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Starting and building

Ren Zhengfei

Endurance

Ren Zhengfei (Contemporary · 1944–) — Endurance.

Starting and buildingThe industrial ageEndurance

What actually happened?

He started late. At forty-three, an age when most people have stopped starting things, he was reselling switches made by other companies out of an office in Shenzhen. Thirty years later the company was the largest equipment maker in its industry anywhere. Asked about that arc, his line was that Huawei has had no success, only growth. It is not modesty. In his vocabulary success is a place where you are allowed to stand still, and standing still is precisely what he has spent thirty years designing the company not to do.

Survival is the goal

Staying alive is the plainest goal Huawei has, and also the highest one. A dead company's vision is worth nothing, so everything else is subordinate to the question of whether the firm is still here in ten years. The habit is what kept the organisation from freezing when trouble actually arrived.

Ask of any strategy proposal: does this raise or lower our chance of existing in a decade? Many impressive plans do not survive the question.

Self-criticism as an immune system

In the best year of Huawei's history he wrote an essay describing in detail how the company might die. Seeing risk while conditions are good is the whole trick: self-criticism is not self-doubt, it is the deliberate exposure of your own blind spots before someone else finds them.

Put the near-miss, not the win, at the top of the weekly agenda and the organisation slowly grows a warning system instead of a congratulation system.

Customer first, striver second

Customer-centred, striver-based is one sentence with two jobs. The first half sets direction, aiming every resource at customer value. The second half supplies the motive, by making sure the people actually doing the work are the people who get paid for it.

A reward system that pays proximity to power rather than proximity to the customer will quietly reverse the first half of the sentence within a year.

Sew the winter coat in summer

Winter passes and spring returns, but the coat has to exist before the cold does. Contingency, cash and a second capability are cheap to build in a strong year and impossible to build in a weak one, which is why the timing of his most famous essay is the argument.

Run the stress test in the record quarter. The same exercise in a falling quarter reads as panic and lands on morale.

How do I use it today?

Once a year, write yourself the winter scenario: if the most important customer or the largest source of revenue disappeared next year, what exactly would you do? Write it while the numbers are good, because the same document written in a bad quarter is no longer planning, it is triage.

Deep read

Huawei's winterTalking bankruptcy in a record yearHe wrote it the year revenue first crossed twenty billion yuanLet those who hear the gunfire call for artilleryTurning authority toward the frontWhoever stands closest to the customer commands the resources

Read alongside

Kazuo InamoriTwo eastern versions of the company as a practice: Inamori binds people with an ethic of doing right by them, Ren drives them with self-criticism and a sense of crisis — one uses good, one uses fear. Zeng GuofanThe same method a hundred and thirty years apart: build the solid camp and fight the slow fight, no shortcuts, no clever moves, never be beatable before you try to win. Konosuke MatsushitaBoth put survival first and take opposite routes: Matsushita stores water in the good years, Ren manufactures a sense of crisis so nobody relaxes.

Further

Kazuo Inamori Zeng Guofan Steve Jobs Jensen Huang Lee Kuan Yew Konosuke Matsushita Wang Xing

Lines to keep

Staying alive is Huawei's plainest goal and its highest one.