Haier

Back to 2013, Gary Hamel visited with the puzzle of “how RenDanHeYi model developed”, he is now very surprised that Haier has already shifted its focus from ZZJYT to the Micro-enterprise, CEO Zhang has been thinking how to build an ecosystem with co-creation and win-win principle.

After the excellent speech that Gary made at the end of this journey, a number of tough questions posed to Gary. “What’s the difference between Haier’s CEO and others?” a very loyal user of Haier asked. The CEO Zhang was sitting in the front row of the presentation hall at that moment. “This is a very tough question, but I think CEO Zhang is trying to build the future of corporation, the corporation that can be adaptable for future organization”.

But this is not the biggest challenge that he had to face. On 19^th February, he had to summarized the result and present them in front of more than 300 audience, Gary spent 3 days to communicate with senior leaders, section leaders, platform owners, micro-enterprise and all other relevant stakeholders of Haier group, he had to summarize all of these into an 1 hour presentation.

During the presentation, he displayed a very interesting organization chart, the organization that has never existed so far. In the tree organization chart, he draw two levels of hierarchy, Bill Gates was sitting on top of the hierarchy, and leaders from Apple, Google were in the lower position. This was to explain the creativity and giant internet companies would probably never be created if these talented leaders were locked into their specific roles. They can only focus on the things that are mentioned in their job description. Gary predicted the failure is inevitable in this kind of organization, because all the decisions have to be made by the top level of hierarchy.

Gary also mentioned that although the giant technology company Microsoft has achieved tremendous achievements in the past, they were always one step late than others in the recent 20 years. Leaders’ wisdoms are restricted by the times; they could not unleash the entire enterprise’s creativity by the boundary of top hierarchy. It does not matter whether they are creators or business people, they have to unleash all the people’s creativity.

After eliminating the bureaucracy in Haier, the company is now transforming into an platform, which accumulated more than 3,800 node of Microenterprise and thousands of micro-enterprise. Enterprise is transforming into a node of Internet, a node that could interact with all different resources. Every employee of Haier is now turning themselves into an entrepreneur, they could start their businesses on the platform, facing with users and creating values. “Leaders must empower all your controls to your employees”, CEO Zhang is referred as the chief architect rather than a strategic leader.

CEO Zhang also said “No every single employee could be entrepreneur, we are not trying to turn every employee into an entrepreneur, but we want to attract all entrepreneurs to become our employees”.

As the professor of IMD, Bill Fisher commented Haier as “the ideal form of China’s future organization, Haier has not only set a benchmark in China, but also referred as the role model of the global enterprise”. Professor Gary later gave a prediction of Haier’s future, “Haier has already become one of the greatest companies with best management practice, and it is very likely that Haier will succeed in the future”.