Summary

P&G is a real “CEO factory.” Founded in 1837, its first 3 CEOs were family members; since then, 12 professional managers have served 13 CEO terms, all promoted internally without exception. Its alumni effect is just as striking: many executives at Unilever, Nestlé and Mars, as well as the founders of Perfect Diary, U Smile, 悦刻 and 直观, came through P&G.
The core hiring logic is to look for innate traits rather than learned skills. 于东琪 compares drive for success, resilience and leadership to a person’s “operating system”—experience and skills are merely the software running on top: “The operating system determines how quickly and how well you can write the program.” P&G’s Eight Questions include situational prompts designed to identify people who can reflect and who have a genuine interest in the business: “You can control how long an employee stays at the company, but it is very hard to control how much time and energy that employee invests in your business.”
The interview has one hard filter: the direction of attribution. Candidates who blame failure on “a bad macro environment” or “regulators not favoring the industry” are rejected outright: “If someone pushes problems outward, it is also difficult for that person to have leadership, because they must have thrown plenty of people around them under the bus.” Candidates who proactively discuss a case they themselves botched, by contrast, won unanimous approval from both HR interviewers.
Keeping top talent is not about money. “The better the talent, the less sensitive they tend to be to money.” At one industry benchmark company, employees have been offered multiples of their existing pay by competitors across the sector, yet not a single person has left. The reasons: “Only here can all the work I do become my work,” plus a group of excellent peers who constantly push one another to grow. Money is the easiest competitive advantage to copy; benefits and culture are the hardest.
P&G’s three-part talent-development playbook is simple. Managers “strictly restrain their own hands” and never do employees’ work for them; they use coach-style questions to force teams to complete their own thinking frameworks—the source of Wang Xing’s habit of repeatedly asking no more than 100 questions in meetings; and they lead from the front line. “At P&G, there would never be a female sales manager wearing high heels”: executives must also visit stores, or they gradually lose their intuition for consumers.
“Only speed wins” is a false premise; developing people is itself a way to accelerate. Huawei’s IPD found that every additional week spent validating a project before R&D began could save 2-3 weeks later. When Meituan faced Ele.me building its own courier force, Wang Huiwen’s response was, “We haven’t seen it clearly yet. Let’s wait.” Repeatedly waiting produced the eventual win. Talent development increases the number of effective iterations per unit of time; moving quickly at a low level simply repeats the same mistakes.
The high failure rate of parachuted-in executives has 3 root causes, with lessons for M&A integration and leadership transitions. External track records are hard to separate from platform advantages; the boss has not clarified what the role actually requires; and all 3 parties refuse to allow enough time. A “fallen phoenix” arrives and immediately reshuffles the team, bringing former lieutenants and making the new team repeat the old team’s mistakes. The probability of producing results in 6 months or 1 year is extremely low; executives should be given at least 2 years. The way to accelerate is to give them bounded problems and let them level up from easy to difficult.
Culture is the final variable. “Corporate culture eats strategy for breakfast.” P&G’s coaching system works because the organization gives people who share knowledge both psychological safety and incentives—not because rules force them to “train their replacement and then starve.” For employees, 于东琪 emphasizes internal attribution, creating incremental value and active altruism: “Power games are a zero-sum game; companies promote people who are willing to create incremental value.” 叶楠 emphasizes ikigai, a community of shared destiny and personal brand.

Deep dive

1. The most old-school consumer-goods company has produced 13 internal CEOs

The episode opens with an unexpected contrast: the biggest producer of CEOs is not a technology company, but P&G, the maker of Olay, Pampers and Tide. At the end of July this year, P&G announced that current CEO Jon Moeller would step down next January. His successor, Indian-born executive Shailesh Jejurikar, joined through campus recruiting in 1989 and has spent 36 years at the company, rising from assistant brand manager to global COO.
麻花’s data tells the story: P&G was founded in 1837; its first 3 leaders were all family members. Since then, 12 professional managers have served 13 CEO terms, all developed internally without exception. The alumni effect is just as pronounced: many executives at Unilever, Nestlé and Mars began as P&G management trainees, while the founders of Perfect Diary, U Smile, 悦刻 and 直观 all came out of P&G during China’s consumer start-up boom.
The episode’s central question is this: a good CEO may be one in 100,000, but there is a replicable methodology for recruiting and developing excellent talent. What exactly is P&G’s methodology, and what can technology start-ups borrow from it?

2. Innate traits are the operating system; experience is the software

于东琪’s breakdown of P&G’s hiring logic starts with innate traits that are difficult to develop later in life: drive for success, resilience and leadership. His analogy is that these traits “are more like a person’s operating system,” while experience and skills are the programs running on top. “The operating system determines how quickly and how well we can turn experience into something real and write the program.”
He gives a concrete example of drive. Among the sales-team managers he has encountered, there is an unwritten rule—“possibly a little biased”—that a male salesperson must have children before being promoted into management. The logic is that once someone carries an inescapable family responsibility, “I have to make this work.” People with drive read industry articles in bed after work. “What occupies your mind eventually returns an answer; total commitment of energy makes success easier for them than for others.”
He distinguishes resilience from leadership with a car analogy: horsepower determines forward momentum, while resilience determines the ability to clear obstacles. After repeated failures, can someone recover their energy in less time, change their angle and keep moving toward the goal? Leadership determines the ceiling on that energy: “If I can influence and unite other people, if countless people are willing to follow me, my energy will be far greater than what one individual can achieve or even imagine.”

3. Hire boxers, not silver spoons—interest determines energy investment

叶楠 tested P&G’s Eight Questions in person in 2023. They are still being asked, even though candidates have long studied the expected answers. He cites a framework from a well-known HR executive’s TED talk: one type is the “silver spoon,” with a perfect résumé; the other is the “boxer,” who has fought through all kinds of brutal battles but whose résumé does not look impressive. The boxer is the person to hire.
His historical footnote is that from 2010 to 2018, in the internet sector, “whatever you did was unlikely to fail; the only difference was a big win or a small win.” When he interviewed middle managers in 2018 and 2019, their frustration was intense: “The move that used to work no longer works, even though the move itself hasn’t changed.” They realized only then that “I was simply standing on a trend.”
Interest is the real test. He recalls people who never review their work, but who could spend a long time reviewing a poker hand after playing Texas Hold’em at night. The HR maxim is: “You can control how long an employee stays at the company, but it is very hard to control how much time and energy that employee invests in your business.” P&G people do not say “business” in the abstract; they say “生意”—a real business. Ownership is not handed out by a KPI. It grows from within.

4. The interview’s hard filter: source of achievement and direction of attribution

于东琪’s first signal is how much information a candidate has mastered beyond what the job strictly requires. Someone marketing a high-suction vacuum cleaner should be able to explain which factors create high suction and why the noise can still be controlled. “When someone can speak fluently about information that the job did not necessarily require them to acquire, their drive for success is more likely to be sound.” His favorite question is: “What was the most fulfilling moment in your previous work?” The worst answer is, “Everything was fine.” It suggests that work was merely a package the person carried.
The automatic rejection signal is external attribution. When reviewing a failed start-up, he would reject anyone who said it failed because the macro environment was bad or because regulators did not favor the industry. The logic is intact: “If someone pushes problems outward, it is also difficult for that person to have leadership, because they must have thrown plenty of people around them under the bus. If you are the boss and you also throw the team under the bus, how can the team possibly follow you?”
His follow-up questions on leadership include: Have you ever won over a difficult cross-functional department? How do you deal with a manager you dislike? “How long has the subordinate who has worked with you the longest stayed with you? What did you bring to them, and what did they bring to you?” 叶楠 adds a negative case: a programmer was asked why a business had failed and answered, “I was only responsible for writing the code. The investors decided not to invest, and I don’t know the specific reason.” That answer is an automatic rejection for a start-up team.

5. An interview is not mind-reading: use a case to extend the observation window

叶楠 revised his own methodology: “An interview is not mind-reading. It’s very difficult to say that I’m an extremely good interviewer and can judge someone in 30 minutes or an hour.” His prescription is to spend an afternoon working together on a small project case, observing the advice a candidate gives the team and the path they take to solve problems. This is especially important for small and midsize companies, which can hardly afford to make a mid-level hiring mistake.
He remembers a good case from 10 years ago. A marketing candidate was asked about the project he was most proud of. After describing 2 strong cases, he voluntarily turned around and described one he had handled terribly. “A good interview should somehow become a conversation.” In the end, both HR interviewers and the rest of the panel approved him unanimously: he was capable, but also sincere.

6. Recruiting and retaining talent: the better the talent, the less sensitive they are to money

于东琪 describes a real case involving an employee at an industry benchmark company. A client wanted to poach the person, while competitors across the sector were offering multiples of their existing pay. “To date, not a single employee has left.” The employee gave 2 reasons. First: “I need capabilities from every part of the upstream and downstream chain. All those capabilities are complete only here, and all the work I do can become my work.” Second: everyone around them was excellent: “I discover that my work becomes more and more impressive here, and I myself am becoming better and better.”
His 3-step method is to first understand what a specific candidate wants; then keep becoming a better employer—young people dislike one-person rule and authoritarian bosses who refuse to delegate; and finally show the real you honestly. Explain your strengths, your requirements and the risks and costs the candidate will have to bear, repeatedly and clearly. “As long as you are genuinely excellent, you do not actually need to worry too much about excellent candidates leaving you.”

7. The five Cs: employees at different ages want completely different packages

When 叶楠 worked at an executive-search firm, he summarized a best-match framework built around 5 Cs: compensation must be agreed, followed by career, competence, culture and chemistry. The counterintuitive point about competence is that someone who matches a role 100% may not join: “They think they would be doing exactly the same thing at your company, and they won’t do it.” A 75% match combined with 25% entirely new work is a better fit.
Culture shows up in benefits through 2 cases. Trip.com turned working from home into a direct 3+2 arrangement with no application required, removing employees’ fear of being punished informally. Volvo offers parental leave: within 3 years of a child’s birth, both male and female employees can take 6 months. The boss explained to investors on a global conference call: “We calculated that this makes sense. We want to use the benefit to attract more fathers and become a better EV manufacturer.”
Needs also vary by age. Young people want the brand of a large company, career development and training. Thirty-five-year-olds with children want work-life balance and care more about cash. Fifty-year-old employees at foreign companies care most about retirement benefits. He has seen employees who worked for 20 years and accumulated pensions worth more than 1M, with monthly retirement income in the tens of thousands, become objects of envy among colleagues. The conclusion: “Money is the easiest competitive advantage to copy, but benefits are very difficult to copy.” Retention starts with understanding exactly what kind of employee you are trying to retain.

8. P&G’s three-part development playbook: keep your hands off, ask coach-style questions, lead by example

The first move that most inspired 于东琪 is for every manager to “strictly restrain their own hands and never casually do the work for employees.” He has seen many managers who know they should delegate but cannot control themselves when a proposal looks wrong. They tell the team the ideal answer in their heads, leaving the team no choice but to listen. “In the end, the boss did the work for the team and failed to serve as a coach.” P&G instead asks questions and discusses all kinds of exceptional situations, forcing the team to complete the framework itself.
The second move left an especially deep impression: “At P&G, there would never be a female sales manager wearing high heels.” Sales judgments must come from offline stores and consumer interviews, and executives are no exception. “If someone has gone too long without appearing in retail stores, they gradually lose their intuition for what consumers are really like.” They must wear flat shoes and follow the team into the field.
The underlying decision principle comes from Wang Xing: “Anyone with normal logical ability who has acquired sufficient information can make an excellent decision.” Asking questions to build a framework and going to the front line to preserve information together form P&G’s mechanism for fast employee growth without taking away their sense of achievement. But 于东琪 adds a precondition: “The person’s thinking ability cannot be too poor. If two questions leave someone completely confused, this method cannot run.”

9. The self-replicating coaching culture: the trainer wall and “too frequent” career conversations

What 叶楠 saw firsthand was that P&G assigns every new employee a coach. The company also has a wall filled with the year’s outstanding trainers. “From the simplest English email writing to leadership and project management, there are trainers for everything.” Their photos go on the wall, accompanied by various awards and incentives.
The clearest sign of cultural intensity came from a contrast. A P&G salesperson who had joined less than a year earlier complained, “My coach talks to me about my future career plan once a month. It’s too frequent.” 叶楠’s comparison is that at most companies in China, a leader may not ask an employee about their career plans for 18 months or more. The culture closes the loop: “When you join, a senior coach helps you; you will then do your best to help the people who come after you grow.”

10. The 2 lessons start-ups lack most: firsthand information and complete frameworks

于东琪 identifies a common founder problem: they do not go to the front line themselves. One education-and-training founder he met “talked every day about how everyone needed to go to the front line and get firsthand information, but during all the years he ran training, he never once went to the front line himself.” If the boss does not take it seriously, the training requirement is unrealistic.
On frameworks, he again cites Wang Xing: “Many methodologies are essentially just checklists”—a list of the questions that must be considered before making a decision. He uses 曾鸣’s 3 strategic questions as an example: Is this feasible? Do you have an advantage? Do you want to do it? Answering all 3 at once will necessarily lead to a qualified strategy.
The practical way to build a framework is repeated questioning through coaching. If the team proposes an elaborate marketing event, ask: “How do you think we can sell our product at the event?” “What kind of people will be eager to participate? Will they buy our product after participating?” A red-envelope reward for checking in, for example, may attract price-sensitive users rather than high-spending target customers. “If you keep asking again and again, the completeness of the team’s thinking will gradually improve.” People close to Wang Xing told 叶楠 that he asked no more than 100 questions in meetings, repeatedly using the same questions across all meetings. The reputation of P&G and Meituan people for having strong methodologies came from the bosses’ questions.

11. The blind spot in domestic leadership development: an excellent individual is not automatically a competent leader

叶楠 criticizes the promotion logic at many Chinese companies: “This employee does the work very well, so you should become the leader.” The new leader then “tries to copy their own methodology across the entire team.” But one person’s methodology does not work for everyone. He has seen an excellent headhunter who could personally generate several million in business, but whose team of 5 or 6 people collectively produced less than he once did alone. The root cause was an inability to let go: he focused on everyone’s daily actions instead of key-point data.
P&G’s training in treating the business as a business shocked one product manager hired from outside: “At my previous company, I never realized that a product manager needed to know the finance process.” P&G required him to manage the business as a business. Now, “every time I put together a proposal, I also include the financial side.”
叶楠’s redefinition of leadership is that leadership does not begin only after someone becomes a manager. When a junior employee runs a project, the rest of the project team is made up of people gathered from different departments. The employee has no management authority and cannot influence anyone’s year-end bonus. “You really need a unique form of leadership to unite them around you.” In some ways, that is harder than being a manager.

12. Why mentors give generously: incentives plus a culture of safety

于东琪’s rational accounting is that teaching people “always has more benefits than costs.” There is the Feynman-learning effect of teaching and learning together, plus concrete economic returns: among P&G employees’ 5 annual goals, at least 1 is always related to talent organization and development. A strong coaching record directly supports promotion and pay raises. You are developing “a workforce that can serve you in the future and help you run the business better.” Within a reasonable ratio—for example, spending 20% of your time developing people—the benefits necessarily outweigh the costs.
叶楠 points directly to the cultural foundation with a story from Simon Sinek’s TED talk. When a U.S. Army unit was ambushed in Afghanistan, a corporal carried wounded soldiers one by one from the battlefield to a helicopter. Asked why, he answered, “I believe that if I had been the one injured that day, my comrades would have done the same for me.” P&G works the same way. If a company imposes a set of rules requiring people to train newcomers, but “once the newcomer learns, they eliminate the older person,” employees will never develop that sense of responsibility. Everyone will fear “training your replacement and then starving.”
His conclusion is that “the prerequisite is that I must feel safe. This is something ordinary companies find very difficult to achieve.” The company must both motivate people to share and protect them from being harmed for sharing. He ends with the maxim: “Corporate culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Ultimately, corporate culture determines what a company’s strategy can become.

13. Who makes the best coach? The underachiever may beat the star student

于东琪 gives 3 selection criteria. First is an altruistic drive: during training, “the trainee is the trainer’s user.” People motivated by helping others succeed are suited to teaching. Second, the coach must have strong enough summarization and review skills and must not rely on personal experience alone. “A lot of people really do succeed without knowing how they succeeded.”
His counterintuitive experience is that “the underachiever is better than the star student.” Star students do not understand why underachievers cannot learn. Someone who started out as an underachiever and later performed extremely well had to fight through and summarize every step themselves. They are therefore more likely to replicate the process so others can learn it too. The third criterion is user thinking and communication awareness: “Once you get on stage, you have to talk about history and explain the broad trend.” But the people below do not want to hear that. A good coach needs to understand what the audience actually needs.

14. The paradox of “only speed wins”: Huawei’s slow validation and Meituan’s late-mover advantage

于东琪 directly challenges the premise of the era: “Only speed wins is not necessarily an eternal truth in the business world.” The key distinction is between low-level speed—repeating the same mistakes—and fast, high-quality iteration. When Huawei implemented IPD, it found that every additional week spent validating a project before formally starting R&D could save 2-3 weeks later. Huawei turned itself into “a slow company during the solution-validation phase.”
Meituan’s example is even more extreme. During the food-delivery war, Ele.me and Baidu Waimai were both building their own courier teams. Internally, people kept asking when Meituan would do the same. Wang Huiwen replied, “We haven’t seen it clearly yet. Let’s wait.” “Seeing clearly and waiting, again and again, helped Meituan win in the end.” The real premise behind “only speed wins” is that the number of effective iterations per unit of time must be higher—but the iterations must actually be effective. Developing people is precisely what raises that effectiveness.
Building talent internally is unavoidable when the role is part of the core competitive advantage. “The people you want do not exist in the industry, because what you want is far above the industry standard.” If you want Haidilao-level service, you can only poach people from Haidilao—and Haidilao cannot poach them from outside either. Hired veterans may instead require costly correction of their accumulated bad habits. To shorten the development cycle, selection should prioritize quality and mindset over existing experience and skills, while coaching should respect initiative. What if you cannot hire people with top-tier ability? Look at Meituan: “Use a standardized methodology to lower the required talent threshold, and the success rate can also rise substantially.” The higher the talent quality, the fewer constraints they need; the lower the quality, the more support they need.

15. How second- and third-tier companies compete for talent: differentiate instead of copying big-tech benefits

叶楠 shared information from an AI headhunting company he interviewed last week: “The best AI talent won’t join you just because you offer more money.” The entire industry uses the same standards—how many papers someone has published, which professor they studied under and what results they have achieved. Top companies take the people who meet those standards. They go to ByteDance because the pay is good, the probability of success is higher and the foundation is stronger. Second- and third-tier companies need a differentiated advantage: “They cannot grow there; only at your company will they get a better opportunity.”
“If you compete with big tech on exactly the same benefits, you will definitely lose.” Small and midsize companies cannot match big tech’s 996 schedule on efficiency. They should instead compete on things large companies are unwilling to offer. He cites Canva’s Epic Leave: after roughly 5 years of employment, an employee can take 1 month off whenever they want. When he asked how a company with few people and lots of work could absorb that, the HR response was: “If a project is delayed, then it’s delayed. That’s our corporate culture.” 叶楠’s view is that excellent employees will assess the impact of a month-long vacation themselves. The probability that an employee will shut down the company by taking a month off is extremely low, while the culture conveyed by the benefit is highly attractive to talent.

16. Which companies are best at developing talent? Look at where their core capability sits

于东琪 sees a clear pattern: “Any company will ultimately have to develop its own talent in the department where its core competitive advantage resides, and it will eventually become very good at it.” Meituan is driven by offline operations and supply chain, so managers in those roles are consistently strong. P&G is built around brand marketing, making it “the Whampoa Military Academy of the entire internet industry.” Pixar develops animation directors and screenwriters, and even animation programs at their alma maters are taught by Pixar employees. The map for recruiting talent follows from this: identify the company where the target capability is a core advantage, then recruit there.
叶楠 nominates consulting firms: “They are not really selling consulting. They are really selling people.” At Mercer, he found that even interns leaving the following week were trained, and every intern in online training had access to an account. At McKinsey, “apart from doing business, most of the time is spent on training, team building and knowledge sharing.” The firm does not merely provide input; it also requires output—repeated practice in presenting, communicating and explaining.

17. Why parachuted-in executives usually fail: track-record attribution, uninformed bosses and insufficient patience

于东琪’s first trap is evaluating an external executive only by their track record. “A premise that is very easy to overlook is what proportion of their track record came from personal ability, and what proportion came from opportunities and resources provided by the environment.” The clearest example is recruiting growth personnel from ByteDance. “ByteDance has extremely high monetization efficiency. The same user can be turned into more money, so it can also afford to provide a larger growth budget. Once they leave that environment, many growth moves that worked at ByteDance stop working.”
The second trap is the timing of the hire. A boss often looks for an external executive after “stumbling several times in a row.” The team is not working, but the boss also has not clarified what process and capabilities are required to solve the problem. The result is a crude focus on track record. The third trap is a joint failure of patience. The star executive thinks, “I was so successful at ByteDance, so I must turn things around here.” The boss and team have the same expectation. The executive then applies past experience aggressively, the team sees no results, organizational trust disappears, and the executive leaves in embarrassment. The correct posture is to first understand what the environment requires, what cards you can play and where you must communicate fully with the boss to win support.
叶楠 adds a common epidemic: the “fallen phoenix.” A smaller company recruits a star laid off by a big company because the price-performance ratio looks attractive. “Full trust” means giving the executive complete hiring authority for 6 months or 1 year. The new executive skips integration with the existing team, removes everyone and brings in former lieutenants. The cost is that “the new team repeats all the mistakes the old team had already made.” Once mistakes appear, remaining veterans think, “You don’t look that impressive either,” and trust collapses further. His time scale is clear: the probability of producing results in 6 months or 1 year is extremely low; executives should be given at least 2 years. Foreign companies react slowly precisely because they are willing to give people time. If needed, they can reassign someone or remove part of the role so the person can focus on what they do best. The mindset also changes with the cycle: “Give me 3 years, and I will operate more steadily in the first year, which makes success more likely. Give me only 1 year, and my operating moves and logic will change again.”

18. How to accelerate a parachuted-in executive: bounded problems, an educated boss and process-based evaluation

于东琪 has seen parachuted-in executives produce results within 2 months. The acceleration method starts with the number of attempts possible per unit of time. Give someone a smart-hardware project and a single IPD cycle takes several months, making results within 1 or 2 years unrealistic. Give them a bounded problem such as adjusting the marketing of a particular channel, and the ROI can show up immediately. Do not start by asking them to “save the entire company’s strategy.” “Even a god cannot do that in a few months.” Instead, design a progression from easy to difficult and let the executive build trust with the team first.
He gives an unusually candid self-assessment. In his previous start-up, he changed 5 executives in the most critical role within 1 year. “To put it bluntly, that was unfair to the first few people,” because he himself did not understand what success in the role required. He had set unrealistic goals and an unrealistic timeline; it was entirely possible that some of the first executives were substantively capable. The turning point was that “the first 4 executives educated me on behalf of the last one.” He learned to evaluate not only outcomes but also process. By the fifth executive, he could set key delivery checkpoints according to industry norms in the first month and tell the team what they would examine first and what they would examine in the second month. The operating numbers did not look good until more than 6 months later, but from the first month, the executive was delivering results stronger than the predecessor’s in front of the boss, HR and the team.
叶楠 adds the final piece: build trust before the executive joins. When Jeff Weiner was invited by Reid Hoffman to a villa, he was told he would not be leaving. After 3 days of brainstorming business direction and personnel decisions, he was finally told, “We’ve decided. We want you to be our CEO.” To become a successful parachuted-in CEO, “you first need to build enough trust with the stakeholders. That cannot be achieved in a 1- or 2-hour interview.”

19. The employee’s self-cultivation: drive, internal attribution, incremental value and personal brand

于东琪 gives high-potential employees 3 pieces of advice. First, find your intrinsic drive—“Drive is unlikely to come from the outside”—and record the moments in your past when you felt a sense of achievement. Second, attribute less to the outside and more to yourself: “No matter how bad the environment is, you can still review how to avoid a deterioration that was bound to happen next time. Once you develop that mindset, your iteration speed will be faster.” Third, reject the politics of manipulation: “Power games are a zero-sum game. The people a company promotes are those willing to create incremental value for it.” Share actively, help when you can, and in the end, the more selfless person who is willing to help others succeed will win their support. You will naturally appear in talent reviews.
叶楠 begins his 3 pieces of advice with ikigai: the intersection of what you like, what you are good at, what society will pay you for and what is valuable to society. He wrote for 3 years without earning a cent, purely because he liked it, and only after 3 years realized it could be monetized. Second is a community of shared destiny. At an internet company, he learned to begin a meeting with another department by asking, “What are your current OKRs? Is there anything I can do to help?” If their OKRs had nothing to do with his own, “I would not even ask them to do the project I wanted.” The most important community of shared destiny is with your direct boss: the boss needs subordinates to deliver results in order to deliver results themselves.
Third is personal brand. Responding to the New Oriental annual-party joke that working hard matters less than knowing how to make a PowerPoint, he offers a reversal: “A PowerPoint is also an expression of personal brand.” Being able to explain something clearly in front of the boss and colleagues, and have them recognize your ability, is itself a capability. Put your labels out there so people know what to come to you for, and opportunities will flow toward you. “If I walk into my boss’s office and the boss cannot think of my keywords at all, that is a problem.”

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