Zhang Ruimin (Chinese: 张瑞敏; born 5 January 1949) is the founder of Haier Group.
Zhang Ruimin transformed Haier from a small, failing collective factory, to an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem brand.
In 1998, Zhang Ruimin spoke at Harvard University, becoming the first Chinese business leader to appear on the Harvard podium. He has received management attention and praise at home and abroad for his continuous management model innovations.[4] He created the Rendanheyi model – which encompasses management thinking and models with Chinese characteristics for universal application. Gary Hamel described him as "a CEO representative of the Internet era".
Zhang tied employee pay scales to sales of the products which they produced. He also instituted a practice whereby a mistake by an employee would require that employee to stand before his co-workers to explain his error.[5] Another new concept that Zhang introduced was customer feedback. After noticing that sales were poor in Sichuan province, he discovered the reason to be that villagers would use the machines to wash sweet potatoes, clogging the drains in the washers. In response, Zhang had his company redesign the product to wash produce in addition to clothing.
In a seven-year stage, Haier established 18 manufacturing plants, 17 distribution centers, and 9 R&D centers, underpinned by a three-pronged strategy of R&D, production, and distribution.
To break into the American market, Zhang realized that Haier would need to offer niche products such as wine coolers and mini-refrigerators, popular with hotels and college dormitories. To achieve this, Haier dissected its 80,000 workers into hundreds of internal micro companies, each with a profit and loss account. Haier adopted a policy of "catfish management" whereby each division manager has a shadow manager who is ready to take charge of the division if, for whatever reason, the manager misses targets for three months.
By 2005 the Financial Times recognized Zhang Ruimin as one of the "50 most respected business leaders in the world.
While a price war was ongoing in the home appliances industry in the period 2005–2012, Zhang Ruimin adopted the strategy of production on demand for zero inventory. During this period, Haier underwent a significant transformation from organization-centric to user-centric and from a manufacturing organization to a service organization.
On 26 December 2012, Haier's 28th anniversary, Zhang Ruimin announced that Haier had entered a new strategy stage with a networking theme.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Ruimin
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