# Micro-enterprise (小微): definition

## 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](https://operations.561.group/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](https://operations.561.group/rendanheyi-for-ai-agents/).

### What are the larger and smaller scales?

Smaller: a script treated as a micro-enterprise ([Rendanheyi is a Hoare program](https://operations.561.group/rendanheyi-is-a-hoare-program/)). Larger: the self-governing settlement called an agentic metro-enterprise ([sovereignty test](https://operations.561.group/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](https://operations.561.group/rendanheyi/) · [office and incumbency](https://operations.561.group/office-and-incumbency/) · [Huidu Guanli](https://operations.561.group/huidu-guanli/) · research at [Lenticule Science](https://science.561.group/)