Address to My Partners: Some Principles

I am trained as a mathematician; in the beginning of my career in information technology, I worked as a consultant and developed systems for online trading, call center service and customer relationship management etc.. For the past two year, I worked for a software development house as a senior architect and development manager leading product development and solution implementations for clients in Europe, Asia and here, North America. I am excited about this opportunity here at ***.

Let me share at this moment several principles I hope to follow in the future:

(1) Bias for action. While we encourage open, positive and constructive dialogs and debates on ideas and processes, we will not waste any time on empty talks. We constantly drive for results, large or small. The bottom line here is no bluff just stuff. Discussions are not necessarily bad, but execution is the focus, and results are the only things we value.
(2) Play to win. Play not to lose is already losing; and frankly speaking, it is troubling to see that many people in our profession belittle themselves when they actually can contribute so much. My thought is that people playing not to lose are impediments to those motivated, therefore should be held accountable for all the failures if there are any. Only the trivial things have certain outcomes. Endeavors of substance always involve some risks. We need to take prudent risks. After putting into sincere efforts, it is fine to make mistakes.
(3) Take responsibilities personally. For any tasks we are assigned, for any initiatives we advocate, we need to take our responsibilities, and I want us to take them personally. That is one way we learn from experiences. We often find a culture of “delegate up” in large enterprises, and I do not want to see it in our group. I do not want to see either delegate horizontally to a committee or to other colleagues. And I certainly hate to see delegation of responsibilities down to the subordinates if they belong to the leaders.
(4) Always be innovative. This means to expand out of our comfortable zone, to constantly challenge ourselves, to try things we have not done before, to explore any approaches that may help us to do things more effectively. To be innovative, we need always be ready to admit that there are things we do not know, and always be ready to learn new technologies and anything else that makes us to be more productive and make us to be better professionals.
(5) Performance says it all. We see often people in large enterprises are obsessed with internal politics and relationships. I am sure that this is not the case here. But anyway, I am going to make one thing crystal clear in front of you: for all the things that I have control and for all the situations that I can influence, performance has the final say. The A performer gets the reward, gets the rise, gets the promotion and gets the development opportunity. You think those are attractive, and you think those are honorable to have, then you work hard, you deliver, and you prove that you are an A performer.
(6) Teamwork is the ground rule. When we emphasize performance, some people immediately think of a hero or a heroin at the center of the stage, a bright star in the largely dark night sky. This is not right. Performance is first judged by how well our group accomplish our collective goals; how well our group create value for the business of ***. If our group fails, nobody successes. Performance is mainly determined by how much you contribute in this team effort. It certainly considers the factor how well you help your teammates, and how well you contribute to the professional development of your teammates. You know, I am talking about teamwork here. In our group, if there is one single ground rule, it is teamwork, and teamwork with all its positive implications. With teamwork as the ground rule, there will be no excuse, no accusation and no blaming, absolutely NO.

Not I want to discuss with you what we want to achieve as a group.

There are two things I feel important. The first, we need to build the best ****** among Fortune 500 companies. To be the first or to be the best, nothing else. And we also need to be well prepared to carry out any tasks for us to better serve the business of ***. Here comes the second thing I hope to achieve in my tenure: I want to see everybody to get well developed professionally in terms of both skills and advance in our career paths. At the end of my tenure, I hope we are all among the most competitive in our profession and all of us are confident to take more responsibilities here at *** or in any other institutions.

You have done a lot of great things in the past, and I see more challenges are coming in the way ahead of us. There is no doubt we have the talents and we have the potentials. Let us demonstrate our commitments; let us work together and face the challenges together.