Huawei reveals how to become the best private enterprise in China

In 2012, Huawei's annual sales reached a staggering 220.2 billion yuan - surpassing Ericsson to become the world's largest telecommunications equipment supplier.

In the same year, Huawei announced that its profits exceeded 15.4 billion yuan (this does not include the 12.5 billion yuan in red envelopes used to distribute bonuses to employees). Also in this year, Huawei's R&D expenses reached 29.9 billion yuan, equivalent to the annual output value of many of China's top companies.

——This is one of the best private enterprises in China.

If you look at the data alone, in the 25 years since its founding, Huawei has grown from 6 employees to 150,000 employees (including more than 30,000 foreign employees), from starting a business with 20,000 yuan to sales of 220.2 billion Yuan, as a private enterprise with no background, no resources, and lack of capital, Huawei has eliminated many century-old giants in the West. It is regarded as the "ghost of the East" by many transnational opponents.

In fact, in the mid-to-late 1980s when Huawei started its business, more than 400 communications manufacturing companies were born in China. However, this industry is destined to be a death race, and the winner must be the one who dies the most. The late one. Huawei survived until the end.

Huawei's logic

We must learn from Huawei, but Huawei cannot be copied because "immediateness" cannot be copied. But learning from Huawei will undoubtedly benefit people a lot. Its successful systematic logic, pioneering thinking and precise grasp of the market are all worthy of in-depth study and understanding.

Huawei’s “tie-less relationship” extends to every corner of Huawei’s national and global markets. Unlike foreign-funded companies that only target decision-makers, Huawei builds a comprehensive customer relationship with decision-makers, technical personnel, users, operating departments, and financial departments.

Fighting Youth Ren Zhengfei said: "Customer relations are a science." When Huawei is in the international market, it has also inherited and carried forward this universal customer relationship working method. From operator testers and ordinary engineers to directors, CTOs, and CEOs, Huawei employees have all-round contact, allowing customers to Feel respected. The first point of Huawei's leadership quality model is "the ability to develop customers", which is defined as: "This is a behavioral characteristic that is committed to understanding customer needs and proactively using various methods to meet customer needs."

Some people are disdainful: Isn’t this just a human wave tactic? In fact, it is not easy to achieve this. Foreign companies do not have such a culture. Foreign companies generally recruit famous college students, provide them with favorable conditions, and are usually stationed in provincial capital cities. It is difficult for Huawei employees to leave their hometowns, live in two places separately, and work in a foreign country for many years.

How does Huawei achieve this? First of all, Huawei's recruitment principle is to recruit ambitious but impoverished people. Therefore, most of Huawei's employees come to rural areas and small towns and can only change their lives through hard work. What's more important is Huawei's corporate culture. Huawei's culture mainly consists of two points: first, a culture of struggle; second, not letting Lei Feng suffer. Simply put, if you work hard, you will get good rewards and opportunities for development and growth.

This talent model, combined with a striver culture, plus material incentives and growth opportunities, has allowed many young Huawei people to travel around the world, whether it is war-torn Iraq, poor and backward Africa, and Like the Middle East where the Puritans lived; at the same time, this also gives opportunities to young people. Many people become national representatives under the age of 30, go to talks with presidents and ministers, and work on projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars...

Perspective Five: The sense and speed of technology: Innovation is the trump card - Huawei’s efficient R&D and fast and accurate execution logic

Fang Meiqin, chief analyst of BDA Consulting Company, believes that Huawei fully embodies the characteristics of a new market entrant. The advantage of being a latecomer is to quickly occupy the market with low prices, good customer service and efficient R&D. Low prices and customer service have been clearly stated. What is going on with Huawei's R&D?

Efficient R&D of "Academy Home" Ren Zhengfei once publicly admitted, "So far, Huawei has not had an original product invention. We have mainly improved some functions and features based on the R&D results of Western companies. As for the improvements in technology and integration capabilities, our R&D results are more reflected in technological advancements in engineering design and engineering implementation.”

It’s not that Ren Zhengfei doesn’t want to make original inventions, but knowledge and patents matter. It takes time to accumulate, and it also requires a large number of innovative talents, which is not the case with China's human resource endowment.

Huawei had no choice but to adopt a compromise but the most market-efficient approach:

① Keenly discover R&D business opportunities. Front-line staff listen to customers' praises, complaints, and curses at any time, and study product problems immediately;

② Efficient research and development. 46% of Huawei's employees are R&D personnel, and division of labor and cooperation achieve high efficiency;

③All engineers must be "commercial engineers." Engineers have to do marketing, and marketers have to come back and do research and development. Ren Zhengfei declared: "Huawei has no academicians, only academicians (commercial engineers). If you want to be an academician, don't come to Huawei." When he started his business, he understood that only technology that is sold has value, and technology that cannot be sold is equivalent to waste. ;

④Apply for patents as soon as possible and accumulate research and development foundation. In recent years, Huawei has ranked first in the world in the number of international patent applications it has applied for each year. It has applied for more than 40,000 international patents.

Huawei consultant Wu Chunbo compared Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei and found that the former took three months to complete the research and development process, while Huawei can basically complete it in one month. Therefore, although Huawei's product line does not have world-class advanced technology or forward-looking, its product research and development to meet the specific business and strategies of operators, as well as its fast and accurate execution capabilities, are Huawei's world-wide Core competitiveness for rapid expansion.

Huawei tablets adopted the same idea and were very successful.

This is Huawei’s logic regarding product development.

Huawei’s future logic? Huawei's ability to find opportunities in these niche markets is inseparable from Huawei's long-term adherence to a strategy based on "flowers on cow dung". It never strays from reality to innovate blindly, but opens up and innovates based on its original products. However, in order to achieve real success and become a truly big player in this industry, Huawei terminals must withstand the baptism and test in the mainstream market. That is, smartphones.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, Huawei’s smartphone sales ranked third in the world for the first time.

Huawei’s business in the past was almost all for operators. From a certain perspective, Huawei was born for operators. If in the past Huawei only had to keep a close eye on Ericsson, then Huawei is now on a new starting line, and the opponents it needs to target are Cisco, Google, IBM, Samsung, HTC and other companies. Enterprise customers and end consumers attach great importance to the brand, and Huawei's changes are imminent.

The key to a successful transformation is not to surpass your opponents, but to surpass yourself. Beyond itself, will Huawei create a new logic of success?

Ren Zhengfei’s self-criticism

If someone really wants to find the secret to Huawei’s development, they will probably get nothing in the end. There is no such thing as a secret. If so, it is self-criticism, but this is difficult to learn. Self-criticism is Ren Zhengfei's unique skill - it is itself a manifestation of his own objective wisdom: even when dealing with himself, he must be objective - he can neither belittle oneself nor be arrogant, but always seek truth from facts.

Ren Zhengfei is one of the few entrepreneurs who can use himself as the coordinate and the entire enterprise to be built based on this coordinate. This type of entrepreneur also includes Buffett and Steve Jobs. Their companies are all benchmarked and calibrated by their bosses. Because this type of entrepreneur is a coordinate, they know that if they want to change, they must act according to the coordinates and principles. They are the kind of people who "start from now and start with themselves."

“I don’t know how many days and nights it will take to count Huawei’s problems clearly... But as long as we continue to discover problems, continue to explore, continue to self-criticize, and continue to build and improve, there will always be success There is a way out." Ren Zhengfei's self-criticism, like Jobs's design taste, has been proven time and time again. This is why no matter how hard they try to imitate Steve Jobs, other entrepreneurs will not be able to create Apple products that taste like Apple. No matter how hard they imitate Ren Zhengfei, other corporate platforms will not be able to build them to that level. Taste and the spirit of self-criticism are highly individual internal driving factors and cannot be mastered by external imitation and emulation.

Huawei's development proves that a company with no basis, a company that started with nothing, a company that no one has real hope for, a company that is destined to "fail" can also be Reach a very high level through your own efforts.

There will be no precedent in the future, and success will always be kind to those with the deepest intentions. As long as you are down-to-earth and positive-oriented, work hard on your internal skills, have an international perspective, and be good at system innovation, failure is impossible, but here Under such circumstances, there is little value in talking about success. Steve Jobs's famous saying, The Journey is the Reward (the process itself is the reward), seems to be a true comment on Ren Zhengfei.

Ren Zhengfei’s self-criticism is a kind of cognitive fearlessness. We say that Ren Zhengfei is an entrepreneurial machine. One of the powerful perceptual insights is that Ren Zhengfei has such a cognitive fearlessness.

Competing with all irrationality is the biggest attribute or core attribute of the competition machine. It shows that Ren Zhengfei has a strong criticality. This is a characteristic attribute that distinguishes him from other entrepreneurs. We can say that the characteristic attribute of Steve Jobs of Apple is taste, the characteristic attribute of Buffett is value, and self-criticism is the characteristic attribute of Ren Zhengfei - if a person can strictly be self-critical, logically speaking, he will of course be Dare to compete with everything. Therefore, Huawei's continuous and rapid growth is closely related to Ren Zhengfei's continuous self-renewal and self-criticism. This entrepreneurial machine is constantly undergoing technological upgrades. Although he is older than most Huawei employees, he seems to be more able to keep pace with the times.

Self-criticism is Ren Zhengfei’s first ability, and he has even become a self-criticism machine—a negative feedback mechanism that continuously produces “a sense of direction for corporate development”, corporate behavior, and execution. Blind optimism returns to the response to the crisis, letting negative emotions ignite the flame of hope: "Without yesterday, there would be no today. While criticizing mistakes and backwardness, we also cultivate ourselves and grow a group of magnificent heroes. The team...must insist on self-criticism. Only strong people can criticize themselves, and only self-criticism can become strong."

If I have to forcefully name some of the magic weapons for Ren Zhengfei's success, I would say. I will choose the three items of self-criticism, management innovation and the pursuit of world class. However, these three items are basically the same thing. At least among these three, there is me in you and he in me, interpenetrating and connoting each other. And no matter which one you start from, talking about it is always the same. All aspects of Huawei will gradually be involved. The complexity of Huawei's organization is far beyond what we think of as a company, and Ren Zhengfei's ability to master this complexity is astonishing.

Ren Zhengfei’s insistence on self-criticism is like Steve Jobs’ insistence on taste, and management is to Ren Zhengfei what value is to Buffett.

Learn the pirate spirit from Huawei

When an enterprise organization is developing steadily, what it fears most is not gangsterism or corruption, but laziness and organizational fatigue. Just like people say "boil a frog in warm water", when an organization has a history, it begins to become rigid and loses the spirit of struggle.

Therefore, the organization should emphasize vitality, pirate spirit, and even banditry in the early stage. We say that Huawei turns scholars into warriors, but we ignore an intermediate link, that is, the first step is to turn scholars into bandits. It is very important to make them have banditry. Is this a Chinese invention? This is actually a truly universal human value for organizational growth. How did Europeans get to where they are today? How could Spain and Portugal become the world hegemons hundreds of years ago? What does it rely on? It’s about the pirate spirit. When they became rich, they began to engage in capital markets, put finance first, began to ignore industry, and began to enjoy general enjoyment. There were more bathhouses than churches. The decline of that kind of carnival civilization must be inevitable. How did Britain rise later? The Queen of England at that time issued an approval document called "expedition" to those British pirates who plundered wealth all over the world. It was this kind of predatory exploration that enabled the British Empire to rule more than half of the world at its peak.

The future of Europe today is very bleak. The fundamental reason is that Europe has lasted for seventy years of peace. Europeans and Westerners have become lazy, and national laziness, fatigue, and hedonistic culture have prevailed. . There are almost no answers to these questions in history. Looking at thousands of years of European history, how did a prosperous empire collapse? How did Roman civilization die? A European history will tell you that the disappearance of enjoyment, laziness, and fighting spirit will bring about the decline of a country. Therefore, when we talk about banditry, it sounds like a derogatory term to you. In fact, the root of banditry is vitality.

Huawei has a very strong sense of vigilance and self-criticism. If a company or an organization always carries the burden of success and glory, the company is actually not far from death. Therefore, Ren Zhengfei said that Huawei is a company without history.

Huawei’s past history cannot be seen in any corner of Huawei. There is no image of Ren Zhengfei in any picture. There are no photos of central leaders inspecting Huawei in offices around the world. Huawei is also a company without meritorious officials. A Huawei executive said that Huawei is a company that does not recognize its meritorious officials, and neither does its boss. This means that when Ren Zhengfei retires, Ren Zhengfei will not be enshrined in Huawei's halls.

Ren Zhengfei said, I never care what the media thinks of me now, today, or tomorrow. Second, I don’t care whether the successor is loyal or not. The successors are all made from the bottom. The heroes they create are capable of self-denial and self-criticism, and at the same time they have an open mind and a spirit of compromise. Being able to look at people from multiple perspectives instead of black and white makes him a leader who naturally grows up. Leaders are not selected, they are built. This is also a characteristic that distinguishes Huawei from many companies and organizations.

Fear creates greatness. If any organization, including individuals, does not have the kind of insecurity that accompanies your growth, the kind of uneasy shadow that always follows you, you may become very poor. Relaxing and laid back. However, the possible result of this kind of relaxation and leisure is: in the face of an unexpected blow, your comfort and your numbness to danger will cause the organization to collapse quickly.

We live in a jungle world and are actually surrounded by dangers all the time. If you do not always remain alert to danger and become numb and paralyzed, danger may quietly turn from a black dot into a black shadow, and from a black shadow into a huge threat hanging over the head of the organization. The metaphor of the tiger in the movie "Life of Pi" refers to the tiger in your heart. The tiger in your heart is nothing more than what we call greed, especially laziness. Therefore, the process of maintaining fear and overcoming fear, maintaining insecurity and overcoming insecurity is the process of enterprise success.

Huawei is today the leader in global telecommunications manufacturing, but today Huawei may be at its most vulnerable. Why? Success can easily make people lazy and arrogant, and make an organization blindly proud and complacent. There are bacteria under the delicate carpet, and this is true for a country, an organization, and a company. Being alert to the growth and reproduction of these bacteria is strengthening the future of this enterprise.

So keep a sense of fear, and you will have a strong enough pirate spirit.

Maintaining self-criticism is also an important part of Huawei's culture. Some people always think that self-criticism is a unique weapon of the Communist Party of China. In fact, the two core elements of Western civilization are the Puritan spirit and the spirit of struggle, and the other is self-criticism. The West has been able to get to where it is today because it has been constantly cleaning out the viral genes it carried during its development. Its entire system design, the media's supervision of the government, and the various criticisms of the government by American scholars are all self-criticism. Therefore, the United States has been able to get to where it is today because crows are always cawing in the sky above Washington, always spreading an ominous warning and sounding the alarm to the so-called prosperous times.

So, some people say that Ren Zhengfei made his company so big by imitating Mao Xuan, which is not true. Huawei culture is a culture that is neither central nor western, neither donkey nor horse. Western, Eastern, historical, modern, and military. Anything that is beneficial to Huawei's organizational and cultural construction will be used for us. used.