endgame of the new competition. What an enterprise should pursue is no longer how to more efficiently engage in zero-sum hand-to-hand combat with competitors in the old, shrinking “red ocean,” but how to bravely create a new, uncontested “blue ocean,” and with a more open, more generous posture, to invite and empower more partners to jointly build the prosperous ecosystem of this blue ocean.

This great leap also necessarily requires the leaders of enterprises to complete a profound “role transformation” from “warlord” to “rainforest gardener.” The business leaders of the old era were “hegemons.” They believed in “power” and “strategy,” and their core ability was “conquest.” The business leaders of the new era must become “kings.” They believe in “vision” and “symbiosis,” and their core ability will shift to “empowerment.”

So, friends, the ultimate strategic choice of the AGI era becomes exceptionally clear. You can choose to stay on the old battlefield of the “zero-sum game” and engage in a doomed “war of attrition” with an AGI that has infinite computing power, is never tired, and has no emotions. Or, you can choose to start a new “positive-sum game,” to become the “king” who builds the new ecosystem, defines the new rules, and ultimately shares the greatest value.

In the oldest classic of Chinese wisdom, the I Ching, there is a core idea that runs through it, and that is “endless generation and regeneration” (sheng sheng bu xi). What it describes is the ultimate state of life in the universe, a state of self-evolution, self-reproduction, and the continuous superposition and emergence of value. The inner logic of the “zero-sum game” empire is closed, rigid, and ultimately bound to lead to energy depletion and thermal death, a state of “exhaustion.” The inner logic of the “positive-sum symbiosis” rainforest, however, is open, fluid, and in line with the great Tao of the universe, “endless generation and regeneration.”

The highest strategic wisdom of a company is to transform itself from a “value capturer” who goes against the Tao, to a “value co-creator” who follows the Tao, and ultimately to become the core, driving force of “endless generation and regeneration” in the entire business ecosystem.

(3 The “API-ification” of Capabilities—From “Internal Resources” to “External Services”

Friends, after we have jointly established the new strategic direction from “empire” to “rainforest” and have taken “empowerment” as the guiding principle of the new world, we must immediately answer the most critical, practical question of “how to achieve it.” Because if “empowerment” only remains at the level of a beautiful vision without a concrete, executable “technical path” to carry it, then it will forever be just an unreachable mirage.

This “technical path” that transforms the “empowerment mindset” from a philosophical vision into a commercial reality is the core concept we will delve into in this unit—the “API-ification” of capabilities.

Let’s first look at a metaphor. A traditional, great company that adheres to the “control mindset” is like an impregnable fortress. In its deepest part, there must be a heavily guarded, secret “armory.” In this armory are displayed the sharpest “unique weapons” that the company has forged with decades of effort and huge investment—it could be its world-leading logistics management system, its incredibly accurate user data analysis model, or its core algorithm that embodies the painstaking efforts of countless engineers. Under the old imperial laws, these “core capabilities” were considered top secrets, the “asymmetrical advantages” that the company used to crush its opponents on the battlefield and ensure its own survival. Their only user could be the company’s own “direct troops.”

The “API-ification of capabilities,” however, represents a completely disruptive, anti-traditional strategic choice. It requires the company to bravely open its dusty “armory,” to no longer view its most powerful “unique weapons” as just “internal resources” serving itself, but to “decouple” them one by one from the original, complex, and intertwined internal systems, to carefully “package” and “polish” them, and finally, through standardized “interfaces,” to transform them into “public services” that can be called by the entire external world.

The term “API,” which originates from the field of software engineering, stands for “Application Programming Interface.” Its essence is a clear, standardized “socket.” It allows an independent software program to easily call the core functions of another software without understanding its complex internal workings. And the “API-ification of capabilities” we are talking about here is to elevate this technical concept to the height of corporate strategy. It means a company must learn to no longer see itself as a monolithic, indivisible “product manufacturer,” but as a “capability portfolio” composed of countless independent, modular “core capabilities.” And every capability module in this portfolio has the potential to be extracted separately and become an independent “new species” that can empower the entire business ecosystem.

This is a profound, and even painful, “self-deconstruction.” It requires the company’s leaders to have an extraordinary vision and courage that can penetrate the existing business forms. And once this deconstruction is successful, the energy it can release will be exponential. It usually follows three interlocking steps.

   Step 1 is “Identification and Decoupling.” The company must first have an inward-looking, “X-ray”-like insight to clearly “identify” which capabilities in its vast and complex business processes are the true “crown jewels” with “long-plank effects.” This could be an “anti-fraud algorithm” that a bank has accumulated over decades of risk control practice; it could also be a “dynamic inventory management” system that a fashion retailer has honed in the brutal battle of managing a massive and complex range of products (down to each color, each size, what is called SKU in the jargon); or it could be the mysterious “content recommendation” engine that a media giant uses to maintain the stickiness of its billion-level user base. After identification comes the more difficult “decoupling” work, which is to, in terms of technology and organizational structure, perform a “surgical” separation of this capability module from the “parent business” it currently serves, making it an independent “business unit.”

   Step 2 is “Standardization and Productization.” An internally decoupled capability is often just a piece of “crude oil” with huge potential. Although powerful, it is rough in form and difficult to use. Therefore, the company must invest huge resources to “refine” it. This process is to transform this internal tool into a stable, reliable, and scalable “standardized product” for external services. The company needs to create clear documentation, stable servers, and a professional service team for it. This process is often painful and “counter-intuitive” because it requires the company to completely shift from a “client mindset” of “serving only oneself” to a “vendor mindset” of “serving millions of others.”

   Step 3 is “Externalization and Evangelism.” When this “crude oil” has been successfully “refined” into a universal, standardized “gasoline,” the company can officially open this “gas station” to the world. And to attract the first batch of “vehicles,” the company often needs to first become the largest and most demanding “customer” of this “gas station.” Amazon’s cloud computing platform (AWS), its initial and still largest customer is Amazon’s own e-commerce business. This practice of “using it yourself first” is the best touchstone for testing the stability of its service. After this, the company also needs to transform from a “product developer” to an “ecosystem evangelist,” to spare no effort to preach, promote, and help external developers and partners to use its “capability API.”

And once this ecosystem, driven by the “capability API,” is successfully established, the strategic returns it brings to the company will be incredibly rich, and often completely unimaginable to the original “control mindset.” The most direct return is the opening of a new “second growth curve.” Amazon’s AWS has now become the main source of profit for the entire company, and its market value has even surpassed its traditional e-commerce business. This is the great victory of transforming a “cost center” into a “profit center.” A more profound return is the “exponential acceleration of innovation.” When a company opens its core capabilities to the wisdom of the world, it has in fact gained the wisdom of the world as its “free,” inexhaustible “external innovation engine.” Countless developers will, in ways that the company itself could never have imagined, creatively use its “capability API,” thus exploring countless new application scenarios and business possibilities for the company. And the ultimate return is the construction of a new, more solid “ecosystem moat.” When tens of thousands of external companies have built their own core businesses on your “capability API,” your service is no longer just a replaceable “supplier,” but has become the “digital foundation” on which they depend for their survival. The cost for them to “migrate” to another platform will become extremely high. You, by “empowering” them rather than “controlling” them, have finally formed a “community of common destiny” with them, a community that is deeply bound and shares weal and woe.

So, friends, let us remember this. When a company faces the strategic choice between “control” and “openness,” ancient Chinese wisdom has long had insight into the ultimate mystery of evolution.

Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching: “The more he does for others, the more he has himself; the more he gives to others, the more he possesses.” This sentence is full of profound dialectical brilliance. It tells us that true strength does not come from holding on and taking, but from giving and connecting. A company that chooses “control” is essentially trying to “have” without “accumulating,” which goes against the laws of development. It is like a closed gene pool. Although it can perfectly replicate past successes, it will eventually lose its ability to adapt to environmental changes and become rigid because it refuses to exchange and recombine.

And a company that chooses “empowerment” and bravely “API-ifies” its core capabilities is precisely practicing the open principle of “the more he gives to others, the more he possesses.” By “giving” capability interfaces to the external world, it in turn receives the feedback and nourishment of the entire ecosystem, building a truly antifragile life form with infinite evolutionary potential. This corresponds to the core idea in the I Ching: “When a situation reaches its limit, it changes; change leads to passage, and passage leads to endurance.” In the business world, choosing openness and empowerment is the “change” that can traverse cycles and lead to longevity.

(4) From “Chain Master” to “Gardener”—The Fundamental Shift in Corporate Roles

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed the twilight of the “control empire,” embraced the dawn of the “empowerment rainforest,” and mastered the core technical path of “capability API-ification,” our deep exploration of corporate strategic shift has arrived at its final and most philosophical destination. Because a profound strategic change must ultimately require the enterprise, and especially its leaders, to complete a more profound self-revolution of “role” and “identity.”

In the “control mindset” era that we have bid farewell to, the core role of the enterprise was clearly defined as the “chain master.”

Please imagine a linear “supply chain” composed of countless nodes, from raw materials to end consumers. The ultimate ideal of the great enterprises of that era was to become the most powerful “master” on this chain, with absolute say. It was the “chain master.” This “chain master,” like an ancient feudal lord holding a long whip, placed himself at the power center of the entire value chain, using the strictest contracts to restrain upstream suppliers and the most aggressive channel policies to “manage” downstream distributors. His core toolbox was filled with cold, confrontational weapons like “price negotiation,” “payment term pressure,” and “exclusivity agreements.” His relationship with all other roles on the chain was essentially a “zero-sum game,” a fragile relationship of domination based on “power and fear.” His goal was very clear: to use his dominant position to “extract” and “intercept” the largest share of the profit from the entire supply chain into his own imperial treasury. This was the fate of the “chain master.” He was the master of control, the incarnation of efficiency, and also a lonely “value island,” watched warily by all.

However, friends, we have repeatedly argued how fragile and vulnerable this linear chain, built on “control” and “extraction,” is in an uncertainty-filled, decentralized AGI era. The business world of the future is no longer a confrontation between a few chains, but a competition of “vitality” itself between a few rainforests. And in a real tropical rainforest, the species of “chain master” simply cannot survive.

Therefore, the enterprise must complete a fundamental role transformation. It must bravely take off the heavy “chain master” armor, which symbolizes past glory, and instead, put on cloth clothes, pick up a watering can, and play a new, more humble, and wiser role—the “gardener.”

The underlying worldview of a “gardener” is completely different from that of a “chain master.” The “chain master” believes in mechanism; he believes that the entire system can be designed, controlled, and accurately predicted. The “gardener,” on the other hand, believes in ecology; he deeply understands that the prosperity of a complex living system comes by no means from the strong intervention of any single will, but from the self-organizing, uncertainty-filled, and unpredictable “emergence” within the system. Therefore, the duty of the “gardener” is no longer to “prescribe” the growth method of every tree in the rainforest, but to focus on creating and maintaining an empowering environment where all life forms can “thrive.” He has completely shifted his work focus from “managing results” to “nurturing the process.”

The toolbox of a great “ecosystem gardener” is no longer filled with “whips” and “contracts,” but with “sunshine, soil, and water.”

   First, the “gardener” must provide a fertile “soil” for the entire ecosystem. This is the stable and reliable “empowerment infrastructure” built by the “capability API-ification” that we have discussed in depth. This soil must be open enough and robust enough to allow any “seed” with a dream to easily take root in this land and draw its initial nutrients.

   Second, the “gardener” must provide sufficient “sunshine” for all the species in the ecosystem. This is the clear and grand “mission and vision” defined by the “why” that we argued for in the first part of this section. This vision, like the eternal sun above the rainforest, provides the most fundamental energy source for the photosynthesis of all plants, and also points a common, upward direction for the growth of all species, ensuring that even if this rainforest is full of free, seemingly chaotic competition, its overall evolutionary direction is always upward and has a clear value orientation.

   Third, the “gardener” must ensure that there is abundant “water” and “nutrients” in the ecosystem. This refers to the “data, capital, and talent” within the ecosystem that are actively designed to “flow freely.” A great platform company will never “monopolize” data, but will “feed back” the desensitized and governed data to its partners in the ecosystem in a safe way, to help them make wiser decisions. It will set up its own “ecosystem fund” to “irrigate” the “new species” with the most innovative potential. It will also establish an open, borderless talent market, allowing the best talents to flow freely within the ecosystem to where they are needed most.

   Finally, a qualified “gardener,” in addition to providing empowerment, must also assume the responsibility of “maintaining the health of the ecosystem.” He needs to regularly “prune” the dead branches of this rainforest and “clear out” the malignant, ecosystem-destroying “invasive species” (such as fraudsters and bad actors on the platform). What he relies on is not his personal preference, but the fair and transparent “rules of the game” formulated to maintain the long-term prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

Friends, this is the fundamental transformation from “chain master” to “gardener.” It requires the leaders of enterprises to complete a profound “mental” cultivation, from “arrogance” to “humility,” from “taking” to “giving,” from “short-term harvesting” to “long-term cultivation.”

And the return of this cultivation will be incredibly rich. Because the resilience of a supply chain controlled by a “chain master” depends entirely on the strength of the “chain master” himself. Once the chain master encounters a crisis, the entire chain will instantly break. A species-rich tropical rainforest, nurtured by a “gardener,” on the other hand, has unparalleled “antifragility.” Even if one of its species dies out due to environmental changes, new species will immediately grow from the soil to fill the ecological niche it has left. The vitality of the entire rainforest, as a community of life, will become stronger and stronger through one internal iteration and external shock after another. This is the ultimate, and only sustainable, path to “longevity” that an enterprise can pursue in the AGI era.

The ancient Taoist sage Lao Tzu has already described this “ultimate gardener” for us in the Tao Te Ching: “To give birth to all things but not to possess them, to act but not to rely on one’s own ability, to lead but not to dominate. This is called profound virtue.”

To give birth to all things but not to possess them, to accomplish things but not to boast of one’s own merit, to lead all things but not to forcefully dominate them. This is the most profound “virtue.” This is also the highest strategic realm that future business leaders can reach. He will no longer pursue being the tallest, thickest “king tree” in the rainforest; he will be dedicated to becoming that silent, humble, yet ubiquitous existence itself, the one that allows the entire rainforest to thrive endlessly.

Section 2: The Transformation of the Organization: From “Pyramid” to “Tropical Rainforest”

I. Embracing “Chaos” and “Emergence”

(1) The End of the “Predictable” World

Friends, after we have jointly completed the deep reconfiguration of the “strategic” level of the enterprise, we must turn our surgical knife to the internal of the organization, to examine the more fundamental “skeleton” that supports the execution of strategy—our organizational form and management paradigm. Because even the greatest “ecosystem” strategy, if grafted onto a rigid “empire” body, its final fate will inevitably be rejection and death.

To understand the profundity of this organizational change, we must first return to the spiritual temple of the industrial age, to pay homage to the management belief that was once revered as gospel and ruled the entire twentieth-century commercial civilization, and that is “prediction and control.”

The underlying worldview of this paradigm is an almost religious worship of “rationality.” It firmly believes that the world is essentially a grand mechanical device that can be understood, dismantled, and calculated. Although the future is full of fog, as long as we have enough data, powerful enough analytical tools, and wise enough minds, we can, like a masterful watchmaker, perceive all the gears and springs that drive this machine and draw a flawless “blueprint” for its next move.

The existence of the enterprise is to “execute” this blueprint. And the organizational form that can best ensure the perfect execution of the blueprint is the “pyramid” that we are so familiar with, which symbolizes order and efficiency, also known as the “bureaucracy” defined by Max Weber.

In this magnificent pyramid, everything is arranged in an orderly manner. Power is transmitted from top to bottom, clearly and level by level; information, on the other hand, is filtered and summarized layer by layer from bottom to top. At the top of the pyramid are the “pharaohs” or “generals” with the final decision-making power; they are the final guardians and interpreters of the blueprint. In the middle of the pyramid are the countless managers and bureaucrats, who, like the messengers and governors of an empire, are responsible for accurately and without discount decomposing and transmitting the will of the top to every executive unit. And the vast base of the pyramid is the countless, standardized “positions.” Every employee in a position is like a “screw” with a clear function, required to complete their precisely defined, repetitive work without any distractions.

This was the golden age of “prediction and control.” It was the perfect embodiment of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” philosophy; it was the institutionalized form of Henri Fayol’s “fourteen principles of management”; and it was the ultimate answer for “efficiency” and “scale” extolled in countless business school textbooks. We must admit that in the industrial age, an era of relative environmental stability and linear change, this paradigm created unparalleled commercial miracles. It could, with unprecedented efficiency, build railways, construct factories, and manage a multinational corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees. The pyramid was the most advanced and most powerful “organizational weapon” of that era.

However, friends, the solid and flat “promised land” that once allowed the pyramid to be built with composure, one brick and one stone at a time, has long ceased to exist. The ground beneath our feet has become a violently active “tectonic plate,” full of fractures, folds, and volcanic eruptions.

In this chaotic world, which military strategists call “VUCA,” the act of “predicting the future” itself has transformed from a “high-difficulty challenge” that tests wisdom into an “intellectual fraud” akin to divination and witchcraft. A company’s annual strategic plan often becomes a meaningless historical document the moment it is printed, due to some unexpected technological raid or geopolitical “black swan.”

And the arrival of artificial general intelligence is no longer just about adding another aftershock to this already turbulent land. It is the ultimate “plate tectonics,” which will completely change the crustal structure. AGI, by lowering the barrier to innovation to almost zero, is “manufacturing” uncertainty at an unprecedented speed and density. It is the most powerful “chaos engine” and “change accelerator” of this era.

Therefore, a fundamental, unavoidable contradiction is placed before all enterprises: can we still use a rigid pyramid structure, born for “stability” and “predictability,” to cope with a new future driven by AGI, a future full of “chaos” and “unpredictability”?

The answer is no.

This will be a rout as one-sided as a “cold weapon legion” against a “modern warfare.” The pyramid organization, this once “perfect weapon,” in the new paradigm of warfare, all its past advantages will instantly turn into fatal flaws.

First, the pyramid’s “information transmission” mechanism will completely fail. Its bottom-up, layer-by-layer reporting system, in the past, was to “filter” noise and “extract” essence. But in an era where change happens in “seconds,” this “filtering” is equivalent to “delay,” equivalent to “information distortion.” When a faint but fatal “enemy signal” from the front lines of the market (such as the prototype of a disruptive product) needs to traverse the long bureaucratic hierarchy, taking weeks or even months, to reach the desk of the “general” at the top of the pyramid, this war has, in fact, already ended.

Second, the pyramid’s “decision-making” mechanism will be paralyzed. Its design of highly concentrating decision-making power at the top, in the past, was to ensure “strategic unity” and “centralized resource allocation.” But on a “distributed battlefield” where threats and opportunities emerge from all directions at the same time, this “centralized” decision-making becomes a huge “response bottleneck.” It requires the general in the “rear command post” to formulate perfect combat plans for every specific “trench” thousands of miles away, which is logically absurd.

Finally, the pyramid’s “talent incentive” mechanism will go to the opposite extreme. Its culture, with “loyal execution” as its highest virtue, in the past, was to ensure that “orders are strictly followed,” creating a disciplined “army.” But in an era that requires “proactive exploration” rather than “passive execution,” this culture will systematically stifle all the most precious qualities within the organization—the initiative, creativity, and the “rebellious spirit” to challenge the status quo of the employees. The pyramid does not need “explorers”; it only needs “soldiers.” And soldiers can never discover a new continent.

So, friends, we must, with an almost tragic resolve, accept this reality: the magnificent pyramid that we once relied on for our livelihood, that provided us with a great sense of security and order, in the AGI era, is no longer a “sturdy fortress” that can withstand the storm; it has become a magnificent and fatal “exquisite wall” that completely isolates us from the future.

Any attempt to make minor repairs and gradual “digital transformations” within this wall is no different from installing a more aerodynamic shell on a horse-drawn carriage. Its essence is still a horse-drawn carriage, and its final fate is still to be mercilessly eliminated by the rolling wheels of history.

There is only one real way out. And that is to bravely walk out of the pyramid and embrace the chaotic, real future world, which seems full of dangers but is in fact full of infinite vitality. We must learn to give up our obsession with “order” and instead appreciate the creativity contained in “chaos”; we must learn to give up our obsession with “control” and instead find a new wisdom that can dance with it on the edge of “out of control.”

This is the great wisdom of “emergence,” which comes from complexity science, that we will explore in depth next.

(2) Introducing the Wisdom of “Emergence”

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed how the pyramid organization, with “prediction and control” as its core faith, is so fragile and rigid in the face of the chaotic future driven by AGI, a huge and profound confusion naturally arises in the minds of all corporate leaders: if we give up top-down “control,” won’t what we welcome be complete, destructive “disorder” and “chaos”? If the pharaoh no longer gives orders, then how can the magnificent pyramid be built?

This is a deep-seated “controller’s anxiety” that comes from our thousands of years of civilization. We instinctively believe that behind any grand and exquisite order, there must be an equally grand and exquisite, centralized “designer” and “commander.”

However, friends, today we must temporarily move our gaze away from the short history of our human civilization and humbly learn from an older and wiser teacher—nature. Because on this planet, the largest, most complex, and most resilient “organizations” all, without exception, have no “leaders.”

Order does not have to be “designed” and “imposed” from the top down by a center; order can also “grow” and “emerge” from the bottom up from countless dispersed individuals. This spontaneously generated, leaderless order in the midst of chaos is the most precious intellectual gift that complexity science has given to our era—”emergence.”

To truly understand the wisdom of “emergence,” let’s first conduct two immersive “natural observations.”

Please imagine you are looking down at a vast leaf-cutter ant colony on the floor of a South American rainforest. Millions of ants are engaged in a highly complex collective collaboration with astonishing efficiency: some have formed a disciplined “transport army,” carrying newly cut leaves back to the nest along a “highway” that has been optimized to the extreme; others are playing the role of “agricultural engineers” in the huge underground city, chewing these leaves into a paste to “cultivate” a fungus they rely on for a living; still others are acting as “defense soldiers” and “cleaners,” protecting and maintaining the operation of this city.

Faced with this spectacular picture, we can’t help but ask: who is the “chief designer” of that perfect “highway”? Who is the “chief engineer” behind that precise “agricultural production process”? And where is the “commander-in-chief” behind the seamless “social division of labor” of these millions of ants?

The answer is: there is no chief designer, no chief engineer, and certainly no commander-in-chief.

The “collective intelligence” of the ant colony is not stored in the brain of any “queen” or “elite ant.” It stems merely from a few extremely “simple,” “local” chemical behavior rules preset in the genes of every ordinary worker ant. For example, a famous “pheromone” rule: “When I find food, I leave a trail of pheromones on my way back; when I am looking for food, I prioritize the path with the highest concentration of pheromones.” It is this simplest, “brainless” local rule that, when executed simultaneously by tens of thousands of ants, “emerges” an amazing, macroscopic, highly intelligent result—the ant colony can always find the shortest path from the nest to the food source with extremely high efficiency, because the ants taking the shortest path have the highest frequency of round trips and can thus accumulate a higher concentration of pheromones faster per unit of time.

Now let’s raise our vision from the ground to the European sky at dusk, and you might see another, more spectacular “emergence” wonder—a “nebula dance” “woven” by tens of thousands of starlings. This huge “bird cloud” constantly and fluently changes into various incredible, complex three-dimensional forms in the air, sometimes like a flowing ribbon, sometimes like a rotating vortex. It is as if it is a unified “super-organism” with a single will, and every “cell” (every bird) within it moves so harmoniously, so precisely, as if an invisible “god of the sky” is conducting a live, real-time “choreography” for them.

However, the truth is still the same: there is no choreography, no command, and not a single bird knows what the shape of the entire “bird cloud” is.

The research of complexity scientists has found that this grand sky dance also stems merely from three extremely simple, local rules that each starling follows in flight, rules that only concern its “neighbors”: first, “don’t collide with your nearby companions” (separation rule); second, “try to align with the flight direction of your nearby companions” (alignment rule); third, “try to stay close to the average position of your nearby companions” (cohesion rule). These three simple rules, involving only local information, when executed simultaneously and dynamically by tens of thousands of starlings, “emerge” the grand sky dance, a dance full of the beauty of impromptu creation, that not a single bird could have pre-designed.

Friends, from ant colonies to bird flocks, to the migration of fish schools and the construction of beehives, nature is repeatedly revealing the same profound truth to us. A group of “simple individuals,” following “simple rules,” through “local interactions,” is sufficient to “emerge” highly complex, intelligent, and highly adaptive “collective behavior” at the macroscopic level.

This is the definition of “emergence.” It is the fundamental feature that distinguishes complex systems from simple mechanical systems. The overall behavior of a mechanical system, represented by a pyramid, is the “sum of its parts” and can be predicted and dismantled. The overall behavior of a complex system, represented by a rainforest, is “greater than the sum of its parts.” It is full of “surprises,” and its macroscopic order cannot be simply reduced to the behavior of any single microscopic individual.

And we humans ourselves are the greatest and most extreme embodiment of the wisdom of “emergence.” Our brain is composed of nearly a hundred billion neurons. The behavior pattern of any single neuron is extremely simple, nothing more than receiving, processing, and transmitting electrochemical signals. However, when these hundred billion simple “neurons” interact on a large scale, in parallel, and locally, in a complex way that we have not yet fully understood, our “mind,” full of thoughts, emotions, creativity, and self-awareness, miraculously “emerges.”

The “I,” the subject through which we perceive the world, does not exist in any single neuron; the “I” itself is the most magnificent “emergence” continuously happening inside our skulls.

So, friends, for the anxiety of “does giving up control equal embracing chaos,” we can now give a firm answer, an answer that comes from life itself: absolutely not. Giving up top-down, rigid, mechanical “design and control” is not to fall into a complete void, but to embrace a more advanced, more powerful, and more vibrant, bottom-up “growth and emergence.”

The core of future enterprise organizational change will no longer be to design a new “pyramid” with a more “rational” structure, but to bravely tear down that old pyramid and, in its place, learn how to, like a patient gardener, cultivate an “organizational rainforest,” a rainforest full of diversity and possibilities, where “emergence” can happen. And to cultivate this rainforest, our work focus will no longer be to “formulate” those incredibly tedious “processes and regulations” that try to cover all possibilities, but to “find” and “establish” those few most critical “simple rules” that, like those of the bird flocks and ant colonies, can inspire the organization to produce “collective intelligence.” This is the core that we will explore in depth next.

(3) “Simple Rules” Replace “Complex Processes”

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed the leaderless yet orderly “emergence” miracles in nature, we have obtained a new key to open the door of future organizations. But a profound question also follows: how can we, as humans accustomed to “design” and “control,” create a fertile soil in our own enterprises where “emergence” can happen? How can we, after giving up the rigid top-down control, avoid falling into the complete chaos of a heap of loose sand?

To answer this question, let’s first tell a short parable about “over-design.”

There was once an incredibly wise watchmaker whose lifelong dream was to build a “perpetual clock” that could run forever and perfectly cope with all external changes. To this end, he spent half his life designing the most complex mechanical system in human history, composed of millions of precision gears, levers, and springs. He pre-designed incredibly exquisite, interlocking “response procedures” for every possible external interference—from the slightest change in temperature to the most violent earthquake. When this great clock was finally completed, it was a breathtaking, perfect, closed-loop work of art. However, on the very first day it began to run, a small bird accidentally flew in through the window of the clock tower and rested for a moment on one of its unexpected components. This was the one and only, insignificant “possibility” that the great watchmaker had missed in his million “contingency plans.” And so, the entire perfect, over-designed “perpetual clock,” because of this one “accident” that could not be defined by a procedure, instantly fell into an eternal stillness.

This parable is the ultimate portrayal of the traditional management thought of the twentieth century.

We are all that clever but incredibly dogmatic watchmaker. We firmly believe that the excellence of a great organization is reflected in the completeness of its “processes.” We are obsessed with drawing organizational charts and business process diagrams that are as precise as circuit diagrams; we are dedicated to writing “standard operating procedures” and “employee codes of conduct” that are as thick as mountains and try to cover all work scenarios. We naively believe that as long as we “prescribe” every detail of the organization in advance and perfectly, then chaos will be completely driven out, and efficiency and order will descend eternally.

However, behind this superstition of “complex processes” lies a profound, pessimistic assumption originating from distrust. The fundamental reason we design such tedious processes is that we do not believe that every individual in the organization can, without being explicitly “prescribed,” spontaneously make correct and wise judgments.

And this “over-design,” based on “distrust,” will inevitably breed three fatal “organizational toxins.” The first is the “suffocation of creativity.” When employees are told that any deviation from the standard process will be considered an “error,” they will instinctively shut down all their creative impulses to explore better paths. The second is the “paralysis of responsiveness.” When a frontline employee faces a rapidly changing customer demand, what he can do is no longer to make a decision on the spot, but to report layer by layer, to wait for the incredibly long “process authorization” from the top of the pyramid. The third, and most fatal, is the “demise of a sense of responsibility.” When a person’s job is just to play the role of a thoughtless “screw” on a huge machine, he no longer holds any “owner-like” responsibility for the final result. His goal is no longer to “get things done,” but just to “get things done according to the process.”

So, friends, the first step towards “emergence” is to bravely throw the thick, control-freak “watch design blueprint” in our hands into the fire. We must give up being the omniscient “chief designer” and instead play the more humble and wiser role of an “ecosystem cultivator.”

Our job is no longer to design a “complex” set of processes that try to “control” everything for the organization, but to “find” and “establish” those few most core, “simple rules” that can inspire “emergence” for the organization.

This is the entire secret of an “emergent” organization.

And the company in the world that has practiced this philosophy of “simple rules” most thoroughly and most successfully is none other than Netflix, which is famous for its unique culture of “freedom and responsibility.”

The startling aspect of Netflix’s management philosophy is that it has abolished most of the “complex processes” that traditional companies rely on. It has no vacation policy, nor does it have an approval process for travel and expenses. It has replaced the thousands of thick rules and regulations with one extremely simple yet incredibly profound “simple rule.” This rule is: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”

Please carefully appreciate the subtlety of this rule. It does not “prescribe” any specific behavior, but it provides a clear, unified “judgment standard” for all behaviors. When an engineer needs to go on a business trip, he no longer needs to consult the company’s dozens-of-pages-long manual on “travel standards” to calculate what level of hotel he should stay in or what class of flight he should take. He only needs to ask himself one question: “Is the choice I am about to make the best decision for the company that I could make if I were spending my own money?” The “cost control” effect that this simple rule, which appeals to common sense and a sense of ownership, can achieve is far more effective and more advanced than any tedious financial approval process.

And supporting this rule is another simple rule about “leadership”: “context, not control.” At Netflix, the core duty of a manager is no longer to “control” and “supervise” the behavior of his subordinates, much less to “approve” their every decision. His core duty is to “provide context,” that is, to ensure that his team members have all the transparent information and strategic background they need to make the right decisions. The leader is responsible for clearly communicating the “why” and the “what,” while the power of “how” is delegated to the greatest extent to the frontline employees who are closest to the “battlefield.”

Finally, there is the most famous and most ruthless “talent” simple rule—”We only hire adults,” and its complementary “keeper test”: “If one of my team members were to resign tomorrow, would I fight hard to keep them?” If the answer is no, then the manager should proactively let that member go. This rule replaces all the complex, bureaucratic “performance appraisal” processes. It, with an almost “cruel” frankness, establishes a continuously self-iterating, high-density talent “metabolism” system for the organization.

Friends, the case of Netflix has shown us, in an irrefutable way, the great power of “simple rules.” And a great “simple rule” usually has the following distinct features:

   It must be “generative,” not “restrictive.” It aims to open a door of “possibilities” for employees, not to draw a line in the sand for them.

   It must be deeply tied to the company’s “core mission.” It is the most direct, behavioral-level “translation” of the company’s “why.”

   It must be based on “trust” and aim to “inspire individual judgment.” It is designed for mentally mature “adults,” not for “children” who need to be constantly supervised.

   It must be “scarce.” An organization’s “constitution” should not exceed five to seven rules. Because the fewer the rules, the more important each one will seem, and the easier it will be for everyone to remember and believe in.

This is the management way of the future organization. We will no longer build that cold, fragile “mechanical clock” piled up with countless complex processes; we will be dedicated to cultivating that “organizational rainforest,” full of vitality and possibilities, guarded by a few simple rules.

Ancient Chinese Taoist thought has long had insight into the ultimate wisdom in this. The “governing by doing nothing” (wu wei er zhi) advocated by Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching is by no means the laziness of “doing nothing.” On the contrary, it is the highest form of “doing.” “Doing nothing” refers to the monarch giving up the specific, tedious “intervention” and “control” over all things; while “doing” is reflected in his dedication to establishing and maintaining the most fundamental, simplest “Tao” that allows all things under heaven to “spontaneously” operate in harmony.

The same is true for a great corporate leader. His highest achievement will no longer be to design a perfect set of “processes” that can control everything, but to discover and establish those few, wise “simple rules” that can allow the entire organization to enter a state of “self-organization, self-drive, and self-evolution.”

He will, from then on, be able to “do nothing,” and the entire organization will, in the miracle of “emergence,” “do everything.”

(4) From “Manager” to “Environment Designer”

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed the great bottom-up wisdom of “emergence” and established the new management philosophy of replacing “complex processes” with “simple rules,” we must turn our focus to the most critical, most concrete, and most in-need-of-“reshaping” role in this organizational change, and that is the “middle manager.”

In the solid structure of the traditional pyramid, middle managers are the indispensable “structural beams” that connect the top and the bottom. But at the same time, they are perhaps also the most anxious, most tired, and most “powerless” class in the entire pyramid. They are the “filling” in the “sandwich,” squeezed from both sides: they need to translate and break down the highly condensed and often somewhat unrealistic “strategic intentions” from the top into concrete, trivial “work tasks” that the frontline team can execute; at the same time, they need to filter and organize the “battlefield fire” from the front lines, which is full of complaints, difficulties, and real feedback, into well-formatted, data-rich “work reports” and present them to the generals at the top.

Their core value is reflected in two ancient and important functions: first, as a “relay station for information,” responsible for “transmitting up and down”; second, as a “supervisor of processes,” responsible for “supervising execution.”

However, friends, in the AGI era, a cruel reality is that these two once-indispensable core functions are precisely the areas where AI excels and will inevitably replace with a far greater efficiency than humans.

When a company has an AGI-driven, company-wide visible, real-time updated “transparent information hub,” any form of manual “transmitting up and down” becomes an inefficient and redundant noise. When every corner of the organization can receive the most original strategic signals from the top without delay, and can, at any time, retrieve all the data and context it needs, the role of the “information relay station” loses its entire reason for existence.

And when AGI can, in a tireless, absolutely impartial, and data-driven model, track the progress of every project in real-time, evaluate the output of every team, and provide immediate, non-emotional “performance feedback,” the “supervisory” work of human managers, which is full of subjective biases and personal connections, also appears incredibly clumsy and outdated.

This is the profound “existential crisis” that middle managers around the world are facing today. If they continue to anchor their value on the two floating logs of “information transmission” and “process supervision,” which are being rapidly submerged by AI, then their obsolescence will only be a matter of time.

The real way out is not to compete with AI in the efficiency of “management,” but to completely abandon the old identity of “manager” and evolve into a new species that AI can never reach—the “environment designer” and “catalyst.”

Let’s dissect this new role in detail.

An “old-era manager” is obsessed with “controlling” specific people and things. He is like a chess player, trying to plan the specific moves of every piece on the board. A “new-era environment designer,” however, completely gives up the direct control of the “pieces,” and instead, invests all his wisdom in “designing” and “maintaining” a better “chessboard.” He deeply understands that as long as the “environment” of the board is right, the pieces on the board will spontaneously emerge with the most brilliant game.

So, what is the “environment” that he needs to design?

First, and most importantly, he needs to design a “trust environment” full of “psychological safety.” This directly echoes our discussion of “empathy” and “trust” in Chapter Eight. The most important job of a great “environment designer” is to, through his own continuous, exemplary words and actions, create a “high-trust greenhouse” for his team, a place where “it’s okay to make mistakes, to speak the truth, and to show vulnerability.” He will publicly admit his own “ignorance” and “mistakes” to encourage team members to dare to expose problems; he will reward the “high-quality trial and error” that, although it failed, brought valuable experience to the team, to inspire the team to dare to challenge the “impossible missions.” He is the “chief guardian” of the team’s trust.

Second, he needs to design an “open environment” where information and resources can “flow freely.” His job is no longer to “monopolize” and “distribute” information to maintain his own power, but to become a “network connector” and “obstacle remover.” He will proactively break down the “information silos” within the team; he will keenly identify the “process blockages” on the team’s path forward, which are caused by poor cross-departmental coordination, and use his influence to clear these “choke points.” He is the most active “super-node” in the organizational network.

Third, he needs to design an “autonomous environment” where “simple rules” can be “contextualized” and implemented within the team. He is the local “chief justice” of the company’s grand “constitution.” He needs to, together with his team members, deeply discuss what the seemingly concise “simple rules” actually mean in their specific work scenarios. He is responsible for interpreting the rules, and also for, within the boundaries of the rules, defending and granting the team the greatest degree of “autonomous decision-making power.” He is the “chief empowerment officer” of the team’s autonomy.

And when this “environment designer” has successfully built this “micro-environment,” full of “trust, openness, and autonomy,” for the team, his role will automatically be elevated to that of a “catalyst.”

He is no longer the “commander” who gives orders, but the “Socrates” who asks enlightening questions. He is no longer the “referee” who evaluates performance, but the “personal coach” who is dedicated to discovering the potential of every member. And he is no longer the “project manager” who only cares about task progress, but the “chief meaning officer” who can continuously connect the team’s daily, trivial execution with the company’s grand, inspiring “why.”

He is like a skilled chemist who, by precisely regulating the “temperature” and “humidity” of the “environment,” “catalyzes” the chemical reactions of “trust, collaboration, and innovation” within the team, and then quietly appreciates the miracle of “emergence” as it naturally happens.

Friends, this is the entire journey from “manager” to “environment designer.” It is a profound identity cognitive change, from “power” to “service.” The value of a manager will no longer come from his “position” on the organizational chart, but from the “environment” and “value” he can create for the “community” he serves.

The ancient Chinese Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching, describes the highest state of leadership for us: “The greatest leader, the people are unaware of his existence.” This means that when the greatest leader has accomplished his work and things are done, the people under his rule will not attribute the credit to him, but will say, “We did it ourselves.”

This is also the ultimate image of the future “environment designer.” He is the most successful, but also the most “selfless,” leader. The “environment” he designs is so perfect and harmonious that the team’s success seems to happen “naturally.” The team members will sincerely feel, “We did it all ourselves.”

And the humble “gardener” will smile and hide in the depths of the vibrant rainforest he has personally cultivated.

II. Building a Learning and Innovative Organizational Culture

(1) “Cognitive Sclerosis”—A Crisis More Terrible Than Financial Bankruptcy

Friends, after we have jointly completed the discussion on the “structure” of the organization and established the new paradigm of replacing “control” with “emergence,” we must turn our surgical knife to a deeper and more critical domain—the “culture” and “mindset” of the organization. Because the fate of an organization is ultimately determined not by the ingenuity of its organizational chart, but by the “health” of its collective mindset.

And in the AGI era, the most fatal and most insidious “organizational disease” that all enterprises will face will no longer be “strategic missteps” or “financial crises” in the traditional sense. It is a more fundamental “spiritual cancer” that can cause even the most powerful business empires to rot from within—we call it, “cognitive sclerosis.”

“Cognitive sclerosis,” this term describes not the decline of an organization’s intelligence or a lack of knowledge. On the contrary, it is often the most dangerous and most ironic “complication” brought about by “great success.”

Let’s dissect the pathogenesis of this “organizational disease” in detail.

When a company has achieved groundbreaking, huge success through some unique strategy, technology, or business model, an invisible but incredibly powerful “psychological gravitational field” will quietly form within the organization. The company’s past “successful experiences” will be continuously and repeatedly “deified” and “purified,” and eventually be summarized into a concise, unquestionable set of “creeds of success,” like the “Ten Commandments.”

This set of “creeds” will gradually permeate every capillary of the organization. The company’s recruitment process will begin to systematically look for “like-minded people” who are highly compatible with this set of creeds; the company’s incentive system will spare no effort to reward the “model soldiers” who execute this set of creeds most thoroughly; and the company’s decision-makers, the “elders” and “heroes” who have personally created the past glory, will naturally become the “chief high priests” of this set of creeds.

Over time, the entire organization will, around this “old map of success,” build a self-circulating, self-hypnotizing, and self-consolidating “cognitive greenhouse.” Within this greenhouse, any “information” that conforms to this set of creeds will be amplified and applauded; while any “heterogeneous signals” from the external world that contradict it will be instinctively and systematically “filtered,” “weakened,” and even “hostilely interpreted.”

Thus, the organization, without realizing it, loses that most precious, humble “perceptiveness” of the real world. It becomes a closed, arrogant life form that is only willing to listen to its own “echo.” This is “cognitive sclerosis.” It is more terrible than any external competitor, because it directly destroys the most fundamental ability of an organization to survive and evolve—the ability to learn.

To make this seemingly abstract discussion more concrete and tangible, let’s turn our gaze to the depths of business history and look at two classic, regrettable tragedies caused by “cognitive sclerosis.”

The protagonist of the first tragedy is Xerox. In the 1970s, Xerox, with its absolute monopoly in the photocopier field, became the undisputed “office empire.” At the same time, in its legendary “PARC” (Palo Alto Research Center), a group of the world’s most brilliant minds had quietly invented almost all the core technologies of the future: including the graphical user interface, the mouse, the Ethernet, and the prototype of the personal computer, which we are so familiar with today.

However, when the researchers at PARC excitedly demonstrated their revolutionary inventions to the “all-star team of executives” from Xerox headquarters, who were dressed in suits and ties, a tragic “cognitive mismatch” occurred. Those executives, they were the people in this world who knew the “photocopier” business best. Their “cognitive framework,” which had been repeatedly tempered by decades of great success in “photocopiers” and had become as hard as a diamond, made them completely lose the ability to “understand” when faced with the new species of the “personal computer.”

They saw, but they did not “perceive.”

They could not understand why anyone would need such an expensive “little machine” that could not be used to make copies; they could not even imagine how this “little machine” would subvert the stable, profitable “photocopier” world that they ruled, a world with a core business model of “leasing large, expensive equipment.” In the end, Xerox, the empire that once held the “future” completely in its hands, watched with its own eyes as Steve Jobs, the astute “external intruder,” casually took the spark of the “personal computer” from its laboratory and ultimately used it to ignite a new era.

The tragedy of Xerox is a classic case of “being unable to imagine a new future because of past success.”

And the protagonist of the other tragedy, Blockbuster, shows us another form of “cognitive sclerosis.” In the heyday of DVD rentals, Blockbuster was the undisputed “king of offline entertainment,” with thousands of physical stores. Its business model was clear and efficient, and its huge profits came largely from an “innovation” that all consumers hated but could do nothing about—the “late fee for videotapes.”

In 2000, a young man named Reed Hastings, after being fined forty dollars for returning Apollo 13 late, angrily founded a company called “Netflix.” Its initial business model was simple and clear: renting DVDs by mail, and most crucially, “no late fees.” Later, Hastings tried to sell this small company with an uncertain future to Blockbuster for fifty million dollars, but was met with the arrogant ridicule of the latter’s management.

Why did the executives of Blockbuster make this decision, which seems incredibly stupid today? Because, in their “cognitive framework,” which had been completely solidified by the great success of the “late fee,” “abolishing the late fee” was tantamount to “suicide.” They could not understand, and could not believe, how a rental company that did not rely on “fines” to make a profit could survive. They were completely hijacked by their most successful “cash cow.” In the end, this former offline giant was completely slapped to death on the beach by the new wave of the “subscription model” and “streaming media” era started by Netflix.

The tragedy of Blockbuster is a classic case of “being unable to give up an old present because of past success.”

Friends, neither Xerox nor Blockbuster failed because they were “stupid.” On the contrary, they were the smartest and most successful “players” in the “old world” they defined. Their failure was a more profound tragedy, one that stemmed from “cognition” itself.

And the arrival of AGI will amplify the risk of this “cognitive sclerosis” to an unprecedented, extreme, and therefore more dangerous degree. Because AGI, this ultimate “master of efficiency,” may also at the same time become the most powerful “enabler” and “solidifier” of “cognitive sclerosis.”

When an organization inputs its already sclerotic “creeds of success” to AGI as the “one and only correct answer,” AGI will, in an irrefutable, data-and-chart-filled, and seemingly incredibly “scientific” and “objective” way, repeatedly “prove” the “correctness” and “superiority” of this old set of creeds. It will become the most powerful “thermostat” of the organization’s “cognitive greenhouse.” It will use an endless stream of “confirmatory data” to kill all the new, fragile “sprouts of dissent” within the organization that try to challenge the existing paradigm.

In the future, the most dangerous organizations will no longer be those that do not use AGI, but those that are composed of a group of “cognitively sclerotic” humans and a powerful AGI that is “fed by sclerotic cognition,” forming a “perfect closed loop.”

So, friends, we must take “combating cognitive sclerosis” as the first and highest priority core principle of future organizational construction. As the ancient Chinese wisdom of the art of war has already profoundly revealed: the strongest fortress is always breached from within. An organization that has lost its “ability to learn,” no matter how powerful its technology, how abundant its capital, or how perfect its processes, its final fate is already doomed.

And how to build a new “learning and innovative” organizational culture that can systematically combat this “spiritual cancer” is the “ultimate prescription” for the survival of the organization that we will explore in depth next.

(2) “Psychological Safety”—The “Oxygen” of an Innovative Culture

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed how those once-great business empires, because they were hijacked by their own past great successes, eventually declined in the silent cancer of “cognitive sclerosis,” a crucial question has emerged before us: how can we, in our own organizations, build a powerful “immune system” that can systematically combat this “spiritual entropy”?

The answer is not to introduce a more advanced AGI management software, nor is it to hire a more legendary “star CEO.” The answer is much simpler, more internal, and also more difficult than all that. It lies hidden in a seemingly soft term from the science of interpersonal relationships, and that is “psychological safety.”

Let’s first, in a narrative way, walk into a “silent” scene that we may all be very familiar with, a scene that lacks “psychological safety.”

Please imagine a typical “project crisis” meeting, happening in countless offices around the globe. The company’s vice president, with a furrowed brow, sits at the head of the conference table. He has just, in an unquestionable tone, announced a piece of bad news: our most important project is seriously behind schedule; worse still, we have just learned that a small competitor we’ve never heard of has launched a “new species” that is sufficient to disrupt us in its core functions.

Then, with a sharp gaze, he scans the room and asks, “Everyone, can anyone tell me how this happened? And what should we do next?”

The meeting room falls into a suffocating silence that lasts for dozens of seconds. You see the young, most talented engineer. He had, in fact, foreseen the crisis of today three months ago, but he chose to remain silent because he was afraid that his “crow’s mouth”-like warning would offend the project leader and bring unnecessary risks to his career. You see the experienced marketing manager. A highly disruptive new strategy, one that can “fight fire with fire,” has, in fact, flashed through her mind. But she also chose to remain silent because she felt that the idea was not yet mature, and if she said it out loud, she might seem very “stupid.” And you see even more the project leader, who is well-versed in office politics. He clearly knows that the failure of the project stems from an unrealistic strategic assumption from the top, but he chose to remain silent even more because he deeply understands that in such a meeting, “challenging a superior” is tantamount to “career suicide.”

In the end, the meeting hastily concludes in a flurry of meaningless bureaucratic nonsense like “agreed in principle,” “will study in depth after the meeting.” And this company, in one “collective silence” after another, watches with its own eyes as the ship named “the future” quietly sails past.

Friends, this “silence,” this “collective aphasia” within an organization where everyone knows what the problem is but no one dares to stand up and speak the truth, is the most typical and most fatal “clinical manifestation” of a lack of “psychological safety.”

This concept, first proposed by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, is actually very simple in its definition. “Psychological safety” is when, within a team, all members jointly and deeply believe one thing: I am safe here. Even if I propose an idea that seems immature, or even stupid; even if I bravely point out the embarrassing truth that the emperor is not wearing any new clothes; even if I honestly admit a mistake I have made in my work, I will absolutely not be “punished,” “humiliated,” or “retaliated against” in any form for it.

We must deeply understand that “psychological safety” is not about making everyone get along and feel “comfortable.” On the contrary, it is the “safe container” that allows the truly difficult, opinion-filled, but critically important “constructive conflicts” to happen. Nor is it about “lowering” the standards for the team. On the contrary, only in an environment where “high psychological safety” and “high performance standards” coexist can a team truly enter the miraculous “learning and high-performance zone.”

So, how can such a precious “organizational culture oxygen,” as important as air, be deliberately and systematically “manufactured” by a leader?

Let’s look at another narrative. A new leader named “Anna” has just taken over the struggling team that has fallen into “collective silence,” which we described earlier.

At her first all-hands meeting after taking office, she did not, as everyone expected, give a passionate inaugural speech about “a new broom sweeps clean.” The first thing she did was to make a “public self-disclosure.” She frankly shared with everyone a stupid mistake she had made early in her career, a mistake that had almost ruined an entire project, and how she had painfully learned her lesson from that failure.

This act is the first “foundation-laying ceremony” for building psychological safety. When a leader first bravely shows her “vulnerability” and “imperfection,” she has, in a silent way, sent a clear signal to the entire team: “It is acceptable to make mistakes here, and it is acceptable to discuss them openly.”

Then, during the discussion part of the meeting, a young engineer, after hesitating for a long time, finally mustered the courage to propose a new, seemingly “wild” idea that was completely contrary to the current mainstream plan. In an instant, all eyes were on Anna’s face. And Anna, with an extremely focused expression, listened carefully to his entire presentation. Then, the first thing she said was: “Thank you very much. This is the most valuable idea I have heard today, because it has provided us with a brand new possibility that we had never imagined before. Let’s see together how we can make this idea more feasible.”

This is the second “key reinforcement” for building psychological safety. When the first “fool who speaks the truth” in a team is not only not punished, but receives the highest form of “public praise,” a new set of game rules is quietly established.

Finally, Anna “reframed” the team’s overall work. She told everyone: “Our highest priority for this next project is not to ‘ensure a one-time success,’ but to ‘ensure that we can gain the maximum cognitive upgrade from this process.’ Therefore, what I expect is not for you to bring me a perfect, flawless result; rather, I hope that we can jointly conduct a series of the boldest ‘experiments,’ and from every unavoidable ‘failure,’ bring back the most precious ‘learning’.”

Friends, this is the entire process of a great “organizational gardener” “tilling, fertilizing, and irrigating” a “cultural soil” that has become compacted by fear. It has nothing to do with power, nothing to do with IQ. It only has to do with the leader’s humility, wisdom, and sincerity.

And the effect of this “organizational culture oxygen” provided by “psychological safety” can even be clearly explained by modern neuroscience. When a person is in a low-safety environment full of “interpersonal threats,” the “amygdala” in his brain, which is in charge of “fear” and “stress response,” will be highly activated. This will inhibit the activity of the “prefrontal cortex” in his brain, which is responsible for long-term thinking, complex analysis, and creative thinking. Simply put, an employee who is in a state of fear for a long time is physiologically “dumber.”

And psychological safety, by reducing this “interpersonal threat,” is like re-supplying sufficient oxygen to an oxygen-deprived brain. It allows the team’s collective intelligence to “awaken” and enter its optimal “operating state.”

So, friends, let us remember this. The ultimate weapon against “cognitive sclerosis” is not a smarter brain, or a more advanced AGI; it is the warm, safe, and trust-filled “field” that allows all brains to dare to contribute their truest wisdom without reservation.

This is “psychological safety,” the one and only foundation of a future innovative culture, which seems soft but is harder than any steel.

(3) Treating “Failure” as an “Asset”

Friends, in an organizational greenhouse full of “psychological safety,” when the hard ice of fear begins to melt and sincere dialogue begins to flow, we have created the most basic, indispensable “preconditions” for “learning” and “innovation” to occur. However, this is just the beginning.

Because merely “daring” to try and make mistakes is far from enough. The excellence of a truly great learning organization lies not in its never making mistakes, but in its possessing a more advanced and wiser new worldview towards “error” and “failure.” It has completed a profound value reassessment, from “financial accounting” to “cognitive accounting.”

On the ledger of traditional “financial accounting,” “failure” is always recorded in the “liabilities” and “losses” column. It is a “cost center” that needs to be forgotten as soon as possible, an “operational stain” that needs to be borne by the person responsible. What we are going to discuss today is a brand new “cognitive accounting.” On this new ledger, certain specific “high-quality failures” will no longer be considered a “liability.” On the contrary, they will be considered an extremely precious “intangible asset” that can bring long-term returns to the organization—a wealth we call “cognitive assets.”

To understand this disruptive value reassessment, we must first establish a more refined taxonomy of “failure.” Because not all failures have equal value.

   The first type of failure is “failure from inattention.” It comes from carelessness, laziness, or a blatant violation of existing procedures. This type of failure contains almost no new cognitive information; it is a pure, avoidable “waste of resources.” For this type of failure, an organization should, through better management and stricter accountability, do its best to prevent it.

   The second type of failure is “failure from complexity.” In a dynamic, complex system full of countless variables, some failures are inevitable. For example, a production interruption caused by an unexpected “black swan” event in the global supply chain. The core lesson of this type of failure is not to pursue “never making mistakes,” but to build a more “resilient” system that can recover quickly when errors occur.

   And what we are going to discuss today is the third, and most valuable, type of failure—”intelligent failure.”

    An “intelligent failure,” in its essence, is not an “accident,” but a meticulously designed “scientific experiment.” It must have several distinct features: first, it must be “goal-oriented”; it aims to test a “core hypothesis” that is important for the future but is uncertain. Second, its “cost must be controllable”; it occurs at the “aggressive end” of our barbell strategy, and its maximum possible loss will never shake the organization’s foundation of survival. Third, it must be “fast in action”; it pursues the completion of a “hypothesis-verification-feedback” learning loop in the shortest possible time. Finally, and most importantly, whether it succeeds or fails, it must be able to produce clear, high-information-content “data,” thereby providing a precious, irrefutable “factual basis” for the organization’s future decisions.

Let’s use one of the most famous and most classic “intelligent failures” in business history to feel the immense power of this “cognitive asset.” The protagonist of this failure is Amazon, and its commercially disastrous smartphone—the Fire Phone.

In 2014, when Amazon, pouring all its top R&D resources, launched this phone, which carried Jeff Bezos’s great expectations, the “core hypothesis” it wanted to test was: “Can we, by building a new hardware portal that is deeply integrated with our e-commerce ecosystem, create a ‘fourth pole’ sufficient to challenge Apple and Google?”

However, the market soon gave the cold, negative “experimental result.” The Fire Phone, due to its immature experience and closed ecosystem, was a complete commercial disaster, ultimately bringing Amazon a huge “financial loss” of hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to the traditional business script, this should have been a frustrating, tragic ending, full of mutual accusations, accountability, and the disbandment of the team. But at Amazon, the story took a completely different, “emergence”-wisdom-filled turn.

They did not “cover up” this failure, nor did they “punish” the teams that made the mistakes. They launched a deep review mechanism that we call the “organizational black box,” treating this expensive “failure” as a precious lesson for which a huge “tuition fee” had been paid, and from it, calmly and systematically, “extracted” the “cognitive assets” that were more precious than money.

What did they learn? Through this failure, they, for the first time, completely mastered all the “tacit knowledge” of the design, R&D, manufacturing, and supply chain management of “consumer-grade hardware.” They, through this failure, deeply understood how difficult, and yet how important, it is to build an open “developer ecosystem.” And most crucially, they discovered that the “dynamic perspective” and “voice wake-up” technology on the Fire Phone, which was too advanced and was criticized by consumers, the “artificial intelligence” and “natural language understanding” capabilities behind it, perhaps had a future far broader than mobile phones.

It was precisely these shining “cognitive assets,” extracted from the smoldering “financial ruins” of the Fire Phone, that, a few years later, directly gave birth to the revolutionary new species that completely changed the global smart home landscape—the small, black cylinder, the Echo smart speaker, with the Alexa voice assistant built in.

Friends, this is the entire secret of “treating failure as an asset.” The “financial liability” of the Fire Phone was, in an incredible way, “transformed” into the even greater “cognitive asset” of the Alexa ecosystem. The “wrong options” that this great “intelligent failure” eliminated for Amazon for the next decade, and the “correct course” it pointed out, its value had long since far surpassed the short-term loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.

And for this “alchemy of failure” to happen systematically and continuously within an organization, it necessarily requires leaders to proactively build a new “organizational culture” and “incentive mechanism.”

The leader must, first, start with himself, publicly defining every strategy he proposes as a “hypothesis to be tested,” not an “indisputable truth.” He must shift his focus from the “success or failure of the result” to the “learning of the process.” He must, in every review meeting, repeatedly ask the question that is ten thousand times more important than “who should be responsible”: “What did we learn this time?”

More importantly, the organization must, in its resource allocation and incentive mechanisms, unequivocally “encourage” the “explorers” who dare to take the risk of “intelligent failure.” A truly great innovative organization must have an “innovation portfolio” mechanism, like “venture capital,” within it. It allows, and even mandates, teams to invest a portion of their resources in those “high-risk, high-return” projects that have a “very low probability of success, but if successful, the return will be disruptive.”

And when a team, after conducting a rigorous, brave “intelligent trial and error,” finally brings back a clear “cognitive map” that says “this way is a dead end,” what they should get is by no means “punishment,” but “praise” and “applause” of the same caliber as the teams that have achieved “expected success.”

Friends, the twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl Popper once proposed a profound theory of “falsification.” He believed that scientific progress is not made by continuously “verifying” the correctness of a theory; on the contrary, it is made by continuously designing experiments to “falsify” the errors of a theory in the most rigorous way. A theory that has withstood countless attempts at “falsification” and still stands is a truly strong theory, one that is closer to the truth.

The same is true for a great innovative organization. Its core task is not to repeatedly “prove” how “correct” its past successes were, but to, with an almost “masochistic” attitude, continuously design and execute various “intelligent failure” experiments to proactively “falsify” its own outdated “successful assumptions.”

It is precisely in this journey of “falsification,” one of bravely embracing “failure” again and again, that an organization can continuously escape the gravity of “cognitive sclerosis,” continuously evolve itself, and ultimately obtain the “antifragile” survival ability that is the scarcest and most precious in the AGI era.

(4) Establishing an Organizational “Memory and Reflection” Mechanism

After we have jointly completed the value reassessment of “failure” and bravely regarded it as a precious “cognitive asset” that can drive organizational evolution, a more thorny, practical problem follows: how do we systematically “store,” “retrieve,” and “utilize” this intangible, precious asset?

Because a “learning” that cannot be remembered, cannot be reflected upon, and cannot be passed down is, in its essence, just a one-time, scattered “flash of insight” that will eventually dissipate with the wind.

Let’s first tell a tragedy about “organizational forgetting,” a tragedy that may be happening right around us.

Please imagine a huge multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees. It is like a giant suffering from severe “amnesia.” Within the body of this giant, every independent “organ” (business unit) and “cell” (employee) is in fact accumulating incredibly precious experience about “success” and “failure” in their daily struggles.

In the R&D center in Shanghai, a team, through a costly “intelligent failure,” has finally verified that a certain technical path is a dead end. But on the other side of the globe, another team in Berlin, being completely unaware, is cheerfully applying for a budget to embark on the same, already-proven-“wrong” path. In the Asia-Pacific sales team, a clever salesperson has worked out a unique communication script that can greatly increase customer conversion rates. But this precious “tacit knowledge” only stays in the “oral tradition” of him and a few of his colleagues, and has never been able to be learned and replicated by their colleagues in North America, who are equally eager to improve their performance.

This amnesiac giant, although it has the largest body and the most intelligent minds (employees), is, due to the lack of an effective “memory and reflection” hub, repeating the same mistakes day after day and missing the successes that could have been replicated. Although it is alive, it has never truly “learned” and “grown” as a unified, complete “living organism.”

This is the heartbreaking reality that most traditional organizations face on the topic of “knowledge management.” We are not not learning, but our learning outcomes are fragmented, isolated, and cannot be sedimented and passed on.

Why do our traditional “review” and “knowledge management” mechanisms fail? Because they are, in their essence, an outdated “agricultural era” model based on “static documents.” The final outcome of a review meeting is often just a dozens-of-pages-long, detailed but unread PPT document. This “mummy of knowledge” will be quietly uploaded to some unknown corner of the company’s server, and from then on, will have no connection with the living life of the organization.

And the arrival of artificial general intelligence will completely change all this for us. It will, for the first time, give us the possibility to build a truly dynamic, intelligent “memory and reflection” system for an organization, a system that can simulate a “biological brain.”

Let’s imagine the basic working principle of this AGI-driven “organizational brain.”

The first core component of this brain is the “holographic organizational memory bank,” which plays the role of the “hippocampus,” responsible for transforming everything the organization has experienced into “long-term memory.” AGI will, like a ubiquitous, tireless “organizational scribe,” in a non-intrusive way, objectively and neutrally record the complete “data life cycle” of every project, every decision. From the initial project kick-off meeting recording, to every key decision email; from every code submission during the product development process, to every user comment on social networks triggered by a marketing campaign. All of these will be transformed by AGI into structured, searchable “organizational memory slices.” This is no longer a collection of isolated “work reports” written by humans; this is an objective, panoramic “high-definition documentary” of the organization’s life history.

And the second, and more important, core component of this brain is the “intelligent cognitive extraction engine.” It plays the role of the “cerebral cortex,” responsible for “reflecting” on the massive, raw “memory data” and “extracting” the “wisdom” that can be passed on.

The work of this engine is no longer a simple “information summary.” It is a “strategic analyst” with deep insight. It will proactively search for the “patterns of success” that can be repeatedly verified in countless successful cases: “We have found that in the past three years, all successful new product launches have shown three common, key behavioral characteristics in their promotion phase…”; it will also, with the unbiased, surgeon-like calmness, dissect the failed cases to find the most fundamental “cognitive flaw” behind them: “Through a full review of this project’s failure, we have found that its real turning point was not in the execution phase, but at the very beginning of the project, when the team made a fatal ‘wrong assumption’ about a core user need, an assumption that was repeatedly falsified by subsequent data…”

It will distill the organization’s past “experiences,” which are full of chaos and noise, into clear, verifiable “organizational wisdom,” like “scientific theorems.”

However, friends, a brain with only “memory” and “reflection” abilities is just a “thinker.” A truly great “organizational brain” must also have a third, and most advanced, core component—the “proactive wisdom push system.” It plays the role of the “neural network,” responsible for “connecting” the “wisdom” that has been sedimented to the “nerve ending” (employee) in the organization who needs it most, at the most appropriate time and in the most appropriate way.

This system is no longer a passive “knowledge database,” waiting for employees to proactively “search”; it is a proactive, considerate “wisdom service butler,” like a personal tutor.

When a young product manager is preparing to write a business plan for a brand new project, this system will automatically push the “summary of successes and failures” of all similar projects in the company’s history, as well as the most valuable “cognitive assets,” to him for reference. This is “just-in-time learning.”

When an engineer in Shanghai raises a technical problem about “algorithm optimization” on the company’s internal forum, this system will instantly match him with a senior expert in Berlin, from the organization’s global “memory bank,” who had solved a highly similar problem three years ago, and proactively establish a connection for them. This is “cross-spatio-temporal wisdom connection.”

Even when a strategic decision-making team is conducting a strategic deduction for an uncertain future, this system can, based on the organization’s entire “failure assets,” conduct a “risk simulation” and issue a warning to the decision-makers: “Please note, your current strategic assumption has a 93% similarity to the assumption we relied on in the failed ‘Firebird Project’ in 2018. Here is the complete review report of that failure…” This is “immune-system-like risk warning based on the organization’s own memory.”

Friends, this is the complete blueprint for “solidifying learning” into “organizational muscle memory.” It is a never-stopping “wisdom flywheel” composed of “holographic memory,” “intelligent reflection,” and “proactive connection.”

In this new “human-machine symbiotic” learning model, humanity has also found its own irreplaceable, more noble new role. AGI provides us with the most comprehensive, most objective “facts” and “data”; and we humans can be completely liberated from the tedious “information organization” work to focus on the higher-level “wisdom sublimation” that requires more “intuition,” “imagination,” and “value judgment.”

“Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide for the future.” This ancient Chinese wisdom can today finally break free from the fragile, accidental “oral history” model that relies on individual “heroes,” and be systematically and permanently realized by a reliable, eternal, and tireless “organizational brain.”

And an organization that truly possesses “collective memory” and “collective reflection” can be called a truly “living organism” in the true sense. It will, in this evolutionary race driven by AGI, a race full of acceleration and iteration, obtain the one and only, and final, ticket to the future.

Friends, our exploration of corporate evolution has reached its end here. From the top-level design of “strategic shift” to the internal transformation of “organizational change,” we have jointly drawn a new blueprint for the survival and prosperity of the future commercial life form.

On this blueprint, we clearly see the evolutionary direction of future enterprises.

Its soul must be value-driven. When all “what to do” and “how to do” will be homogenized by AGI, the grand and sincere “why” will become the company’s only un-replicable identity marker and gravitational core.

Its body must be a symbiotic ecosystem. When the imperial walls of “control” become meaningless under the impact of AGI, the only way out for an enterprise is to open up, to cultivate a business rainforest with a posture of “empowerment,” a rainforest with diverse species, interdependence, and the ability to jointly enlarge the value pie.

Its blood and nerves must be organizationally agile. When “prediction” becomes impossible, the enterprise must abandon the rigid pyramid, bravely embrace chaos and uncertainty, and, through “simple rules” and an “empowering environment,” catalyze the bottom-up “emergent” wisdom that can respond quickly to changes.

And this profound evolution also necessarily requires the leader to complete an identity transformation. He will no longer be the “general” who sits high atop the pyramid, holding all the answers and giving orders. He must step down from the altar and become a humble, patient “gardener.” He no longer prescribes the growth of plants, but focuses on providing sunshine, soil, and water; he no longer pursues personal achievements, but takes the prosperity of the entire ecosystem as his highest achievement.

Because in the final analysis, the ultimate business competition of the AGI era will no longer be a competition of computing power between machines, but a competition of charismatic appeal between humanities. The companies that can ultimately win will inevitably be those that have best and most sincerely released the most precious qualities of “humanity”—those that can ignite the inner fire of employees and users with a great mission; those that can win the respect and following of business partners with a generous empowerment; and even more so, those that can, with a culture full of psychological safety, inspire the goodwill and creativity deep within every ordinary person.

The Tao Te Ching says: “The highest good is like water. Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.”

The business kings of the future will be like water.