“Owing to the blind pursuit of KPI by both the executive body and employees, our value system has been compromised. Sales growth has replaced user performance, easyoperation has replaced easy reliable operation, as the most important thing. We are gradually drifting away from our users, from the mission and value system we used to uphold when we just started.”

　　Indeed, KPI has become a headache for Baidu and its employees, just like the Incantation of the Golden Hoop for the Monkey King.

　　Chen could never forget that “since some time staff training was less about business and operation, but more about writing promotion reports, managing colleague relations and finding overlapping spots between others and one’s own KPI”.

　　Li also mentioned this problem in this article, saying that “KPI has always been the priority at Baidu Doctor. Once a project failed to meet the KPI, it had to be suspended.”

　　“KPI is like a promise, so you’ve got to keep to the promise. Indeed, many people attach high importance to KPI here at Baidu. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but what shall we do when KPI and our value system are contradictory. This is a more critical problem,” he wrote.

　　Why are value system and KPI contradictory sometimes? In an interview with a financial media, Robin Li also admitted that the contradiction between value system and KPI was a critical problem at Baidu. He told a small story to illustrate his point:

　　To lower surgical mortality, New York State once adopted a policy and allowed patients to choose doctors when doing bypass surgery. However, after the policy was enacted, surgical mortality increased. How come? Of course, doctors will do everything they can to save patients. However, since high risk is involved in bypass surgery, surgical death is sometimes unavoidable. Therefore, the best way to lower surgical mortality is to refuse to have bypass surgery for patients who are severely ill.

　　“Easy and reliable” used to be at the core of Baidu’s value system. However, when it comes to promotion, KPI is the most important indicator. An aggressive incentive mechanism disrupt the balance between value system and KPI. When KPI became the sole indicator to get promoted, an increasing number of employees will give up value and opt instead for ways to achieve higher KPI.

　　A former employee at Baidu Health Business Division revealed to TMTpost that in the early stage, users couldn’t cancel their registration. “When some people advised that we should enable registration cancelling, others would disagree citing excuses such as such measure would undermine their KPI,” he explained.

　　“We should have focused on other businesses besides online hospital registration. We shouldn’t have focused much attention on competing in a mature market. Money should have been spent in blind spots, in areas that don’t guarantee profit in the short term but could generate values in the long run,” he reflected.

　　Indeed, it’s KPI that caught Baidu in a trap and limited its innovative power.

　　“Middle managers often constitute the biggest obstacle to innovation,” Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu Group, said during the recent 2017 Boao Asia Forum. For him, the senior executives often like innovation, but middle managers often constitute the biggest obstacle since they generally prefer to maintain the status quo. In any large-sized enterprise, convincing middle managers is the most challenging task. Therefore, many enterprises achieve innovation through bypassing middle managers.

　　Although people who determined tactics and strategy are often different in large-sized companies, they should have met properly. However, as to Baidu Health Business Division, strategy and tactics were disjointed. This is why high-level strategic decisions were often misinterpreted in the tactic level, and KPI chosen as the sole indicator for good performance, and even promotion and pay rise.

　　“When I look back, I would imagine if Baidu chose to invest in others instead of doing everything by itself, we should have done better,” a former employee at Baidu Health Business Division told TMTpost.

　　On the official website of Baidu Doctor, we can still see its progress for the past two years:

　　Covering 343 cities, 12,791 hospitals and 270,764 doctors; providing online hospital registration service for 9,113,253 users in total.

　　Nevertheless, there used to be a wonderful plan beneath these data: “connecting people and information; channeling information between patients and doctors”.

　　…………………………………

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　　[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Fu Mengwen, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

　　Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.