Wang ChuanFu's most respected company --- Huawei
If business is a jungle where the lion is king, then the wolves are looking to usurp the throne.
At least that's how many Chinese experts see the battle to drive competitive innovation in industry and manufacturing.
While Western executives are learning business acumen from the sixth Century BC Chinese classic, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chinese industry leaders are being told to study one of their contemporaries.
The "wolf culture" of privately-owned Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is a more visceral strategy for survival than Sun Tzu's analytical tract -- it stresses innovation with the message "Get on top and stay there."
Huawei's founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei has described the wolf spirit as a blend of three qualities: extreme resilience in face of failure, a strong willingness to self-sacrifice, and sharp predator instincts.
"In the battle with lions, wolves have terrifying abilities. With a strong desire to win and no fear of losing, they stick to the goal firmly, making the lions exhausted in every possible way," the media-shy Ren is reported to tell his staff.
AHEAD OF THE PACK
Originally a low-cost manufacturer of products designed by others, Huawei determined to shed its copycat image and move up the value chain when competition at home and abroad intensified in the 1990s.
As an underdog in a market dominated by multi-nationals, it had to prise open its share inch by inch -- and it had to provide better and cost-effective products and services.
To kindle a spirit of innovation, Huawei encouraged its staff to study wolves.
"When you feel real threat of being eliminated by your rivals, the more thirst you will have for designing innovative products," says Chen Naixing, director of the Research Center for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
WORKING FOR CUSTOMERS
In 1988, with 20,000 yuan (2,942 U.S. dollars) borrowed from his relatives and friends, 44-year-old ex-serviceman Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei as a distributor of imported exchange switches for a Hong Kong company.
The 2010 Fortune Global list published by the U.S. magazine "Fortune" ranked Huawei at number 397 with annual sales of 21.8 billion U.S. dollars and net profits of 2.67 billion U.S. dollars in 2009.
Unlike many of its Chinese counterparts, Huawei has a strong commitment to creating long-term value for its customers by being responsive to their needs and requirements.
"We exist to serve customers, whose demand is the driving force behind our development, and we measure our work against how much value we bring to customers, because we can only succeed through our customers' success," Huawei's founder Ren once said.
Forty-six percent of Huawei's 95,000 staff work on R&D, on which the company persistently spends at least 10 percent of its revenues. Even during the economic downturn in 2009, the company increased R&D spending by 27.4 percent from 2008 to 13.34 billion yuan (1.6 billion U.S. dollars).
With 17 research institutes in the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Russia, India, and Italy and other countries, mainly employing local engineers, it has also set up more than 20 joint innovation centers with top operators such as Vodafone.
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