往事可以回首，当下更需专注，未来值得期待（字节跳动八周年全员信）

The Past Is Worth Looking Back On, the Present Needs More Focus, the Future Is Worth Looking Forward To (ByteDance 8th Anniversary All-Staff Letter)

> By Zhang Yiming · ByteDance 8th anniversary all-staff letter · first published on ByteDance's official WeChat account 字节范儿 · 2020-03-12 · [Original link](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OWrC9iXHxgUZtaLm8GN4ow)

Hello everyone,

Today is the company's 8th anniversary. Under this new mode of remote work, I'm chatting with you online about some new ideas.

At this juncture I want to make a fairly major organizational upgrade: today, the company is appointing Zhang Lidong and Zhang Nan (Kelly) as Chairman and CEO of ByteDance China respectively, with overall responsibility for developing ByteDance's China business. As ByteDance's global CEO, I will next spend more time and energy on Europe, the US and other markets, working with Alex to round out ByteDance's global management team, and helping Erich Andersen, Roland Cloutier and other newly joined colleagues integrate better.

Over the past 8 years ByteDance has developed at great speed. We have grown from one small product into a big platform offering multiple products and services to users around the world, and this year our global headcount will reach 100,000. Along the way we have met many challenges.

To respond to changes in the business, we have kept optimizing and adjusting the company's organization and ways of collaborating. For example, we defined the CEOs and management teams of our main businesses; set up virtual P&Ls for each business to help them make better decisions; and kept updating our performance management and OKR tools. But how to build a super-large global organization well is still a new subject for us.

As the business has grown bigger, its external effects have kept expanding too, and society has come to expect more of us. Over the past year I spent nearly two-thirds of my time travelling to many places around the world. Besides learning about the company's business, I talked with many local colleagues and friends, did user research at Dilli Haat market in Delhi, visited a friend's home in Paris, and went to museums in various places to learn their history; I came to a deeper understanding of the richness of the world and the evolution of civilizations. We have business and users in many countries around the world, and we need to think more seriously about our relationship with the outside world and our contribution to it.

More than that, beyond the information and content platform business we're relatively familiar with, we have also begun exploring many entirely new business directions. For us this is crossing into new fields, but our understanding of these new businesses is still far from enough.

These challenges require more change in how our company is organized. Besides rounding out the global management team, I will free up energy from the company's day-to-day operations and focus on a few things:

1. Studying how to better improve the management of a super-large global organization

Frankly, managing a company in 30 countries and more than 180 cities with over 60,000 employees isn't easy. And that doesn't include the 5,000 foreign teachers in North America for our education business, the outsourced staff in the company's administrative system, and so on. Over the past year we have already seen quite a few management problems; the most direct feedback is that the survey results for employee engagement and satisfaction have fallen.

I will try, over the next three years, to visit every region where we have an office, to understand the company and also learn the local culture. Our goal is not only to build a global business, but even more to build a global, diverse and inclusive organization. Through a better organization, we can unleash everyone's potential and creativity and serve users around the world.

We have always said develop a company as a product; understanding what the essence of the company as a product is matters a great deal for improving management.

Before 2016 I read many things and thought a lot, and put it into practice in managing our company. The candor and clarity in the ByteDance style comes from my trying to understand what Jack Welch emphasized again and again, strongly, in Winning: candor lowers an organization's transaction costs. "In a knowledge organization, every person is a manager": this is Drucker's redefinition of the manager. His thinking on management by objectives inspired our emphasis on organizational effectiveness and our practice of OKRs. His ideas and Coase's pushed me to think about what the boundaries of a firm are, and how to measure the transaction costs inside an organization from an outside perspective. The "context, not control" philosophy we hold to was directly influenced by Netflix. Of course it also has a lot to do with Hayek's account of the fatal conceit of reason; I came to recognize the importance of information transparency, distributed decision-making and innovation.

Changes in how tech companies are organized bring many new changes, which show up in business, finance and HR. In finance: how to bring the LTV from UG into internal financial statements, and how costs should be settled between businesses. In HR: how to organize talent where the three dimensions of function, business and market intersect. And correspondingly, the company's internal tools also need new development and optimization. For us, the past two years have really been many problems and little thinking. From here on I will spend more time learning and researching, and discuss improvements with colleagues in ES.

2. Studying how tech companies can create more social value

Starting in the second half of last year, the management team and I seriously rediscussed what the essence of the company is. We started from the most basic questions. What is technology, and what is a tech company? Why do tech companies need to take on more social responsibility? Technology means the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry; the basic condition for being a tech company is continually learning scientific knowledge. If a tech company can keep raising its understanding and improving its methods, its leverage grows ever larger, leading companies take an ever larger share of the economy, their influence on people's lives grows ever greater, and they draw ever more regulatory attention.

Externally, public expectations will keep rising; internally, employees also need a stronger sense of mission to shoulder greater responsibility. Providing users with innovative, high-quality, efficient products and services is a company's basic social responsibility. But tech companies must also think about how to deal with their own external effects, actively cooperate with outside parties, and create social value.

Over the past two years we have done a lot of work on corporate social responsibility, including setting up a public-welfare department and requiring every business to have CSR goals and plans, on a par with its user goals and business goals. Several projects, such as finding missing people, medical aid and poverty alleviation, have been very successful, but overall I feel it is still far from enough, especially compared with our goal of reaching a high level globally.

I will talk with more colleagues and with people outside, on one hand to better understand the world's current problems, and on the other to explore how to build better mechanisms inside the company for taking on more social responsibility.

3. Thinking about and planning new strategic directions such as education

Education is a new business direction the company is trying as it crosses into new fields. As you should know, I have always placed great importance on recruiting talent and have high hopes for individual potential. I agree with Drucker that, from inside the company, the meaning of a company's existence is to realize people's creativity by way of the company. I would add one more line: to let everyone have richer, more meaningful experiences. Yes, the same as our user products' mission: inspire creativity, enrich life.

For a while in 2016 I noticed that many of the company's excellent algorithm engineers came from the ACM class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, so I went to Shanghai specially to visit Professor Yu Yong. The rate at which the SJTU ACM class turns out talent, and later my research into Minerva University, made me see directly that education is critical to unleashing people's potential, and that education itself still has enormous potential. You could call it the starting point of my serious thinking about the education business. Over the past two years I interviewed quite a few teachers and students, including sitting in on different classes to experience different teaching results, but because my time and energy were limited, it wasn't sustained enough. Going forward I will restart my interviews and observation of education.

Recently the online tutoring market has been very hot, and many people ask me how the company's business is going. Actually I'm not anxious; I'm patient. I think it is still very early, and the education business must have more fundamental innovation, provided of course that we have a deeper understanding. Especially for a company that already has successful businesses, starting new businesses isn't easy; there is both habit and inertia. Trying boldly in new fields is an important mark of always staying a startup.

On our eighth anniversary, I wish you all: the past is worth looking back on, the present needs even more focus, the future is worth looking forward to.

Zhang Yiming

2020.03.12

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