Since the beginning of industrial society, standardization has been a good thing. It reduces costs, improves efficiency, and facilitates collaboration.
For example, the reason why McDonald's restaurants are so big around the world is not because of how good they are, but because of standardization. Customers know very well in their hearts, push open the door of any McDonald's around the world, inside the hamburger, fried chicken nuggets, french fries, eat the taste, are similar. Consumers pick it because it's reliable, because it's insurance.
How can standardization be achieved?For more than 100 years, industrial societies have had the basic experience. From the Taylor system, which first proposed standardized production, to the McDonald's employee manual. All are trying to formulate a set of policies through the top-down, strengthen management, strict control, that is, to standardize human behavior to every action, the final product and service standardization results also naturally have.
I'll read you a few McDonald's staff operating manual to feel: Coca-Cola temperature must be maintained at 4 degrees Celsius, the use of beef patties, the proportion of ingredients must be 83% of the beef shoulder and 17% of the pancetta, which can not be more than 19% of the fat content, and finally made out of the beef patties, it must be a diameter of 95.8 millimeters, a thickness of 5.65 millimeters, and the weight should be accurate to 47.32 grams. It's that strict.
The other face of standardization is the face of rigidity, no choice, no freedom. And it's not just the employees of these companies who have no freedom under strict control, the consumers don't either, there's only that. So monotony and restriction become some of the reasons we criticize standardization.
To reach standardization in the book The Lucky Sign Cake Chronicles, there is another path to achieve it.
The book is about Chinese restaurants in the United States. It's important to realize that American Chinese restaurants don't sell the Chinese food that we Chinese eat every day. Rather, they are modified to American tastes, such as Zuo Zong Tang chicken, beef with broccoli, and so on. Mainly sweet and sour flavors, if Chinese people are allowed to eat them, odds are they will not be used to them.
These Chinese restaurants, though not authentic, they add up to more than 40,000 across the United States. What a concept. The fast food triumvirate we're familiar with, McDonald's, Burger King and KFC, don't add up to that many. From this perspective, Americans are actually more familiar with Chinese food than burgers.
Among those 40,000 Chinese restaurants, are there any chains like McDonald's? Yes, there is. A brand called "Panda Express" is very famous. It has more than 2,000 chain stores across the U.S., which is a big business. But compared to the total number of 40,000, it is not mainstream. What about the rest of the mainstream Chinese restaurants? Basically, they are all husband and wife stores. There's not much of a chain relationship with each other, it's decentralized.
Chinese restaurants throughout the United States, whether they are in Seattle in the northwest or Florida in the southeast corner, are almost identical in their interior design, the dishes they serve, and even the flow of service. America's truck drivers' favorite thing to eat when they're on a long haul is Chinese food. The main reason, in fact, is similar to everyone's love of McDonald's, is that Chinese restaurants offer meals that are safer, more reliable, more consistent, and no matter which city, the food tastes pretty much the same.
McDonald's is like that. But for a chain like McDonald's to get to that point is to spend countless millions of dollars a year on iterative standards and strict management of the production process before standardization is finally achieved. Chinese restaurants in the United States, on the other hand, not only don't have a headquarters to set standards, they don't even have much of a connection to each other. So, oddly enough, how can they also be standardized?
If we call McDonald's "vertical standardization," that is, standardization by top-down management, we might call the standardization of Chinese restaurants "horizontal standardization. Why? Because it is realized by the horizontal promotion of social networks.
How? Chinese restaurants in the United States, although it seems very loose, but there is one thing is not loose, is that behind them there is the same network of suppliers: they provide customers with bags of soy sauce, pouches are very inconspicuous, but all come from a factory in New Jersey; two-thirds of the Chinese fast-food containers, by a business called the Fubaike business production
Chinese restaurants in the United States consume hundreds of millions of disposable menus each year, the eastern part by the New York City, the eastern part by the New Jersey State Department of Agriculture. disposable menus, with those in the East contracted to a few printers in New York and those in the West going to a few printers in Los Angeles. Behind all the various details is a uniform supplier. You see, with consistent suppliers, consistent social networks, isn't the final presentation of the American Chinese restaurant pretty much the same?
Tell you another story and you'll see how powerful this kind of standardization, built through social networks, is. 2005, a lottery company in the U.S. drew a whopping 110 second-prize winners, which was a surprise because it exceeded the projected number of winners by a factor of 40. These winners took $20 million dollars a **** and the lottery company almost went bankrupt that day. Then, of course, there was a special investigation to see if there was any underhanded manipulation. The result?
It was found that the winners were scattered all over the country, and they didn't know each other, so they couldn't find any contact; the tickets they purchased were all from different outlets, so it was impossible for them to collude with each other; and all of the numbers were self-selected, which means that there were no cases of machine malfunction. You see how mysterious it is, right? There must be some kind of mysterious force behind the manipulation.
Finally the truth came out, the reason is actually a kind of cookies. The title of the book we talked about earlier is "Lucky Strike Cookies". What does it mean? American Chinese restaurants have a custom, after the customer consumption, will give a kind of cookie called fortune cookie. This cookie contains a small slip of paper with a lucky saying and a string of lucky numbers. On that day, all the people who bought this lottery company's winning ticket had chosen the numbers on the little slip of paper in the cookie as their lottery numbers. And that string of numbers happened to win the second prize. And these cookies, they were all made by a company in Brooklyn. So you see, it's amazing that the horizontal standardization of food in the restaurant industry brought about by social networks can have such a social impact.
Just a few more examples familiar to Chinese people and you'll see. I don't know if you've felt it in China in the past few years. Often, all of a sudden, a kind of food all of a sudden popular in the country, become Netflix. For example, crawfish, dirty buns, milk tea and so on. And it's not just one store taking over the national market, but a bunch of small stores called by different names and under various banners. The things they make and eat don't differ much. Could it be that the owners of these stores are colluding? Or is there suddenly such a trend or unification of Chinese consumers' tastes?
Of course not. The rise of these Netflix foods is actually due to a network of suppliers. Sixty percent of the country's crayfish are said to come from Hubei's Jianli County; most of the seasonings for cassoulet rice, which was popular a few years ago, come from Jinan; and most of the balsa fish used to make fillets in pickled fish are imported from Vietnam.
Why can cassoulet rice everywhere? There are two reasons. First of all, chicken as an ingredient, there is no special flavor, made into a dish with no presence, seasoning what flavor it is what flavor, convenient for each restaurant to do innovation. So chicken is very popular.
More importantly, the second point is that the supply chain for chicken is super stable, it can be expanded to a very large scale, and the price fluctuation is very small. You've heard of the state subsidizing pig farmers when pork prices are unstable, when have you ever heard of the state subsidizing chicken farms? Even if there's some natural disaster and all the chickens die, raise chickens and you can get them out again in a few weeks.
So you see a street full of cassoulet rice, this is not the user's choice, nor is it the choice of the business, this is the supply chain maturity brought about by the horizontal standardization effect.
Contrast this with the two kinds of standardization we talked about today: vertical standardization and horizontal standardization. Compared to the kind of vertical standardization we used to be familiar with as a sign of the industrial age, the McDonald's kind of vertical standardization, the horizontal standardization we're talking about today is much more benign.
It is neither coercive nor costly in terms of training and management, and it allows for free innovation at various social nodes, but it achieves the same standardization effect of high efficiency and low cost.
If we widen our perspective a bit, you will find that the reason why there was vertical standardization before was actually because the social conditions for horizontal standardization were not mature back then. That is to say, when the supplier network was not yet developed, companies had no choice, were forced, and had to establish a set of internal standards top-down, mandatory to achieve consistency.
And we live today in an era of more mature social networks, where vertical coercion has become horizontal cooperation. This approach can be equally good for business!