Turn the Selfishness of Individuals into Good of Public

This was a ancient Chinese story regarding Zeng guofan (曾国藩). Zeng is a military general and Confucian scholar in Qing Dynasty. He has a large group of counselors working for him. But one thing bothers him is that a lot of people leaves after working for a short period. One day, he asked one of his trusted counselors why. The person answered, “It is hard to get promoted working for you because you think people should be selfless, and you only promote people with great contributions. There are other generals promotes people more quickly.”  Zeng then asked “How can we solve it”? The counselor said, “You’ll need to be selfishlessness and turn the Selfishness of Individuals into Good of Public  (合众人之私，成一人之公)”. Zeng took the advice and his counselors team became the best thereafter.

Think about it. Few people are selfless. Ordinary people like us are all working for our self interest. In all the companies I worked, people comes and leaves frequently. For the people who stays, quite a few of them do not have a better option. Few people really enjoys working.

Every company needs to take care of the selfness of the individuals, not just the management team, but everyone. Everyone should be given the opportunity to realize his/her full potential. Otherwise, the guy is going to leave sooner or later. And the company may ends of keeping someone, the ones that don’t have a better choice and don’t enjoy working.