Ren Zhengfei
Huawei's winter
Talking bankruptcy in a record year
Ren Zhengfei, Huawei's Winter, 2001, published
In the company's best year he circulated an essay about failing. The parts that turn a mood into a mechanism.
What actually happened?
In 2001, revenue just past twenty billion yuan and profits high, Ren published Huawei's Winter. It opens with a question: what do we do on the day sales fall, or the company goes under? Then the admission: for ten years I have thought about failure every day, blind to success, with no sense of honour or pride, only a sense of crisis. Then the verdict, that the day of failure will certainly come and everyone should be ready to meet it. He insisted this was an assignment rather than a mood. Winter passes and spring arrives, but the coat is sewn beforehand.
Make the sense of crisis in a good year; a bad one makes only panic
Raise the alarm while results are falling and people scatter. Raise it in the best year and there is slack to convert worry into coats: contingency plans, cash, spare capability. The timing of the essay is the method. The drill happens while nothing is burning.
Stress tests, cutting redundant process and stockpiling cash look ugly in a record year. Done in a falling quarter, every cut lands on morale instead.
Thinking about failure daily is a way of aiming attention
Blind to success is not modesty theatre, it is allocation. Good news arrives by itself and bad signals have to be hunted. Wherever a leader's scarce attention rests, the organisation grows an information system to match: watch success and you grow pipes that carry congratulations.
Change the first item of the weekly meeting from this week's wins to the thing that came closest to going wrong. Three months later the reporting has changed shape.
Hand how do we survive to every single person
The essay keeps saying every one of us. A sense of crisis owned only by the founder is just the founder's insomnia. Translate it into a question anyone can answer: if a cheaper method replaced your job tomorrow, what keeps you here? That is what institutionalising it means.
Ask every team to write one page a year on what would remove this group's reason to exist. Teams that can write it usually do not die.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the company is at its best and nobody wants to hear bad news.
Ask first: are our winter coats, cash, contingency, a second capability, being made in this good year, or after it gets cold?
Where it goes wrong: turning the sense of crisis into permanent high-pressure fear until everyone is numb. He said prepare for winter, not live in it.
Lines to keep
For ten years I have thought about failure every day, not success.
The day of failure will certainly come. Be ready to meet it.
Winter always passes and spring comes. Use the winter to prepare.
Same situation, other people are asking
Everything's fine. What should I be getting ready for?To make this quarter I would squeeze the people carrying me.It is working. Should I go loud about it now?This is the highest I have ever been. Do I push for more?Things are going well and it scares me · all 11 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.