Synopses & Reviews
"Haier is right up there with Apple and Amazon."
—
From the Foreword by Alexander Osterwalder, lead author of Business Model GenerationPraise for Reinventing Giants
"Reinventing Giants took me to a different world. There is a model of leadership that has emerged in Chinese multinationals; this book has the secret."
—Abhijit Bhaduri, chief learning officer, Wipro Ltd; author of Don't Hire the Best: An Essential Guide to Hiring the Right Team
"I suggest you reflect for a couple of minutes on the companies that were once world champions but today no longer exist. What happened? They were not capable of redesigning themselves to maintain the interest of customers, leadership against competitors, technological updates, global presence, or financial health. Reinventing Giants gives us an excellent set of perspectives for this type of reflection built from the authors' wide international experiences."
—Pedro Nueno, president, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)
"This book challenges our most strongly held views about how the best-of-class Chinese firms compete in the global economy. Through unprecedented access to Haier's operations, we learn that competitive advantage is not about operations and low cost; rather, it's about fast-paced innovation and focused, customer-led organizations. A landmark book that is a must-read for anyone who is serious about competing in the 'emerging markets.'"
—Bernie Jaworski, Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and Liberal Arts, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University
"Here is a great book for learning how to organize in order to execute a unique business model. This book not only tells the story of a Chinese company, it tells you how any company can become globally competitive."
—Jay R. Galbraith, president, Galbraith Management Consultants
"Reinventing Giants provides an eye-opening picture of the future of Chinese, and global, industry. Zhang Ruimin, the genius of Haier, has integrated the most advanced elements of global entrepreneurship with age-old Chinese wisdom, and the result is a constantly self-reinventing and amazingly successful enterprise, from which we can, and must, all learn."
—Sidney Rittenberg, legendary participant in China's reemergence;author, scholar, consultant (Rittenberg & Associates); subject of the movieThe Revolutionary
Synopsis
A compelling profile of an emerging Chinese competitorChinese 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.
Synopsis
A compelling profile of an emerging Chinese competitorChinese 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.
Synopsis
Forward-thinking Chinese companies are reinventing their business models, their corporate cultures, and themselves to become global competitors who offer knowledge rather than cheap labor in their quest to join the ranks of the "world's best" companies.
Reinventing Giants offers a behind-the-scenes profile of one of the most ambitious of these emerging Chinese competitors, the Haier Groupthe world's largest manufacturer of home appliances. The book reveals how Haier has repeatedly reinvented its business model and corporate culture in an effort to sustain its success. Haier's success is not about impulsiveness, nor naive philosophical longings, but about ambitious aspirations, strong inspirational leadership, careful strategic observation, detailed adjustments of managerial choices, and abundant trust in the power of employees to really take command of an organization's fate. The authors demonstrate how a giant company of 80,000 employees transformed itself by embracing the contradictions of being simultaneously structured yet entrepreneurial, disciplined yet flexible, tactical yet strategic.
Reinventing Giants offers the critical information, lessons learned, and a substantive model for transforming any company grappling with competition in the global marketplace. The book shows how Haier's managerial accountability and responsibility have been repositioned at every level in the organization, while maintaining the core value of market-centricity. The authors include actual work reports in order to describe this process in detail from the ground up and emphasize how a belief in the liberation of employee talent has consistently been the driving force underlying Haier's success.
Using Reinventing Giants as a guide, any organization can learn what it takes to open, sustain, and revitalize new markets on a global stage.
About the Author
Bill Fischer is a professor of innovation management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. Formerly he was executive president and dean of the China-Europe International Business School in Shanghai and the Dalton L. McMichael Sr. Professor of Business at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He writes
The Ideas Business blog for Forbes.com.
Umberto Lago is associate professor of Management at Bologna University in Italy. He has been, at different stages of his life (often simultaneously): a university professor, private and public manager, entrepreneur,andconsultant.He is a member of UEFA Club Financial Control Body.
Fang Liu is a research associate at IMD. Her research focuses on fields such as management innovation, marketing, and global business.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction: Reinventing Giants: How a Chinese Global Competitor has Changed the Way Big Companies Can Transform
Chapter 2 The Battlefield: The Home Appliance Industry in the West and China
Chapter 3 The Story of Haier and the Evolution of Its Corporate Culture
Chapter 4 Liberating Talent: Tapping the Entrepreneurial Spirit
Chapter 5 Building a Corporate Culture for a Global 21st Century
Chapter 6 Benchmarking Haier with Successful High-Performing Organizations
Chapter 7 A True Hybrid: How to Fashion a Strategically Agile Organization
Chapter 8 A True Disruptor: How Embracing Change Creates Value
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index