Zhang Ruimin "handed over the baton", and Haier Tao's voice was still the same

Liu Ge

On November 5, Haier founder Zhang Ruimin resigned as chairman of the board of directors and served as the honorary chairman of the new board of directors, and Zhou Yunjie, who has held the positions of general manager and president for many years, took over. The news was sudden, but everything was reasonable, and naturally did not cause much repercussions. This also confirms Peter Drucker's famous saying: "Truly remarkable enterprises are often uneventful, boring and tedious." "Haier quietly completed the transfer of power, and it is likely that Haier's operation and management are in a smooth state."

This is also the result that Zhang Ruimin wants most.

Among Zhang Ruimin's countless honors, he most valued the title of "one of the world's top fifty management thinkers". Among the "post-40s" entrepreneurial group represented by Zhang Ruimin and Ren Zhengfei, Zhang Ruimin is the one who attaches the most importance to management theory.

Around the world, the development of large enterprises always faces two problems: one is that the bureaucratic system leads to slow decision-making and efficiency, and the other is that it is very easy to lose entrepreneurship and lose sensitivity to the market. In order to resolve these two "stubborn diseases", for more than 30 years, Zhang Ruimin has learned from Western classic management theories, combined with the practical experience of the company, successively launched effective organizational management strategies, and in accordance with the established strategic development plan, Haier has methodically sent Haier to the position of the world's top brand of home appliances, and he himself has become a recognized management master among global entrepreneurs. Among the Chinese entrepreneurs, Zhang Ruimin has created the most management theories, published the most management quotes, and won the most international management awards.

Zhang Ruimin's international reputation not only stems from the creation of the world's largest home appliance company, but also from his continuous creation of new management theories and classic management cases. Whether it is the same generation or the next generation of entrepreneurs, no second person is so obsessed with the innovation and practice of management theory. Zhang Ruimin is both the creator and practitioner of these management theories. Haier's development path verifies the value of these management theories, and the Haier brand also highlights the sense of taste because of Zhang Ruimin and his management theory.

In the more than 30 years of leading Haier from a small street factory to a world-renowned brand, Zhang Ruimin has always created, adjusted, revised and practiced his own management theory in different stages of development and the background of the times.

In 1984, Zhang Ruimin took over the Qingdao Refrigerator General Factory. At that time, this small collective-owned factory was on the verge of closure and insolvency, and employees were living in a chaotic way. The first management system he introduced was the "thirteen no's" system, including "no defecation in the workshop", to restrain the behavior of employees. The provisions placed in the "Thirteen Prohibitions" that are difficult to understand now are actually very targeted to the scattered state of the factory at that time. Next, he smashed 76 unqualified refrigerators in front of employees, which became a classic case of brand communication in China. In an era when Home Appliances have just begun to be popularized in China and consumers are deeply troubled by product quality, the decisive or even exaggerated expression of quality problems is not only the basis for Haier to establish a brand, but also the most important starting point for management.

Around 1989, Zhang Ruimin implemented the OEC management model of "Day by Day, Nissin and High" within Haier to prevent the decline of enterprises in the development process and reverse the atmosphere of complacency among corporate management. With the expansion of Zhang Ruimin's management toolkit, Haier has continuously improved itself and gradually begun to open up the gap with many peers from the level of enterprise management.

The Haier culture formed based on Zhang Ruimin's management thought has made a qualitative leap in Haier's internal cohesion and execution, and more importantly, Haier's management model has been successfully copied, and "activating shock fish" is one of the representative cases. Known as the "shock fish" is Red Star Electric. Red Star Electrical Appliances once had more than 3,500 employees, and in the first half of 1995, the company lost more than 100 million yuan and was insolvent and in a desperate situation. In July of the same year, Red Star Electric appliances were assigned to Haier. On the second day of the assignment, Yang Mianmian, executive vice president of Haier Group, led the heads of Haier's five major departments, including corporate culture and asset management, to Red Star to spread Haier's corporate culture for new employees. After that, the OEC management model was fully introduced, and the methods of open supervision, information disclosure, learning and improvement, and strengthening consciousness were adopted, and Haier's management model was established in Red Star. In just two years, Haier washing machines produced by Red Star have achieved the same brand reputation as Haier refrigerators.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, Haier successively merged 18 domestic enterprises. Haier followed the "activated shock fish" method, and all 18 companies turned losses into profits.

In March 1998, Zhang Ruimin was invited to Harvard Business School in the United States to participate in MBA teaching activities. Zhang Ruimin summarized and improved his view of "activating shock fish", pointing out that "shock fish" refers to enterprises with good hardware conditions but cannot keep up with management. The case of "Haier Culture Activating Shock Fish" was written into the Harvard Business School case database, and Zhang Ruimin became the first Chinese entrepreneur to appear on the Harvard forum.

In 1999, Haier began to develop internationally, opening factories in the United States and other places, and taking GeOn, which was in full swing at that time, as a benchmark. Zhang Ruimin realized that the organizational structure of the bureaucratic system lacked innovation; in addition, although the employees who had been recruited and trained on a large scale agreed with the corporate culture and had strong execution, they generally lacked creativity, which made Haier have no advantage over the international home appliance giants. If you do not keep pace with the times and achieve self-subversion, I am afraid that you will return home.

After several years of thinking and management experiments, in 2005, Zhang Ruimin formally proposed the original "Rendanheyi" model, advocating that "every employee is a CEO", directly facing users, to create user value. It breaks the management pattern based on the bureaucratic system within the enterprise, and subverts the traditional organization into an entrepreneurial platform. At that time, Zhang Ruimin wanted to perform "major surgery" on Haier, but considering the huge staff base, it was a bit uncertain.

With the advent of the Internet, and even the mobile Internet era, Zhang Ruimin realized that without painful determination, Haier will inevitably fall behind, so a major change that has dragged on for eight years has begun. In 2013, Haier reorganized, removing all middle-level managers to form an entrepreneurial platform. There is no leader on the platform, only three types of people: platform owners, small and micro owners, and makers. The three types of people become nodes of the network, not flat, but networked. Each node can connect to all resources on the network to start a business. Based on this, haier platform has become a platform for incubating makers and entrepreneurs.

This kind of innovation in the internal organization led by Zhang Ruimin directly affects the transformation of business concepts, interconnecting factories, engineers, users, partners and multi-party systems, so that each employee has the opportunity to exert their potential, and even enables each user to participate in Haier's product design process and brand building.

At the time, more than 4,000 employees lost their jobs, but many of them were soon invited to reapply for entrepreneurial positions. During that period, Zhang Ruimin was saddled with huge criticism and public opinion pressure. Zhang Ruimin said: "Whenever you pursue reform, there are always many employees who are unhappy because you have begun to disrupt their interests. The only thing we can do is provide a level playing field for our employees. ”

Breaking and reconstructing is bound to take a time cost, and due to the impact of transformation and internationalization, Haier disappeared from the vision of the domestic public more than a decade ago. It was also in these silent years that the "rendanheyi" began to take effect in silence and unleashed the magical power of change.

Among the many small and micro entrepreneurial achievements, the popular game PC brand "Raytheon Technology" should be one of the most representative achievements of Haier's "Rendanheyi". Founded in 2014, the technology brand was listed on the New Third Board in September 2017. Its three founders all formed a VAM relationship with Haier Group, and the two sides jointly established a company and started a business.

Several entrepreneurs started from the user's pain points, extracted 13 major types of problem points from the 30,000 complaints of users on the notebook, and developed the first generation of Thor game notebooks after more than a dozen interactions and polishing.

The role of RENDAN in assisting in the transformation of enterprises is obvious to all, and it is also very effective in cross-border and cross-cultural management.

Take GEA, which was acquired by Haier, as an example, GEA can be seen as a model for the traditional management era. Haier exported the "Rendanheyi" model to GEA, turning each team into a small and micro company, and the original three major teams were separately accounted for, turned into a business body, and established their own companies. Team leadership consisted of the heads of the original three teams.

In addition, in New Zealand, Haier turned the merged company Fisher & Paykel into 10 small and micro companies, each of which can create value independently.

Haier no longer considers itself a home appliance manufacturer, but an IoT ecosystem centered on smart homes, in which users, suppliers and even entrepreneurial teams in society can participate.

Just when everything was getting better, Zhang Ruimin chose to work, which was unexpected and reasonable. Although Zhang Ruimin has "handed over the baton", due to his deep thinking on organization and management, as well as the nirvana-like transformation of Haier Phoenix, his influence will surely exist for a long time. The only thing that needs to be verified is whether the "Rendanheyi" model can completely become a leading, epochal and universal management model, driving more enterprises to transform and upgrade.