In the old-time, companies paid much attention to rules. Workers as the mechanical gears and were part of the production line. Therefore, it is reasonable to use regulations to ensure the operation stay normal. Nowadays, the corporate will be more focused on innovation and user experience. No business has succeeded because of sticking with the rules. 

If following the rules will not succeed, why do companies still have so many rules? One of the benefits is to improve efficiency. If everyone handles the same thing in their way, naturally we need to deal with it in various ways. Not only take us more time, but also have a high chance of making mistakes. 

Another advantage of “rules” is convenience. For example, a company’s welfare system may be divided into several levels, and colleagues at the same level receive the same benefits. In this way, the company does not need to formulate welfare programs according to each person’s circumstances, and colleagues will think it’s fair and willing to accept it.  

When implementing a rule, we must be clear about the goal of the rule. If a public organization like the government, the main function of its rules is to erase personalization, then it’s necessary to achieve the principle of integrity and openness, even we need to sacrifice efficiency. For this reason, the government can become a collection of rules. However, in commercial organizations, the main goal is to maximize profits, so all the purpose of the rules is set up to achieve this goal. Therefore, if the existence of rules hinders the interests of the organization, the rules themselves must be amended. 

When you read the title, you might think that this article is against the rules. It is not. I think the advantages of the rules are more than the disadvantages. I oppose the behavior of blindly following the rules and reducing efficiency. 

Many companies will launch some promotions to attract customers to come again, and these activities contains specified rules. I believe that most customers will follow the rules to enjoy the discount, but there always be some people who accidentally miss the discount. If we can respond flexibly to these careless people, we will increase our profitability, but in reality, we will often reject these customers because of violations of the rules; sometimes, we will make the rules more complicated to protect ourselves and makes customers lose interest in discounts. This is what I mean by turning the cart before the horse. 

The reason for this situation, to put it bluntly, is to take care of everyone. Not everyone can look at things from the goal. This requires considerable judgment. Whoever accidentally misses the offer, who is here to take advantage, not every employee can distinguish. Therefore, to facilitate the processing, we always follow the rules. Indeed, flexibility is sometimes necessary for the overall benefit, but the goal-oriented way of thinking should not be ignored. 

Remember the "Peter Principle" mentioned in the previous article "We are all in "incompetent" positions"? It pointed out that we were promoted because the previous position did a good job, and not because we were qualified for the new position, so we would eventually be promoted to a position that we were unable to hold. When this happens, because of our incompetence, we can no longer rely on ourselves to judge things. We can only measure our work by the value of the organization (rules) and become advocates of the rules. However, blindly following the rules can only make us not fall into mistakes, cannot make things better. If we further measure our subordinates based on rules, we may end up with mediocre employees and drive away some talented employees. 

We have to be clear that rules are only tools, tools to make our work better, but they are not our goal; the fair nature of rules is to facilitate our handling of things, and fairness is not absolute under commercial principles. We must understand the original meaning of the rules, understand the meaning of them, and follow them appropriately. When the rules and goals go against, what we have to modify is the rules; when someone takes advantage of the rules, what we do should be to deal with these clever people.

Simon So Head of Digital Marketing