Zhao Licheng, a miserable product manager still revising the eighteenth version of a requirements document at three in the morning, suddenly dropped dead at his desk.
When he woke up, he had become Zhu Houzhao, the notorious “foolish ruler” in Ming history. He had ascended the throne at fifteen, loved playing around and stirring things up, and had been berated by civil officials for sixteen years straight.
The good news: he was emperor now, so he didn’t have to revise requirements documents anymore.
The bad news: the moment he opened his eyes, he found himself in the middle of a court uproar. The eunuch Liu Jin had made a mess of things, the civil officials were sharpening their knives, and everyone was waiting to see the new emperor make a fool of himself.
The even worse news: according to the historical script, the civil officials would soon force him to kill a eunuch, then a prince would rebel, the borderlands would be at war, and the treasury would run dry. In the end, he would bring about his own downfall and leave behind a complete mess.
Looking at the gathered officials, Zhao Licheng fell into deep thought.
So, he was emperor now?
Fine. He’d handle it the way a product manager would.
And so
At court, when the ministers were quoting the classics, he asked, “Can we settle on a key message first?”
At a cabinet meeting, he wrote the six ministries’ core Q1 objectives on the blackboard: “Increase tax revenue by 20 percent. There are three key results…”
When the Eastern Depot sent in a report, he told the Embroidered Uniform Guard to investigate “the correlation between fluctuations in pork prices in the capital and official corruption.”
The civil officials were completely bewildered.
This emperor… why wasn’t he playing by the rules?
Things got even more mind-boggling after that.
When Liu Jin began studying modern management, when he pulled Wang Yangming into a “unity of knowledge and action” project review, when border battles got livestreamed from the front, and when the Ming fleet set sail to “expand into overseas markets”
The court officials finally realized:
