The Homo Sapiens Company’s overt and covert actions around the globe did not affect its normal internal operations.
After assigning various tasks to the company’s management team, Li Qingye took the time to establish a new department—the Demand Division.
He established this department with the goals of finding "development drivers," satisfying "employee needs," and enhancing "internal cohesion."
The newly established Jinghai Branch
received a work group from the Demand Division.
Sen Shangqiang was busy receiving supplies from the Lucia Branch. When he heard that the head office was sending people over, he hurried to the airport.
Yinqi Airport was constructed from over a hundred shipping containers, and only two runways had been paved with fast-setting cement.
"Welcome, everyone, to the Jinghai Branch."
The young man leading the work group extended his hand. "Manager Sen, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Lin Yingbo, leader of Work Group 3867 from the Demand Division."
"The Demand Division? A new department?" Sen Shangqiang asked curiously.
Lin Yingbo nodded. "It was just established. This outlines our scope of work."
Sen Shangqiang took the document and flipped through it, quickly understanding what the Demand Division’s responsibilities were.
This department’s duties were to take charge of the demand feedback app and demand database, which were previously managed by the Internal Affairs Department.
It was also responsible for conducting surveys of all employees, reviewing their feedback, and filtering for reasonable, achievable, and constructive suggestions. This information would then be used to provide data analysis conclusions for the production departments or to relay employee opinions to other departments.
Since the Jinghai Branch had just been established, it lacked submarine fiber optic cables and relied solely on satellite communication. This made it difficult to conduct online surveys, which was why Lin Yingbo’s team had been dispatched.
His entire team consisted of 50 people.
After speaking with Sen Shangqiang, they began their work immediately.
In the temporary residential area, thousands of container homes were arranged together, stacked three stories high to form makeshift housing.
As Lin Yingbo walked into the area, he noticed many elderly people sunbathing, but very few children.
He instructed his subordinates, "Let’s get to work!"
"Yes, sir."
The Demand Division employees present could all speak Japanese and English, so communicating with the East Japan locals was not difficult.
They quickly began asking the elderly men and women all sorts of questions.
The questions covered topics such as: family situation, any difficulties they were facing, anything they needed to purchase, their evaluation of the management staff, their satisfaction with their current lives, and any suggestions they had for the company.
The questions were exhaustive, covering personal information, family, life, work, society, hobbies, aspirations, ideals, suggestions, and complaints.
This was, in essence, an upgraded version of the previous demand feedback app.
Even if people’s answers included completely absurd requests or bizarre content, the surveyors still recorded them faithfully.
Because accurately reporting the employees’ true situation was the most fundamental requirement of the Demand Division.
If it couldn’t reflect the employees’ true thoughts, then the Demand Division would have no reason to exist.
If you conduct a satisfaction survey where the only options are [Very Satisfied], [Quite Satisfied], and [Satisfied], what’s the point? You might as well just make up the results yourself.
Li Qingye wanted to hear the employees’ most genuine voices, not just endless praise for the company.
Because he knew that nothing in this world was perfect. Everything has its own advantages and disadvantages at different stages, and this was a fact that had to be acknowledged.
A system will always encounter problems as it runs. As a programmer and administrator with the highest level of authority, Li Qingye was clear-headed; he knew he needed to modify the program frequently to make the system better adapted to the present.
Recently, while reviewing various reports, Li Qingye had discovered that the various surveys conducted by the Internal Affairs Division were still superficial and failed to reflect the employees’ true thoughts.
Therefore, he directly stripped some business functions from the Internal Affairs Divisions and reorganized them into the new Demand Division.
As a megacorporation, the Homo Sapiens Company’s natural monopoly meant it lagged behind the competitive model of free-market enterprises in terms of innovation and product optimization.
To solve this problem, Li Qingye introduced a special channel for employees to freely provide feedback on their needs, using it to guide the development and production of internal industries.
In the future, the Demand Division would be further refined, for example, by conducting market research, gathering product feedback, and studying new demands.
’After all, the innovation and optimization of a free market have their limits.’
"Free Demand" was Li Qingye’s vision of an upgraded free market. It could provide more comprehensive demand feedback and also prompt production departments to optimize products, design new ones, and develop new technologies based on that feedback.
Moreover, Free Demand had advantages that the free market lacked: high efficiency, low waste, and high satisfaction.
Once the stage of Free Demand was fully entered, the vast majority of products would be equivalent to "private customizations," where the product or service is tailored specifically to each individual’s needs.
’The free market, in reality, isn’t truly free.’
After all, corporations have an inherent advantage over customers. To ensure profits, they can only produce generic products, which inevitably fail to meet everyone’s needs.
At the same time, because they can’t accurately obtain demand feedback from all customers, and due to intense market competition, companies inevitably experience situations like overcapacity and undercapacity.
Overcapacity leads to wasted resources.
Undercapacity, in turn, prevents customers from obtaining cheap and abundant products.
Only by entering the Free Demand stage, where production departments can manufacture products based on demand, can wasted resources and insufficient capacity be avoided.
Li Qingye needed the free demands of his employees to provide the driving force for innovation in the Homo sapiens’ production departments.
He did not subscribe to market fundamentalism. ’All theories have their own validity, but that validity is not an eternal truth; it is built upon the environment of a specific stage.’
Now that the Homo Sapiens Company had entered the megacorporation stage, the free market model was simply unworkable.
Therefore, Li Qingye created Free Demand to complement the megacorporation system.
’In the future, who will dare say megacorporations lack creativity?’
The free demands of 920 million Homo sapiens employees would provide a continuous stream of creativity for the production and research departments of the Homo Sapiens Company.
’The so-called free market of Western economics could never achieve something on this scale.’
This level of granular demand could stimulate at least a thousand small industries.
For this reason, Li Qingye placed great importance on the Demand Division. He not only allocated it 1.5 million new human employees but also granted it considerable authority.
The goal was to enable the Demand Division to obtain the most authentic employee feedback possible, which could then be analyzed to identify all kinds of new demands.
Lin Yingbo and his team meticulously recorded everyone’s feedback, then entered it into each person’s individual database.
The updated demand feedback app would use big data to filter the information, which would then be analyzed by a supercomputer, and finally reviewed, compiled, and evaluated by humans.
After a full afternoon of surveying, the team had interviewed a total of 534 people.
In their temporary office, Lin Yingbo took a quick look at the keyword filtering from the big data.
’Low temperatures, 372 mentions... Poor soundproofing, 292 mentions... Mobility issues, 224 mentions...’
Sure enough, a preliminary screening made the various problems crystal clear.
Lin Yingbo organized ten suggestions for Sen Shangqiang based on priority, to facilitate his future work arrangements.
The survey work at other regional branches was also proceeding in an orderly manner, including not only online questionnaires but also offline, door-to-door visits.
The Demand Division’s million-plus employees were not just for show; they were there to continuously investigate the dynamic demand feedback of all 920 million employees.