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.

Foreword ixAlexander Osterwalder  1. Moving a Company with the Times: What Makes Haier Unique? 1  2. The Battle field: The Home Appliance Industry in the West and China 17  3. The Story of Haier and the Evolution of Its Corporate Culture 43  4. Liberating Talent: Tapping the Entrepreneurial Spirit 81  5. Building a Corporate Culture for the Twenty-First Century 109  6. Haier as a High Performer 147  7. A True Hybrid: How to Fashion a Strategically Agile Organization 175  8. A True Disrupter: How Embracing Change Creates Value 211 Postscript: While We Were Writing . . . 227 Appendix: How ZZJYTs Work 233 Notes 249 Acknowledgments 261 The Authors 267 Index 269

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 Group—the 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.