祝融说。

Stepping away from the grand narrative of the commercial ecosystem, we turn our gaze to a closer, more everyday, yet equally hidden battlefield: the organization.

If standards and ecosystems are a company's weapons directed outward, then systems and processes are its reins directed inward. You may think that working at a company means exchanging your time and skills for a fair paycheck. But what you do not know is that from your very first day on the job, an invisible game over your attention, energy, and possibilities has already begun.

The company does not need to give you orders. It does not need a foreman, does not need a whip. It only needs to establish an intricate system of institutions — an invisible framework composed of KPIs, career ladders, approval workflows, and cultural norms — and then patiently wait for you to entangle yourself within it.

The harder you try, the more you pursue excellence, the deeper you sink into this framework. The more you want to prove yourself, the more each of your choices is pulled by these systems. In the end, when you think you are fighting for your career, you are actually working for this institutional system. All your possibilities are being planed down, bit by bit, by this seemingly harmless blunt knife, converging into the trajectory the company has preset for you.

7.1 The Trap of KPIs: When You Only Do "What Is Measured"

In modern business management, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are held up as the holy grail. They are packaged as a "scientific management tool," a "force that drives the team forward." Managers believe that only what can be quantified can be managed; only what is measured can be done well.

This logic itself is not wrong. But it overlooks a fatal side effect: when everything is quantified, people only do "what is measured," and stop doing "what is right."

This is not a moral problem, but a systemic behavioral convergence problem. When an organization explicitly declares, "We will evaluate your performance based on Indicator X," all rational individuals' attention naturally and irreversibly converges on Indicator X. They will find every way to make Indicator X look good — even if it means sacrificing equally important things that are not on the KPI list.

What You Measure Is All You Get

This is a classic instance of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Let us look at a composite scenario—one that many customer service teams have nonetheless lived through.

The customer service department of an internet company was assessed on core KPIs of "average call duration" and "daily call volume." Managers believed that shorter calls and more calls meant higher efficiency. So customer service representatives frantically began shortening calls. They learned to give standard answers before customers finished explaining their problems, to hang up when customers hesitated, and to skillfully deflect complex issues with "we'll transfer this to the relevant department."

What was the result? The average call duration did go down, and the daily call volume did go up. But customer satisfaction plummeted, and complaint rates soared. The complex problems that truly needed to be resolved were cleverly kicked out of the system, never actually addressed.

This is a classic KPI trap. The company wanted "high-quality customer service," but what was measured was "call duration." So employee behavior converged on the quantifiable goal of "shortening calls," while the unquantifiable essence of "service quality" was silently sacrificed.

The trap of KPIs lies in the "false precision" they create. They make managers feel they have everything under control, but in reality, they are merely reducing a complex reality to a set of manipulable numbers. And the frontline employees, in this game of numbers, learn to "make the data" rather than "do the work."

When Quantification Becomes the Only Language

The more insidious damage is that KPI culture gradually erodes an organization's "non-quantifiable values."

When a team has been driven solely by KPIs for a long time, the things that cannot be measured by KPIs — trust between colleagues, team atmosphere, long-term innovation investment, empathy for users — gradually become marginalized and eventually wither away.

You cannot measure "creativity" with a KPI, so creativity is sacrificed. You cannot measure "long-term value" with a KPI, so long-term thinking is sacrificed. You cannot measure "team cohesion" with a KPI, so collaborative spirit is sacrificed.

This is not because people do not value these things, but because the institutional system leaves no room for them. In an organization ruled by KPIs, employees' time, energy, and attention are all scarce resources. They must make a choice: do they spend time on things that "count toward the score," or on things that are "meaningful but not measured"?

For the vast majority of people, the answer is self-evident. Because KPIs are directly tied to your performance review, your bonus, your promotion. You could certainly choose to persist in doing "the right thing," but the cost is that your KPI numbers look bad, your performance rating drops, and your career development is hindered.

Thus, every rational individual is forced to converge their behavior onto the track defined by KPIs. You are no longer a professional with judgment and creativity — you have become a KPI optimizer, a slave to the numbers.

The "Prisoner's Dilemma" of Organization-Wide Performance

The KPI trap does not exist only at the individual level. It also triggers a "prisoner's dilemma" style of destructive competition across the entire organization.

When every department and every team is driven by its own KPIs, cross-departmental collaboration becomes a zero-sum game. The sales team, to meet its own KPIs, makes technical promises to clients that the product team cannot deliver. The product team, to meet its own KPIs, rejects reasonable requests from the sales team because "it's not in our quarterly goals." The customer service team, to control its own KPIs, pushes customer complaints to the technical team instead of proactively solving them.

Everyone is staring at their own KPIs. Everyone is responsible only for their own KPIs. No one is responsible for the "whole," because the whole is not measured.

This is the most ironic outcome of KPI culture: an organization composed of countless "rational" individuals ends up producing an "irrational" overall behavior. Each department is optimally meeting its own metrics, but the entire organization is fragmenting and consuming itself in internal friction.

KPIs — the tool designed to "improve efficiency" — ultimately becomes the culprit that destroys organizational collaboration efficiency. It converges the attention of all participants from an open battlefield requiring judgment onto a narrow, manipulable scoreboard.

7.2 The Illusion of the Career Ladder: A Step at a Time into the Cage

If KPIs perform "micro-convergence" on you in your daily work, then the career ladder performs "macro-convergence" on you across the dimension of your entire life.

From the day you enter a large company, a clear, alluring ladder is laid out before you: P5, P6, P7, P8... or Engineer, Senior Engineer, Technical Expert, Architect... Each level has clear promotion criteria, salary ranges, and privileges.

This ladder looks like a broad avenue to success. You just need to work hard, constantly improve yourself, and climb step by step. The higher you climb, the more you get — higher pay, greater power, more prestigious titles.

But few realize that this ladder is also a carefully designed cage. With every step upward, you lose something — not something as obvious as losing salary, but something more subtle and more important: your freedom to refuse, your possibility to explore, your power to choose.

The Sweet Trap of Promotion: You Think You Are Winning

Every promotion feels like a small victory. You beat the competition, you earned the company's recognition, your salary went up, your title sounds more impressive. You feel immense satisfaction and pride.

But every promotion also binds you more deeply to this system.

Think about it. When you were a newly hired junior engineer, you had almost nothing to lose. You could freely try different projects, speak your mind honestly, and even walk away gracefully when things did not feel right. Your choice space was vast.

But when you have risen to a senior manager or director position, the situation is completely different. Your salary has grown to a level difficult to match elsewhere. You are leading a team of dozens of people, to whom you feel responsible. You have accumulated years of networks, relationships, and influence at this company. You have bought a house here, your children are in the local school district.

Can you still leave as easily as you could five years ago?

This is the "sweet trap" of promotion: every promotion exchanges "gains" for your "freedom." The more you get, the more you have to lose, the higher the cost of leaving this system. You are locked into this system by more and more "golden handcuffs."

The Irreversibility of the One-Way Track

Another illusion of the career ladder is that it looks like a ladder you can freely choose to climb "up" or "down," but in reality, it is a one-way, irreversible track.

In almost every large company, "downward mobility" is a disgrace. Have you ever seen a vice president voluntarily return to a director role? Have you ever seen a P9 technical expert willing to downgrade to P7 and start over? Almost impossible — because it is not just about salary; it is about face, dignity, and professional reputation.

So once you step onto this ladder, you can only go up. You cannot stop, because stopping means being overtaken by younger people behind you. You cannot retreat, because retreating means failure. Your only choice is to keep climbing, even if you do not like the view from above.

This mechanism of "upward compulsion" is itself an exquisite convergence design. It drives everyone in a single direction. You are not allowed to have your own pace, your own life plan. You can only follow the rhythm set by the company, on this one-way track, climbing until you can climb no more.

The Mismatch of Rank and Power: From Doing to Orchestrating

Promotion carries an even more subtle cost: it quietly changes your relationship with "work" itself.

When you were a junior employee, the essence of your work was "doing things." You wrote code, created designs, wrote documents, handled customer issues. Your sense of accomplishment came from having personally created something, having personally solved a problem. Your relationship with work was direct and intimate.

But as you keep climbing, you find yourself moving further and further away from "doing things." You start "managing" the people who do things. You start "approving" the work of those who do things. You start "setting" the processes that those who do things must follow. You no longer write code — you review code. You no longer design products — you evaluate product proposals. You no longer face customers — you look at the customer data your subordinates report.

You have become a "professional spectator."

This transformation itself is not necessarily a problem — after all, organizations need managers. But the issue is that many people are pushed into this position by the lure of "promotion" without fully understanding this transformation. They think promotion means "doing what you are good at on a larger scale," but in reality, promotion means "completely abandoning what you are good at to do something entirely unfamiliar."

This is the so-called Peter Principle: in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. And the force driving this process is precisely that seemingly enticing career ladder.

By the time you realize this, it is too late. You have spent ten years turning from an excellent engineer into a mediocre manager. You have lost the skills you were best at, without acquiring matching new abilities. You have converged your career — from a professional path that could have been continuously refined — into a track you are neither good at nor enjoy.

7.3 The Soft Violence of Process: When Systems Become Ends

If KPIs tell you "what you should do," and the career ladder tells you "where you should go," then processes tell you "how you should get there."

Processes are the most common and most easily overlooked convergence tool in organizations. They are not as naked as KPIs in driving your behavior, nor as blatant as the career ladder in planning your career. They appear in a gentle, seemingly beneficial guise of "standardization," yet silently strip away your autonomy over "how to do things."

The Approval Chain: Every Gate Is a Deprivation of Choice

Anyone who has worked in a large company is familiar with the word "approval." You draft a proposal, and it needs your direct supervisor's approval. After the supervisor approves, it needs cross-departmental sign-off. After cross-departmental sign-off, it needs the VP's approval. After the VP approves, if additional resources are needed, you go through the financial approval process, possibly even requiring a general manager's office resolution.

By the time you navigate the entire process, two months may have passed. And your proposal, through this long approval chain, has been revised layer by layer, polished repeatedly, eventually becoming a "compromise" that everyone can accept but no one is truly satisfied with.

The essence of the approval chain is not "quality assurance" but "risk distribution." Every manager at each approval node is not concerned with "whether this should be done," but with "if this goes wrong, will I be held accountable?" So they lean toward conservatism, toward delay, toward eliminating all possible risks — even if it means killing innovation.

At each approval gate, your proposal has a bit of its edge, its uniqueness, its adventurous spirit shaved off. When it finally reaches the end, it has converged from an exploration full of possibilities into a risk-free mediocrity.

This is the convergence logic of the approval chain: it does not directly say "no" to you; it simply makes every "yes" incredibly difficult. Through silent delays and invisible resistance, it causes you to unconsciously adjust your own behavior. You begin to learn to "anticipate your boss's anticipation," "give advance notice," "make the proposal as conservative as possible to pass approval." No one needs to tell you "how you should do it" — the process itself has already taught you.

Weekly Reports and Performance Reviews: The Routinization of Self-Censorship

If the approval chain is an "external" constraint, then weekly reports and performance reviews are "internal" domestication.

Writing a weekly report, doing a quarterly review — these have become standard for modern professionals. But few stop to think about what these seemingly "work-reporting" tools are really for.

Weekly reports and performance reviews are essentially a "self-censorship mechanism." They force you to periodically examine yourself: What did I do this week? What results did I achieve? How are my KPIs doing? How far am I from the next promotion?

Every time you write a weekly report, you conduct an "institutionalized examination" of yourself. You translate your work into the language the organization recognizes, pack it into the format the organization prescribes, and present it within the narrative framework the organization expects. No one needs to tell you "what your work should look like" — because in the process of writing the report, you have already completed this "self-convergence" yourself.

More subtly, this self-censorship is continuous and periodic. It requires no external supervision, because you are your own supervisor. Every week, you reinforce this "institutionalized self." Every week, you deepen your identification with the organizational framework. You are no longer "being domesticated by the system" — you have become "self-domesticating."

OKR Alignment: The Unification of Ideological Lines

In recent years, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have replaced traditional management by objectives and become the new darling of many tech companies. OKRs are praised as a tool for "stimulating innovation" and "empowering teams," because they emphasize "bottom-up" goal setting and "alignment" rather than "assignment."

But the "alignment" mechanism of OKRs is precisely its most subtle and insidious convergence function.

"Alignment" means making every team's and every individual's goals highly consistent with the company's strategic direction. This sounds reasonable — after all, if everyone's goals are unrelated to the company's strategy, how can the company function?

But the problem is that when we push "alignment" to its extreme, it becomes an "unification of ideological lines." You are no longer entitled to pay attention to things "unrelated to the company's strategy." You no longer have the space to explore directions that "do not currently align with the company's OKRs." Every one of your objectives and key results must be clearly traceable back to the company's top-level strategy.

Thus, all your efforts are converged within the "strategic direction" defined by the company. You lose the freedom to "explore," because the results of exploration cannot be "aligned." You lose the freedom to "experiment," because experimentation cannot be fitted into the OKR framework. You lose the freedom of "long-term thinking," because the OKR cycle is quarterly, not decadal.

OKR — the management method packaged as an "empowerment tool" — is actually an exquisite "attention funnel." It channels the attention of everyone in the organization from a vast, open field of possibilities onto the few "strategic priorities" designated by the company. You feel you are proactively setting goals, but in reality, your goal space has already been bounded by the company's preset framework.

The Ultimate Paradox of Process: When Systems Themselves Become the End

The most terrifying thing about processes is not the processes themselves, but the fact that they "self-replicate."

Once a process is established, it generates a need to maintain it. To maintain the process, you need more people. With more people, you need more processes to manage them. More processes, in turn, need more people to maintain. This is a self-reinforcing cycle.

In the end, you find that most people in an organization are engaged in work unrelated to "creating value" — they are maintaining processes, optimizing processes, reporting on processes, auditing processes. The system itself, once a "means," has become an "end." The organization's existence is no longer about creating products or serving customers, but about sustaining its own operation.

This is the "alienation of process": we invented processes to serve us, but in the end, we became servants of the process.

7.4 Cultural Identity: The Ultimate Convergence from "I Obey" to "I Will"

KPIs, career ladders, processes — these institutional tools are all "external" constraints. They tell you what you should not do, or what you should do, but there is always an opposition between "you" and the "system."

But when "cultural identity" occurs, this opposition disappears. You no longer feel the system is an external constraint; you feel it is your own choice. You no longer feel you need to "obey" the company's rules — you genuinely "identify" with them.

This is the highest level of "forced convergence": not making you "have to do it," but making you "truly want to do it." Not making you "obey," but making you "identify." Not external compulsion, but internal self-awareness.

Cultural Screening: Who Stays and Who Leaves Is Already Determined

The first function of company culture is "screening."

Every organization has its unique cultural DNA. Some companies advocate a "wolf culture," emphasizing competition and struggle. Some companies promote a "family culture," emphasizing harmony and care. Some companies pursue a "geek culture," emphasizing technology and innovation.

These cultures themselves are neither right nor wrong. But they all share a common function: attracting those who "fit" and repelling those who do not.

When a company repeatedly emphasizes "rapid iteration, embrace change," those who prefer stability and dislike risk will naturally feel uncomfortable and eventually choose to leave. Meanwhile, those who enjoy adventure and pursue speed will be attracted to this culture and choose to stay.

This is a process of "self-selection." The company does not need to fire anyone. It only needs to define its own culture, and then wait for employees to make their own choices. Those who stay are culturally "matched." Those who do not fit will, in the discomfort of the culture, voluntarily exit.

After several rounds of such "natural selection," what remains in the organization is a highly homogeneous group of people. They share similar values, similar ways of thinking, similar behavioral patterns. They do not need much management, because they are already "spontaneously" working toward the same direction.

This is the "convergence" function of cultural identity: not through external pressure, but through internal "self-selection," it converges the diversity of people in the organization into a very narrow range.

From "Work" to "Faith": The Alienation of Identity

Cultural screening is only the first step. The deeper layer is the construction of "identity."

When a person highly identifies with a company's culture, they no longer "work for a company" — they "become part of this company." Their self-identity is deeply bound to the company's identity.

Have you seen people who work at Apple? They do not just "work for Apple" — they "are Apple people." When they talk about Apple, they use "we" instead of "they." They do not just practice Apple's design philosophy during work hours; after work, their aesthetics, their lifestyle, their consumption choices are all deeply influenced by Apple's culture.

Have you seen people who work at ByteDance? They do not just "work at ByteDance" — they "are ByteDance people." When they talk about "ByteDance style," it is like professing a faith. They accept that "ByteDance and the heart have only one beat." They engrave "always entrepreneurial" into their code of conduct.

When this identity is established, you no longer need any external management tools. Because the employees themselves are the strictest managers. They will proactively, consciously, even zealously, regulate their own behavior according to the company's cultural norms.

At this point, the company no longer needs to "manage" you. Because you yourself have become the company's most loyal "manager."

The Trap of Cultural Identity: When "Being Yourself" Becomes "Being What the Company Expects"

The trap of cultural identity is that it makes you think "you are being yourself," but in reality, you are just "being the person the company expects you to be."

When a company repeatedly emphasizes "openness and transparency," those who are not naturally open and transparent feel pressure. They must pretend to be "open and transparent," or they will be seen as "not fitting in," "not culturally matching."

When a company repeatedly emphasizes "ownership," those who just want to do their job well without taking on extra responsibility also feel pressure. They must show an "owner" attitude, even if they do not genuinely feel it, because not doing so would be seen as "not committed enough," "not having the right mindset."

This is the "soft violence" of cultural identity: it does not force you to do anything, it simply defines a standard of "good employee," and then lets you feel that "if I do not do this, I am not a good employee."

This pressure is more effective than any KPI, any process, any system. Because it comes not from the outside, but from within. You need no one's supervision — you are your own strictest supervisor.

Ultimate Convergence: Internalization of the System

When cultural identity reaches its extreme, it completes the final closed loop of "system internalization."

You no longer need KPIs to drive you, because you have genuinely identified with the company's goals — you treat the company's goals as your own. You no longer need the career ladder to tempt you, because you have fully integrated your life plan into the company's career development system. You no longer need processes to constrain you, because you have internalized the company's behavioral norms — every move you make automatically conforms to the company's expectations.

You have become a "perfect organizational person."

But — and this is worth pondering — what have you lost in this process?

You have lost the ability to "question." Because you have fully identified with this system, you no longer feel there is anything to question. You have lost the ability to "imagine another possibility," because your world has been filled by this system. You have lost the ability to be "independent," because your self-identity is completely bound to this system.

You are no longer "yourself." You have become "part of the system."

This is the most thorough victory of "forced convergence" at the organizational level: it does not need to conquer you — it only needs to make you "willingly" become part of it.

Conclusion

From the quantitative trap of KPIs, to the one-way track of the career ladder, from the soft violence of processes, to the ultimate internalization of cultural identity — we have seen how a company, using the "blunt knife" of systems, without bloodshed or shouting, planes down the possibilities of every individual, bit by bit, converging them into the trajectory the organization expects.

But note: I am not criticizing the organization itself. Organizations need systems, just as societies need laws. An organization without systems would only fall into chaos and inefficiency. The problem is not the system itself, but whether we are aware of its existence, and whether we are willing to confront the invisible influence it exerts upon us.

Because when you become aware of this blunt knife, you have already taken the first step toward countering it. You are no longer the person being "unconsciously led by the system." You have become someone who "clearly observes the system and selectively interacts with it."

However, the blunt knife of systems is only the "visible surface" of the organizational game. Beneath the surface lies a more hidden, more deadly undercurrent — a web of power woven from information asymmetry. When your superior holds information you cannot see, when your subordinates report things you do not know, when the entire organization's decisions are made in a "dark room" invisible to you — how can you even realize you are being guided? How can you know you are being manipulated?

In the next chapter, we will explore, from a more microscopic, more personal perspective, another core convergence mechanism within organizations: information asymmetry. We will see how the flow and interception of information shape the power structure within organizations, and how everyone in this silent information war is both the manipulated and the manipulator.