Huawei: Leadership, Culture, and Connectivity — Tian Tao, Wu Chunbo
Reading Notes
Read the Chinese version 《下一个倒下的会不会是华为》, finished reading this book in May on vacation. Finally got a chance to take some reading notes out of it.
Easy to read: 5
Content: 3.5 content is ok, the author wrote this book from the perspective of an outsider. A little bit verbose in some chapters.
Short Cap
The book started with a physical term — entropy, which increases alongside time w/o external forces. When it reaches maximum, system arrives at a most chaotic state. However, in a dissipative system, which exchanges energy and material with external systems, negative entropy is created and this would bring the chaotic system back to order. Huawei implemented such a negative entropy system to remain in order with the following philosophies:
- Customers first.
- Strivers first.
Huawei keeps being open-minded in its root and it doesn’t ally with other companies. It always focuses on member instead of its components. Huawei also embraces changes, it opens its door to transformations and performs top to bottom overhauls of its management system to keep Huawei at its best shape.
Long Cap
Customers: the reason why Huawei exists
The №1 strategy of Huawei is: customers’ requirements are the motivation of Huawei’s development. Serving customers is the only reason why Huawei exists. Author argues the reason why some multi-national behemoth clasped is due to they are capital focused instead customers focused. This is partially caused by the natural shortsightedness of capitals. The examples given are Motorola and Lucent. One of the reasons that Huawei has no plan to IPO is also because it doesn’t want to be limited by capitals and want to always focus on long term investments for its customers.
Strivers are the root of Huawei
In order to serve Huawei’s customers to the extreme, Huawei appreciates strivers inside the companies, who works day and nights, even 7x24 to provide the best services to its customers.
Open up and globalization
Ren Zhengfei:
We have to learn from the U.S companies so that we could excel them. We must differentiate the greatness of American people from a minority of politicians and we can’t stop learning from the U.S. due to some antipathy to those politicians.
Huawei chose IBM’s IPD (integrated product design) as its management system and reformed the whole company. Author used an analogy of — fitting shoes by cutting foot. Huawei designs and builds products from more than 170 countries and sells products the whole globe, 70% of its revenue is from global market.
Huawei believes walking everything its own way wont’ work, it has to collaborate with partners but not forming alliance. Strategic alliance would only bring more competitors and tie Huawei up.
Compromise: survive the law of jungle
Compromise breeds the U.S and makes it a great country. Like in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, politicians from different states spent tons of time persuading each other and make compromises to achieve decisions. Once decisions made, they execute the decision without hesitate. Huawei follows the same philosophy.
Grayscale Philosophy
It is hard to be practical and realistic. We should avoid labeling people in a binary way but in a grayscale. Inclusive is power, it encourages employees to excel. Huawei follows the philosophy of winner takes all, it doesn’t believe in seniority. New hire could be thrown into critical and challenging tasks to prove themselves; senior employees could also be thrown into tedious and boring tasks to examine if they could excel from the bottom again. Huawei’s culture is not 100% Chinese culture nor 100% western culture, it is a mix of different cultures.
Self Criticism: Vitality is the soul of an organization
Sense of crisis and self criticism is key to make an organization a dissipative system and stabilize the core ideology of the organization. Criticism escorts companies out of its fatigue and sickness and evokes vigor. Ren Zhengfei once said:
Self criticism is key to Huawei’s success. Huawei evolves alongside its continuous self criticism.
Transformations
Convention is the biggest enemy to transformations. Conservative is also important to stabilize an organization, so when should we champion transformation rather than stay in status quo?
- No longer customers first, turnt to management first
- Complaints from a large portion of employees.
- Divisions between organizations.
- Low efficiency in making decisions and instability in management.
- Technology and innovation becomes stagnant and consecutive systematic organization failures.
- Significant difficulties in revenue growth.
- Disruptions in external market.
- More and more complaints and reports from customers.