Babbitt Column | Can blockchain help food companies such as Sibe to survive?

Author: Qigong, Mr. Newton

When SARS broke out in 2003, Jingdong's e-commerce boss Jingdong was just a counter seller in Zhongguancun. SARS led to over-the-counter sales. That year, countless such sellers died, but Jingdong keenly smelled the rise of e-commerce and began to “shock” during the SARS period, not only saving Jingdong Multimedia, which was on the verge of death. , Has opened a new business era.

It can be seen that every huge crisis contains greater energy. However, this energy is by no means a repair of the past, often a wedge that pry open the door of the new era.

Recently, the new crown epidemic has swept across the country, not only the public health is greatly threatened, but the business and catering industries at the forefront of the economic system have also been greatly affected. A few days ago, catering giants such as Xibei, Grandma's Family, Jiu Maojiu, and Lao Chicken have made a sound, saying that on the one hand they will adhere to corporate social responsibility, and on the other hand, they confess that the pressure on the company is huge, and I am afraid they will not be able to support it for two months.

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Whether or not the government should take action, we have no chance to beak, but a super-trend in front of all the giants of commerce, retail and catering, it is very possible to pry a whole new era in this disaster.

This super trend is the organizational upgrade from the “employment relationship” and the “sale and purchase relationship” to the “community community relationship”. It is the historical tide of the comprehensive upgrade from the “private enterprise” in the old era to the “public enterprise” in the new era.

For a smoother understanding, let us first return to the catering industry in crisis during the epidemic.

Employees are positive assets, improper handling is the last straw

The grandmother ’s founder Wu Guoping said in an interview that her grandmother ’s family would now go out with 2.5 million yuan a day to open her eyes. The pressure is not small, and this is also the case that a large number of shopping malls have already given her grandmother ’s home a discount and subsidy.

The biggest part of this is labor costs.

If you lay off your staff decisively and stop bleeding, you can save your life, but after the epidemic is over, recovery of personnel is by no means an overnight success, not to mention that catering companies are not heavy assets, employees are the main assets cultivated and deposited by the enterprise, and they may lose their vitality if they are injured.

If methods such as minimum wage and half-pay are adopted, on the one hand, employees may not agree, but on the other hand, it will still cause a mass loss of facts.

If there is no layoff at all, the cost pressure is too great, and no one can say when the epidemic can be completely ended and when it can resume work without risk. The risk of this uncertainty is too great. Cash will run out and die, which is also not what all entrepreneurs want to see.

Let employees and users stand with you

The most important role in this is "employees", and they have an "employment relationship" that lasts for thousands of years: I work, you give money, and it is not my business to make money. Why? Because even if you make it, it wo n’t be shared with me.

This relationship was in the past, and usually, no problem. When faced with such a crisis, the shortcomings were immediately exposed: What matters to me if you die?

Just like today's epidemic situation, a lot of companies have encountered difficulties, and when employees need to share, what will employees think?

The first must be:

The business is the boss's business, not mine, why should I share it?

Although the bosses will feel uncomfortable, under the employment system, the employees' response is completely in line with "rational economic people", and it is understandable.

But even if there is no epidemic crisis, in the new digital era and in the new economic environment, such a pure employment relationship needs to be upgraded. For example, Xibei, who took the lead in calling for help, is a model for sharing benefits to employees in the catering industry. The famous quote of Xibei's founder Jia Guolong is "divide the money down." High-tech companies such as Huawei have distributed more than 90% of their shares to employees.

But even if such a conscious leader as Xibei Jia Guolong is facing such a sudden event, it will inevitably encounter a second problem. The employees will think:

I can share it, but I can't share it for free. At least you have to explain to me what is the benefit of sharing it?

When we ask employees to share for the company, we are essentially asking employees to sacrifice their short-term benefits, and this short-term sacrifice deserves a "fair" return in the future.

Here, I mean that the future deserved return is not a quantitative return, such as borrowing, how much money will be paid in the short term, and how much interest will be returned in the future. Because lending is not practical in the face of such problems, in reality, when a company hits a white bar on its employees, it is actually interpreted as "arrears of wages", which only exacerbates employees' concerns about the operation of the company, and it is often difficult for companies Give higher interest rates than banks.

The future deserved return here is a volatility value, which is the value growth of a certain part of the company at a specific time in the future. Risk and return are associated. The return of the volatility value may be higher than the loan, but it may also be lower. The high value may motivate employees to pay, and the low value may make the company willing to share this value. And who decides whether it is high or low? It is the employees of the enterprise that make their efforts to further develop the enterprise.

On the whole, the crisis is not a bad thing. The wolf is taking away sheep that are already weak and sick to help adjust the structure of the herd. Going to public companies is not a panacea for all companies out of crisis. Employees are more aware of the true status of the company than investment bank analysts. Whether they are willing to exchange short-term cash for the value of future corporate development is the employees' "position to open" vote. This vote will also speed up the companies that should have been eliminated. To reduce the impact of high-quality companies and increase their speed of recovery.

Blockchain Era: From "Private Enterprise" to "Public Enterprise"

However, at present, companies lack a reasonable tool to measure the proportional relationship between employees' immediate losses and future expected benefits. Entrepreneurs can't find a very good way except for borrowing and equity. Borrowing has been described above, and the transfer of equity is too high in terms of decision-making and execution, and the entrepreneurs have eaten some Diversified losses in equity are difficult to promote.

At this time, the era is calling for a new upgrade: without disturbing the existing equity structure, without affecting the existing operating system and vested interests, introducing new thinking, technologies and tools to design a more reasonable incentive mechanism for enterprises Confirm the right at a specific time and value, and share it with more stakeholders and upgrade the "private enterprise" to a "public enterprise".

Blockchain and tokens are the best answer to this problem.

Blockchain's unique characteristics such as immutability and distributed bookkeeping can reduce transaction costs and complete the confirmation of specific values ​​within the enterprise, and gain trust that is not limited to the enterprise; tokens enable the value to be digitalized on the chain, which can be more The design of the incentive system is more flexible and more fragmented and refined; the automatic real-time execution of smart contracts can make the entire incentive system not rely on the efficient operation of personnel, thereby having greater credibility and continuity.

The above paragraph can be simply expressed as: Blockchain and tokens allow enterprises to have a brand new incentive method. This method is parallel to equity incentives and has more advanced incentive methods. Whoever takes the lead will have the opportunity. Win new business competition.

For example, in catering companies, long-term idle "brand equity" tokens are turned into digital assets that can be enjoyed by everyone. Holding this brand token is equivalent to holding a part of the brand and enjoying the brand. the value of. Because brand value will fluctuate with the rise and fall of catering companies, the incentive effect is no less than equity, and even operability is much better than equity.

We assume a scenario in which a customer's membership card was recharged 3,000 yuan during the epidemic, obtained a voucher, and became a "brand partner". A year later, the number of stores and revenue of this brand doubled, and he suddenly found that the price of his brand certificate had doubled, and he was able to get the subsidy bonus shared on this certificate.

Assume that this person is replaced by an employee. During the epidemic period, by voluntarily adjusting the salary, 50% of the monthly salary will be automatically exchanged for brand vouchers. After three years of work, the brand ’s store size and total revenue have tripled. Multiplied value and three years of development bonus.

In short, a new type of incentive has been born. This type of incentive can play the role of equity, but it is much better than the flexibility of equity; it can unite more stakeholders to form a glory and a loss. The community of interests, completely changing the old "employment relationship" and "buying and selling relationship", can transform the "private enterprise" that has lasted for hundreds of years into a "public enterprise" through brand-new channels, and will create a new era of business.

Since the birth of human beings, we have been on a path of continuously expanding the scale of cooperation. From primitive people to hunt and hunt, to horses passing the Silk Road for thousands of miles to pass civilization, and then to Queen Elizabeth's founding of the world's first company, the way to gather strangers to collaborate has also evolved along the way. The latest evolution is the shareholding system.

However, even the latest joint-stock companies have no more than a million people. The Internet has long linked billions of people, but there is no collaboration mechanism that can be matched with it; public companies based on blockchain and tokens are the children of this historical era.

SARS in 2003, people remember the rise of e-commerce;

In the future, we will recall the new crown pneumonia in 2020, and we will remember that this is the "first year of public enterprises".

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