Beijing, April 20, 2015 - Zhang Ruimin, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of Haier Group, the world’s leading home appliances and consumer electronics brand, has been honored with the Best Practices CEO Award, presented by Best Practice Institute (BPI). Mr. Zhang is the first 2015 recipient of the award that is presented to just a few of the world’s top CEOs each year who have demonstrated a commitment to developing talent in innovative ways.
Louis Carter, founder and CEO of BPI, stated, “Zhang Ruimin is exactly the kind of chief executive BPI’s CEO Award is all about. What Mr. Zhang did 30 years ago to rescue and revitalize his company was heroic. Even more important, though, is what Mr. Zhang is doing today to point the way to what talent management looks like in the Internet era.”
In order to address fast-changing user demands, Zhang Ruimin introduced a concept in September 2005 to give front line employees maximum autonomy and decision-making power in order to enable them to respond to the demands of users in the fastest way possible. He achieved this by inverting the traditional relationship pyramid - where managers sit at the top, followed by middle management, then sales teams and finally customers at the bottom. Instead, Haier Group places customers in the position of greatest importance and structures teams around them that can quickly respond to their needs.
Zhang Ruimin continues to introduce innovative management concepts to adapt to the fragmented and individual needs of customers in the Internet age. Haier Group is focusing on building self-managed teams known as micro-enterprises whereby everyone can be their own CEO in a completely flat enterprise. These operate as independent ventures, with each responsible for its own hiring, procurement, strategy, production and, ultimately, profit and loss. As each employee is expected to know and seek input from their users, a user-pay salary platform has been introduced. This means that employees of these microenterprises are financially rewarded directly from their profits in order to incentivise employees to use the Internet to work together with customers to develop the products they want. This is assisted by Haier Group’s ongoing transformation from large-scale mass production into a platform enterprise. Every worker is enabled to access resources from all around the world through the Internet to satisfy consumer desires for on-demand design, manufacturing and delivery.
Regarding Haier Groups’ talent management practices in the Internet age, BPI’s Carter stated, “The best talent management leaders put their faith in the creativity of their team members and then turn them loose. Nobody has done that so fearlessly and on such a broad scale as Zhang Ruimin.”
Through encouraging employees to continually adapt the business model to the times, CEO Zhang has led Haier to become the largest home appliance brand in the world. In 2014, Haier Group’s global revenues reached US$ 32.6 billion, while estimated profits grew three times faster than revenues – at 39 percent year-on-year – to US$ 2.4 billion. It was named the world’s number one major appliance manufacturer in December 2014 by Euromonitor International, the global leading market intelligence company, which calculated its global retail volume share to be over 10%. It was the sixth consecutive year that Haier Group won the award.
Zhang was selected for the Best Practices CEO Award from more than 500 nominees. The final selection was made by a Best Practices Institute advisory board consisting of senior executives from Fortune 500 and Global 500 organizations.
The recipient, Zhang Ruimin, said, “I am honored to receive the Best Practices CEO Award. Haier Group will continue to seize upon the characteristics of the Internet era and continue to conduct disruptive innovations.”
Established in 1998, Best Practice Institute is a leadership and management association focusing on best and innovative business practices. BPI was ranked on Leadership Excellence magazine's "Best in Leadership Development" in 2012. It has corporate and individual members on five continents, including executives and employees of more than half of the Fortune 500.
