Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform

Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform

by Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago, Fang Liu
Released April 2013
Publisher(s): Jossey-Bass
ISBN: 9781118602232

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Book description

A compelling profile of an emerging Chinese competitor

Chinese firms are reinventing their business models, their corporate cultures, and themselves, becoming global competitors who increasingly offer knowledge rather than cheap labour in their quest to join the ranks of the "world's best" companies. This book offers a compelling profile of the most ambitious of these emerging Chinese competitors, the Haier Corporation (the world's largest manufacturer of home appliances), and shares insights on how one organization has repeatedly reinvented its business model and corporate culture in an effort to sustain its success.

Reinventing Giants provides an exclusive look within the Haier Corporation and shows how managerial accountability and responsibility have been repositioned at every level of the organization, with the core value of market-centricity, while aligning strategy on each level of management. It includes actual work reports that show this process in detail from the ground up. The authors emphasize how a belief in the liberation of employee talent has consistently been the driving force underlying Haier's success.

  • Includes the remarkable story of Haier's turnaround and how these lessons can be applied to other organizations

  • Contains information for any company grappling with competition in the global marketplace

  • Shows how to liberate employees' talent to drive business success

  • Written by Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management at IMD in Switzerland, Umberto Lago, Professor of Management at Bologna University, Italy, and Fang Liu, Research Associate of IMD

Reinventing Giants helps global managers rethink their own business models and accompanying corporate cultures in order to be able to apply Haier's lessons directly to their own organizations.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Foreword
  7. Chapter 1: Moving a Company with the Times
    1. Haier Group
    2. Transformational Change in an Emerging Market
    3. Strategy Is Choice and Execution
    4. Anticipating What We Will Learn from Haier
    5. What You Will Learn in Each Chapter
  8. Chapter 2: The Battlefield
    1. The Global Battlefield Emerges in the 1980s
    2. The U.S. Market in the 1980s and 1990s
    3. The Chinese Market
    4. The Challenge of Globalization: Key Lessons of Western Brands in China
    5. Home Appliance Manufacturers’ Approaches to the Chinese Market
    6. China’s Major Home Appliance Manufacturers
    7. The Global Major Home Appliance Industry
    8. The Essence of Success
  9. Chapter 3: The Story of Haier and the Evolution of Its Corporate Culture
    1. The Origins of Haier’s Business Model and Corporate Culture
    2. Qingdao General Refrigerator Factory
    3. Stage 1, 1984–1991: Brand Building Through Focusing on Quality and Manufacturing Excellence
    4. Stage 2, 1991–1998: Diversification—Eating the Stunned Fish
    5. Stage 3, 1998–2005: Business Process Reengineering and Market Chains
    6. Stage 4, 2005–2012: Zero Distance to the Customer—The ZZJYT
    7. Thirty Years of Reinventing Haier Culture
  10. Chapter 4: Liberating Talent
    1. Theme: Haier Thinks of Itself as a Service Company
    2. Theme: Service Is Best Achieved with Zero Distance Between Haier and Its Customers
    3. Theme: The Entrepreneurial Energies of Its Workforce Are Haier’s Best Means of Achieving Its Service Goals
    4. Theme: Freedom Requires Control
    5. Theme: Responsiveness Can Be Facilitated by Preset Conversations
    6. Theme: Value Creation Should Be Linked Among Customers, the Organization, and Employees
    7. Haier Today
  11. Chapter 5: Building a Corporate Culture for the Twenty-First Century
    1. Joining Haier’s Three-Door Module ZZJYT
    2. Market ZZJYTs
    3. Manufacturing ZZJYTs
    4. Second- and Third-Tier ZZJYTs
    5. Preliminary Conclusions Regarding the ZZJYT Model
    6. Looking Forward and Looking Back
  12. Chapter 6: Haier as a High Performer
    1. The Mythology of High-Performing Organizations
    2. Creating the High-Performing Organization of the Future
    3. Benchmarking Against Trailblazing Talent-Liberating Experiences
    4. Markets, Hierarchies, and the Future of Management
    5. Comparison with Haier
  13. Chapter 7: A True Hybrid
    1. Haier’s Business Model and the Governance Structures of Economic Activity
    2. Interfirm Networks, Partnerships, and Alliances in the Market-Hierarchy Debate
    3. Transaction Cost Economics and Interfirm Networks
    4. Trust and Interfirm Networks
    5. Some Preliminary Comments
    6. From Interfirm Networks to Intrafirm Networks
    7. From the ABB Model to the Haier Model
    8. Combining Incentives with Control
  14. Chapter 8: A True Disrupter
    1. The Main Attributes of Haier’s Story
    2. What Can We Learn?
    3. Applicability of the Lessons Learned
  15. Postscript: While We Were Writing . . .
  16. Appendix: How ZZJYTs Work
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. The Authors
  19. Index

Product information

  • Title: Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform
  • Author(s): Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago, Fang Liu
  • Release date: April 2013
  • Publisher(s): Jossey-Bass
  • ISBN: 9781118602232