Reflective Journal Entry 2

TASK:

Reflect on the working culture and management style in Google and Lenovo. You may choose to explore how far their working cultures and management styles reflect their respective societies, share your personal experiences and opinions on your preference of working culture and management style, etc

Google and Lenovo share common goals, but employs different techniques to achieve them. If we look deeper into the root of the difference, this actually reflects the disparity between the American and the Chinese societies in some aspect.

Firstly, Google's working culture emphasises greatly on autonomy and self-discernment for employees, together with human relations and interactions, as well as a bottom up approach, where employees can suggest ideas for the company.

No doubt, this working culture and management style is reflected by the American's staunch belief of human rights. Extracted from the Universal declaration of human rights, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." Dissent is widely encouraged in America. It is accepted as they believe it is just a mere statement of one's right to expressing one's opinion. It was even accepted by Barack Obama, president of the United States of America. In my opinion, this shaped the way Google runs its administration, catering to the needs of employees like they were its "brothers".
Lenovo, on the other hand, follows a strict hierarchy whereby orders and ideas come from the top and employees are expected to follow without question or reluctance.

In my opinion, this working culture and management style stemmed from Confucius' teachings, which had a strong emphasis of respect. For Confucius, this concept of respect is expressed by the character jen, which meant that the social framework defines the accepted range of respectful conduct toward others when two people came together. Besides that, respect is due to persons in accordance with dynamic social roles, as encompassed in the Five Relationships that he came up with. Although Confucius might have passed away a long time ago, his teachings still remain up to today, greatly influencing the Chinese society in everyday life, such as the disapproval of students to question their teachers and the act of disagreeing with one's parents over something they had already decided upon being frowned upon. Ultimately, this society that Lenovo was built upon focussed on the social positioning of one's rank that determines their right to question or discern without offending another the other party.

In many societies, the latter's way of thinking is preferred.

Take a look at Singapore, is there a company which resembles the least like Google? Even in America, the heartland for freedom of speech and opinion, companies like Apple or Microsoft have slanted heavily towards Lenovo's style of operations.

Right now as a student in a Singapore school, I am definitely moving more towards the Lenovo style of management. Like Lenovo's way of life, I have a fixed time which I am supposed to report to school, a fixed time to hand in homework determined by a teacher and a pre-determined pen and paper test that would determine my future. Furthermore, resources like the basketball courts, the street soccer fields, or the swimming pool are not available for use when we want to use them. As students, we have no right to say "I am tired and I need a break now, let's go to the basketball court and have a game," during lesson time. However, I can see that the school is trying to incorporate the Google's approach at the same time. There is the project's day competition, which is free for us to choose which topic we would like to research on, and when we want to research it over a span of 6 months.

This synthesis of different approaches is the school's aim to expose us to different approaches that companies take in the near future, or so I feel. Although it achieves to bring out the management style like Lenovo, I still do not feel the true essence Google's approach.  

As we turn our attentions to our modernising world, I am finding ourselves getting too obsessed with results that we forget to learn how to relax while at work, too obsessed in following our superiors to think innovatively and reflect the problem ourselves.  

Personally, I prefer the Google's working culture and management style. Simply put it, I feel that life is boring and dull for those who work under Lenovo's influence. In essence, I prefer an inclusive society, where everyone is allowed to run the show. I mean, what is the point of life to be another person's shadow, working for him, carrying out his orders with no right to propose one's own? Moreover, I strongly approve the Google's working culture and management style as it brings out the true essence of humans being a societal animal, who listens to each other without the barrier of rank, social status, of wellbeing.

However, that was only a mere ideal. As a matter of fact, nothing ever works out the way it should be in society, such as how the utopian communist ideal was abused and ruined. In this case, the drawback of the Google style of management and working culture is that people are by nature, evil, greedy, and corrupted. The Google's style of management is indeed preyed upon by the black sheep of our  human society, such as the founders of Twitter who made use of Google's free time and paycheque to build up its empire before deserting Google. This comes as a drawback from the trust invested in employees and the little management used to supervise them.

Furthermore, one needs people of high calibre to think out of the box, to innovate, and to explore, which makes this style of management only limited to the most pristine companies capable of recruiting such talent. The most biting point of the truth is that Chief Executive Officers usually care for nothing than efficiency and productivity, together with their hold on power. They do not want to have a messy way of dealing with decisions. So, they take the easy way out and follow the Lenovo style of "just do and follow".

Until human society change for the better and prove that humans can achieve more with the given autonomy and relaxed management, companies will naturally adopt "The Lenovo Way" and we will just have to be submissive while letting the super alpha set the direction.