It all started with a question about decision-making in China. On my trips there, I was struck by how fast things move. At Alibaba's site in Hangzhou, in the universities I visited, in the ecosystems where people meet and the events designed to bring them together, you can feel the momentum. Above all, you can see the results.
In Beijing, during a business Mandarin class at Peking University, our teacher explained what makes the difference in customer service in China. In his view, a sale is won after it is closed, through impeccable after-sales service. Even for a washing machine, he said in substance, someone will answer you at three in the morning if need be.
These observations made me want to dig deeper. That is my practice anyway: across continents, I study how people decide and lead, especially around innovation and breakthrough technologies. It was while digging that I came across, to my great surprise, the vocabulary of the wolf. I knew that people in Chinese tech worked extremely long hours, and it was then that I better understood what the 996 schedule means. But that vocabulary puzzled me, and I wanted to understand what it really says about how decisions are made.
What I found at Huawei does not quite match the image Europeans have of it.
A chairmanship that changes every six months
When Europeans look for an example of military-style management, Huawei almost always comes first. One detail usually gets left out: the company changes its chairman every six months, and it designed things that way.
The system was built in stages. In 2011, Huawei handed its leadership to rotating CEOs. In 2018, the rotation moved up a level, to the chairmanship. Three leaders now take turns at the head of the board of directors and its executive committee, in six-month terms. The two who are not in office do not sit on the sidelines. According to founder Ren Zhengfei, they support the chair in office and act as a counterweight: they prepare their own term, lead the studies and develop the solutions.
The arrangement is therefore less a rotation than a permanent system of checks, exercised by three people. Yet it is the side of Huawei that gets talked about least.
What the doctrine says
What people remember is the pack. 狼性文化, lángxìng wénhuà, "wolf culture", is the doctrine associated with Ren Zhengfei, a former officer of the People's Liberation Army. It expects three instincts from employees.
First, a sense of smell, to pick up the scent of blood: an obsessive attention to the market and to competitors' weaknesses. Second, resistance to cold, meaning the ability to hold firm through crisis, failure and pressure. Third, attacking as a pack: no room for individualism, and dozens of engineers mobilized day and night on a tender or a technical emergency until the ground is saturated.
Reading about this doctrine, I thought back to my Beijing teacher's washing machine. That attention to the customer in the middle of the night comes from the same instinct.
Military vocabulary is part of the company's everyday language, and its pace of work often recalls a battlefield. A former Chinese employee summed it up bluntly to Elliott Zaagman in The Interpreter, the Lowy Institute's publication: "In Huawei, wolf culture means you kill or be killed."
All of this is documented, yet it shows only half the picture.
The detail that changes the reading
Side by side, the two facts seem to contradict each other. On one side, a pack doctrine, with its martial vocabulary and its demand for sacrifice. On the other, a leadership that changes every six months, in which two leaders out of three have the explicit role of containing the third.
In fact, the two fit together. Ferocity operates in execution, collegiality in decision-making. Once the objective is set, the pack moves very fast. But the objective itself is decided higher up, and by several people.
A European leader who sees only the wolf is therefore reading Huawei by halves. They think they are dealing with vertical, solitary command. They are also facing a system designed to keep decisions from concentrating in one person's hands, with one important limit I will come back to.
Why we don't see it
We read foreign organizations through their most quotable trait. "Wolf management" is a phrase: it strikes, it sticks, it travels. "Six-month rotating chairmanship with mutual constraint" is a procedure, and procedures cross borders far less easily than metaphors.
As a result, we know what is said about Huawei far better than what is actually practiced there. And the strategies we build against this company, or with it, rest on the part of the system that fits into a sentence.
The 996 schedule offers a second example, even easier to check. This work rhythm, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, is still presented at many European conferences as the norm in Chinese tech. Yet in late August 2021, the Supreme People's Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly published ten typical overtime cases, all decided in favor of employees.
These cases restate Chinese law: eight hours a day, forty hours a week, a maximum of thirty-six hours of overtime a month, one day of rest a week. In one of them, an employee dismissed for refusing the 996 schedule obtains compensation. In another, the family of a worker who died after excessive overtime, a death recognized as a workplace accident, is awarded 766,911 yuan.
Presenting 996 as today's norm therefore means describing the China of 2019.
The 996 schedule has not disappeared. But since 2021, Chinese courts and authorities have made it clear that such hours are illegal. And a generation has found two words to say it is stepping back: 躺平, "lying flat", and 摆烂, "letting it rot".
This is where the case goes beyond China. Law changes before practices do. A law can be passed and case law established while habits carry on as before. Seeing clearly means locating precisely where things stand between the two, without denying what is still practiced, and without believing the rule has already changed everything.
A mirror more than a model
I read this case as a mirror, without holding Huawei up as a model or drawing a method from it. Looking at how decisions are made on the other side helps us see what we may have forgotten to do, what we do less well, and also what already works for us. Three questions seem useful to me, for each of us as well as for our organizations.
Which speed are we really observing? Execution speed and decision speed are two different things, and we often conflate them. An organization can take time to decide collectively, then execute very fast once the call is made. It can also decide quickly and execute poorly. Faced with a competitor we judge to be "fast", which of the two are we seeing? And in our own executive committees, what moves fast, and what drags?
How old are our examples? An analysis is never more recent than the facts it rests on. How many dated facts would we find in the last strategy presentation on China that we came across?
What do people remember about us? Every organization ends up summed up in a phrase that hides how it really works. Ours is no exception, and neither is each of us as a leader. If someone described us by our most quotable trait, what would they say, and what would they leave out?
Everyone will find their own answers, personally as well as at the level of their organization: a dysfunction to face squarely, an area for improvement, or confirmation that what already works deserves to be refined.
What remains open
Two points in this account are still debated, and I would rather say so.
Huawei's employee shareholding is often presented as the generous counterpart to wolf culture. It is, however, contested. In 2019, in Who Owns Huawei?, Christopher Balding and Donald Clarke argued that the trade union holding the shares is not controlled by employees. The question is not settled.
Ren Zhengfei's own position is even less so. He retains a veto on the board, which qualifies the collegiality described above. Yet he presents himself as "a figurehead", comparing his role to "a clay idol in a temple". That may be true. Coming from a founder, such a statement simply deserves to be read with a little distance.
If I flag these two reservations, it is because they make the difference between an analysis and a brochure. A clear reading also states what we do not yet know.
Sources
- Huawei, corporate governance, annual reports 2011 and 2018
- Elliott Zaagman, "The Huawei way", The Interpreter, Lowy Institute, 28 June 2018
- Ren Zhengfei, interview with the South China Morning Post
- South China Morning Post, on the rotating chairmanship and the founder's veto, 2018
- Supreme People's Court and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, typical overtime cases, August 2021
- Christopher Balding and Donald Clarke, "Who Owns Huawei?", SSRN, 2019
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