A one-person company is also taking the same test paper: The five major cross-pressures taught me by "System Leadership"

A while ago, a friend who runs a company invited me for coffee. He pushed his phone in front of me, and on the screen was a dense to-do list. He said with a wry smile that this month he was dealing with customer delivery, keeping an eye on the team, and reporting to investors, and he also had to find time to think about next year’s new product line. He felt that he was doing multiple-choice questions every day, and there seemed to be no standard answer to each question.

I know that feeling all too well. Because as the owner of a one-person company, I write the same exam paper every day. It’s just that my team is a group of AIs, the investor is myself, and none of the forces pulling each other are missing.

In the past, I always thought that this was due to poor time management. It was because I was not self-disciplined enough and my schedule was not accurate enough that I focused on one thing and neglected the other. Until I read Rob. Only after reading “System Leadership” (opens in a new tab) by Robert E. Siegel did I realize that I had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the problem.

To put it bluntly, it is not a matter of time, it is “cross pressure”

Siegel is a management lecturer at Stanford Business School. He has written more than 115 case studies. He worked at Intel and GE in his early years, and also participated in Andy. Grove author of “The Age of 10x” (opens in a new tab). Such a resume in industry and academia qualifies him to make a very serious statement: today’s leaders are experiencing sustained, violent and diverse impacts that their predecessors have never experienced.

He gave this dilemma a name: cross-pressures.

As soon as the word hit my eyes, I was convinced. Because it hits the nail on the head with that feeling of frustration that no matter what you do or how well you do it, in the end you feel like you haven’t done it right. These pressures are excruciating not because there are too many of them, but because they are contradictory: you go east, and another force pulls you to the west. They are very personal and intense, but few people can explain them clearly in a way that is understandable and useful.

That’s what Siegel did.

Systems Leadership: The Third Way Between Command and Control and Silicon Valley Disruption

He and former GE CEO Jeff. Jeff Immelt spent eight years developing a structure called Systems Leadership.

This name is borrowed from systems thinking in the technology circle, that is, Peter. What Peter Senge said in “The Fifth Discipline” (opens in a new tab): don’t just look at a single part, but see the simultaneous interaction between various forces. For example, if you want to fix an engine, cure a patient, or predict the weather, if you only focus on one of the variables, you are destined to hit a wall.

The same goes for leadership. What Siegel means is that leadership is not the sum of the skills of finance, marketing, and operations, but a cross-disciplinary path that unifies them. It is neither the traditional command-and-control authoritarian leadership nor the Silicon Valley-style disruptive leadership of cutting and retraining. It is the third way.

Five major cross-pressures: Translate the CEO’s problems into my problems

The backbone of the book is the five major cross-pressures he summarized. As I read, I couldn’t help but convert each item into a one-person company version. It turns out that although the scale is several orders of magnitude different, the pulling feeling is exactly the same:

Cross Pressure	The CEO’s Version	My Version of the One-Man Company
Priorities Priorities	Pay attention to this quarter’s financial results, or invest in a new business three years from now?	Hand over the client’s case today, or start writing that book you’ve been putting aside?
Team Management People	Demand performance from executives, or take care of team morale?	Give clear instructions to the AI ​​army, or keep your partners warm?
Sphere of Impact Sphere	Looking after employees, or responding to shareholders and customers?	Should you stick to your own creative pace, or meet readers’ expectations?
Geographical Category Geography	Deeply cultivate the home country market, or expand overseas?	Focus on Chinese readers in Taiwan, or look at opportunities in Chinese and international markets?
Personal Mission Purpose	Show ambition or be statesmanlike with the overall situation in mind?	Make the work I want to do, or deliver the product the market wants?

Did you see it? These five forces are not independent. How you allocate today and the future will affect how you lead your team; what your personal mission is will also determine how you deal with internal and external people. They are like a web, if you pull one corner, the whole web will move. This is exactly why scheduling your time alone won’t solve the problem.

What impressed me the most was actually his humility.

To be honest, I have read a lot of this kind of business management books, and many of them are selling one thing: as long as you follow my formula, your company and your career will be smooth sailing.

Siegel came the other way. He puts it very clearly in the book: He will not tell you whether to invest 20% or 80% of your resources in innovation, because there is no such formula. The starting point of system leadership is to admit frankly: there is always more we don’t know than we know.

This sentence is particularly sobering to read in an era when everyone is selling AI solutions with one click. After all, I myself deal with AI every day. I know very well that no matter how powerful the tool is, it cannot replace the person who is willing to bear uncertainty and make decisions. A true leader does not act because he has the answer, but understands that business and even life are largely influenced by circumstances and luck, but still moves forward with reasonable confidence. What the system leader gives is not an answer, but a thinking structure that will keep you from drowning in the stormy sea.

If you are also writing this exam paper, I would suggest three things

After reading this book, if I were to leave three actions that operators who are also pulled by cross-pressures (whether you are leading 3,000 people or zero people) can take immediately, I would say:

1. Name your stress first. Place your most painful dilemma at the moment against these five sets of stress. Just knowing that this is called cross-pressure and that it has no solution but can only be managed will eliminate half of the anxiety.
2. Stop looking for that perfect ratio. Stop asking how much time I should spend on innovation, and instead ask how much I am willing to deliberately allocate this season to something that will not pay off in the short term. Replace the pursuit of correct solutions with conscious choices.
3. Recalculated every quarter. The weights of these five forces will flow with the situation. The ratio matched today will expire in three months. System leadership is not a one-time setting, but continuous fine-tuning.

Warren． Warren Buffett said that when the tide goes out, you realize who is not wearing pants. Siegel reminds us: Stop waiting for the tide to come back. You can never control when the tide comes back; what you can control is whether you stand firm enough when the tide goes out.

This book won’t make your problems go away. But it gives you a new pair of glasses, allowing you to see clearly where you stand in the midst of chaos. For me, that’s enough.