Unit Two China's Haier Power —Antony Paul
⏹ TEXT河南旅游景点>立刻的近义词
纯种比熊犬In the archives of China’s modern management lore, the events at a Qingdao appliance factory in the summer of 1985 have begun to acquire the dimensions of legend. Something like, say, the day Henry Ford parated the manufacture of a valve into 21 steps or when Akio Morita made Sony’s first length of recording tape in a frying pan.
篮球进攻战术By the early 1980s, the Qingdao General Refrigerator Factory had become a typical example of a business in the last stages of socialist decay: heavy debt, grumpy workers, shoddy products, rvice from hell. One day in August an unhappy customer came to the work site to complain of having bought a dud refrigerator—no small complaint in tho days, when only two or three of every 1000 urban Chine houholds owned such a luxury.
Watched by CEO Zhang Ruimin, then 36, the customer rejected dozens of imperfect refrige讨价还价英语
rators. Finally he ttled on one and left, declaring himlf satisfied. Zhang wasn’t. He went through his warehou, rechecking the refrigerators. “Of the 400 or so there, I found 76 that I didn’t want relead to the market,” he recalls.
He had the rejects placed in an open space. Then he called his staff of some 600 together, showed them the refrigerators, and pasd around a sledgehammer. “Destroy them!” he ordered. The workers hesitated, but Zhang insisted. “If we pass the 76 for sale,” he told them, “we’ll be continuing a mistake that has all but bankrupted our company.” Soon piles of shattered metal littered the warehou floor.
That burst of cathartic violence did more than turn a few refrigerators to rubbish. It t the stage for the regeneration of the Qingdao factory and the creation of one of China’s most interesting companies, now known as the Haier Group Co. Haier’s makeover has proved that it is possible to transform even a rotten socialist enterpri into a vibrant and prosperous company. And the sledgehammer? Refrigerator asmbly-line workers have placed it in a wall display.
Zhang’s next goal is to crack the FORTUNE Global 500. He has a long way to go. In 1998 the group’s sales totaled $2.3 billion; that’s more than 5000 times as much as in 1985, but less than a third of the revenue of No. 500 on FORTUNE’s global list. Still, Haier is a very big fish in the smaller pond that is the China market. It is tops in air conditioners (36.8% market share), freezers (47.2%), refrigerators(40%), and washing machines (35.9%). It is fourth in color TVs and also makes a host of other small appliances, such as water heaters and microwave ovens. And it is growing fast: Since 1984 it has averaged an increa of 83% a year in revenues. Haier now has 50 units (18 are wholly owned, 23 are holding companies, and there are nine joint ventures). It has more than 20000 employees and some $1.1 billion in asts. Its products are sold in 87 countries, and it is building factories in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Iran. Nor is Haier just a Third World wonder. In the U.S. it says it has nearly 20% of the market for small refrigerators. Haier air conditioners have made inroads in Europe.趁结构
The company that Zhang brought back from the dead is a “collective enterpri,” one of some 25 million quasi-socialist commercial entities owned in principle by the workers but
supervid by local bureaucracies and Communist Party officials. Though the problems of such small or middling, often city-bad firms are not exactly the same as tho of China’s vast, gangrenous state-owned heavy enterpris, both have suffered from a lack of accountability and poor management.
Haier has been able to solve tho problems, even though it is still officially a city collective and Zhang therefore a city employee. (At the same time, it is listed on the Shanghai exchange and would like to be listed overas: Chine capitalism can be curious.) The company’s organizational chart lists a category, “Party and Mass System,” not to be found outside China. There are subheads for the Propaganda Department, the Party Office, and the Armed Department. The city government is a constant factor. “We work in a mixed economy,” Zhang says. “You have to have three eyes: one on the market, one on the workers, and one on policy.” The larger point is that Haier’s success shows that even within the constraints, it is possible to resuscitate collective and state-owned enterpris.
Zhang, the only son of a worker in a Qingdao shirt factory, says his first love was ancient Chine literature. As he tells it today, Lao-tzu (a sixth century B.C. philosopher) and Sun Tzu (a military writer of the fourth century B.C.) provide food for thought for modern businessmen as well as ancient warriors. Lao-tzu has advice about running a company:“ When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally.” Sun Tzu is relevant on, among other things, marketing strategy:“ Uproar in the East; attack in the West.”饰词
When Zhang was in his 20s, schools were clod for veral years becau of the Cultural Revolution. He spent much of the period in solitary reading and slowly rising through the Qingdao municipal administration, then a Soviet-style command structure for local industry. With an eye on the future, he also absorbed, discreetly, Western and Japane management texts.
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