On Division of Labor

    

      The logic of “division of labor” is to minimize the effect of the limitation of doing only one thing at any given time in order to optimize the benefits of all who participate.  Nevertheless, there are prerequisites to the success of this principle.  First of all, those who participate must have mutual trust among one another.  Otherwise they are narrow-minded in a win-lose competition.  Secondly, they must have the will and motivation seeking optimization of them all as one entity.  Some people just want the minimum labor and a few would even take advantages of others by being free-riders.  Thirdly, their labor division should only be divided into humanistic level.  It is human that decides what to do not task decides whom should do.  Electronics factory has divided its task too narrowly and inhumane and thus causes tragedies.

      Principles in The Wealth of Nations can also be applied to individuals and enterprises.  Take the orchid industry as an example. In general, before to the end in which the customer gets the orchids, there are breed research and development, flower raising and production, marketing, sales, and logistics.  Moreover, on the sideline there are human resource management, finance management, information management.  There are many ways to accomplish the tasks mentioned above but I will only talk about the difficult way and the optimal way.

      The hard way, which is the way most Taiwanese companies adopt, is doing everything except the logistics by themselves.   However, most companies are family-owned small-size enterprises.  You can imagine that they must be overloaded.   As we all know that one person can only be involved in one activity at any given time, the efficiency and effectiveness of the working method mentioned above must not be good.  But most Taiwanese owners accepted this situation and remain.  What they have in mind is that even though such way of working is not good, it is still cheaper than hiring people to share the workloads.  Their concerns are not only the actual money they pay out, but also the risk of training future competitors.  This is because we cannot claim property right over natural product.  This implies that an owner cannot stop his or her employees from quitting and open her or his own flower company.  There is nothing wrong with this kind of thought.  It is just somewhat pessimistic.

      The optimal way is too have a team of 7 persons or the multiples of 7 for the 7 tasks I mentioned above.  One way is to create a huge company hiring many employees.  This is the hard way because not many companies have such wealth to do so.  Moreover, even if the money is sufficient, willingness of doing so is another issue.  It is quite difficult to manage a large company.  The other way, which is more practical, would be to establish business alliances with different specific-function companies.  Such cooperation has benefits like brainstorming, overall resource sharing, and time saving.  Nonetheless, this is not easy to accomplish because it takes great fortune to meet the right person at the right time and place, and do the right thing together.

      At the current stage, my priority is to get orders and really enter the world of marketing and sales.  However, my goal is to become a strategic partner.  What I mentioned above are the analysis of what I learn from systems thinking and strategic theory.  I believe that the business world is the best place implementing those theories.   Moreover, obviously I will get stimulation and thoughts during the process.  After all, I am working on cooperating with others contributing my best.