Micro-enterprise (小微): definition
*A micro-enterprise (小微, xiǎo wēi, "ME") is the smallest named accountable unit that a firm can carry: it has a director, is oriented toward at least one customer or outcome, and is intended to account for the user value it creates.* In the original Haier usage it is a small team of roughly ten to twenty people constituted as an enterprise rather than a department. In the 561 Group the term also covers agents and scripts when they meet the same tests.
What is the difference from a department?
The line is binary, not a matter of degree. A department has a budget, a manager it reports to and an internal customer; it is funded whether or not anyone values its output, and is corrected by instruction. A micro-enterprise keeps its own accounts, hires and removes its members, sets and distributes its own pay, commits to targets by contract, and receives income only when a user is served. It is corrected by results. A unit renamed "micro-enterprise" that still draws a budget and answers to a manager is a department.
What is its constitution?
Under Rendanheyi a micro-enterprise holds:
- three rights (三权): decision, personnel and distribution;
- a value-adjustment wager (对赌): a two-sided commitment to a target set against the best comparable performance in the market;
- a win-win value-added statement (共赢增值表): accounts that show what it created;
- contestable leadership: any party may bid to lead it, and the team may remove its leader;
- user-derived pay (人单酬).
What kinds exist?
Market micro-enterprises face end users. Node micro-enterprises serve other micro-enterprises. Incubating micro-enterprises pursue a user the firm does not yet have.
What is it not?
Not a team, squad or pod, which are units of work organization inside a firm that retains the payroll. Not a subsidiary, which is a legal entity under a parent's control. Not a franchise, which licenses a proven formula. It is, in the model's words, a firm-shaped thing operating inside another firm, and it is only that if the market it faces is real enough to kill it.
How does the 561 Group define it?
The Group's glossary calls it the smallest named accountable unit the firm can carry, with a director, optional internal staff offices, an orientation to a customer or outcome, and the intended unit of accounting for user value. Later research adds that a micro-enterprise's linkage is to independently received user value under bounded, revocable authority, evidence, refusal, real resource costs and independently received settlement. A planned profit-and-loss statement or an internal token score is not evidence of real monetary profit. Whether an agent is a micro-enterprise or an anthropomorphic wrapper around a task queue is the test in Rendanheyi for AI agents.
What are the larger and smaller scales?
Smaller: a script treated as a micro-enterprise (Rendanheyi is a Hoare program). Larger: the self-governing settlement called an agentic metro-enterprise (sovereignty test).
How should you classify real work?
Classify actual work as a finite endeavor, a shared service, a persistent micro-enterprise or a candidate settlement using its actual authority, customers, obligations, resources, lineage, evidence and refusal. Do not promote one into another by renaming it or moving its directory.
Related terms
Rendanheyi · office and incumbency · Huidu Guanli · research at Lenticule Science