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Diversity of Human Nature

T

wenty years ago, I was a psychology lecturer at a teacher’s univer- sity. At one of the lectures, I gave a magnifier to some students and asked them to observe their skin and describe their observations. Soon a girl cried out, “Terrible!” The other students were shocked, too.

I told them that no one is perfect. Every person, including great lead- ers, is multidimensional. They are kind in one aspect and cruel in another; beautiful in one aspect and ugly in another. A good person has imper- fections, while a notorious person may have something commendable. Whether an individual is good or bad depends to a large extent on the perspective from which they are observed. Therefore, I concluded: First, you cannot take a clear-cut position regarding anyone; you should not love or hate too easily, or you will lose friends and peace of mind; second, since anyone can be a saint and a devil at the same time, you don’t have to look up to any individual, but you cannot look down on anyone either; third, you must understand yourself properly, and you should not appre- ciate or denounce yourself blindly.

This idea was ill regarded in the 1980s. Even today, without proper context, the argument that we must not tell right from wrong apart is still subject to attacks. To the extent of my knowledge, many Chinese people set themselves apart, harbor hostility toward one another, and suffer ten- sion and anxiety, mostly because we are not tolerant enough. We do not

accept differences, including those concerning background, personal disposition, social status, and beliefs. Our perceptions are stereotyped: People fall into definite categories, which is an artistic tradition of the Chinese opera.

Of course, art is different from reality. The reality is that people and their life are diverse. A nursery teacher taking care of dozens of kids and the head of a state governing millions or even billions of people face a similar problem. No two people have exactly the same face or character. The world is diverse and complex. In his New Year address in 2012, Dmitri Medvedev, the then President of Russia, said, “We have all kinds of people, and that’s where our power comes from.” A villager in a remote area of China sighed after he was elected the head of his village, “The heart of the people is like a deep well. If I can manage this village, I can also manage a county.”

Human nature is like the universe—vast but tiny, constant but changeable, regular but diversified. It is constant because human evolu- tion is based on hereditary genes, but every man is rendered unique by his education background, family environment, and personal experiences. Therefore, the most challenging task in the world is to recognize, select, transform, and employ people and put them in certain combinations to attain a particular goal. From a country, to a region, and to a family, any organization must understand human nature, and this is always a tough challenge.

As of the end of 2011, Huawei had 138,000 employees, of which 80 percent were college graduates (including 5,000 with doctorate degrees), and the average age was no more than 30. Unlike other Chinese compa- nies, Huawei has a unique mix of employees: Most are young intellec- tuals, and they come from different countries. Therefore, Huawei faces a pressing imperative to understand and to manage human nature.

When you go deep into the operational model, management system, organizational structure, corporate culture, and the evolution history of Huawei, you will surely find that Ren Zhengfei is a master of human nature, and the success of Huawei comes not only from technologies, market, or resources, but more from an insight into human nature and its success in managing human nature. Although it is complex and change- able, and any organization consisting of diversified members cannot be put into a template, Ren Zhengfei has tied a knot on everything and given it the name “grayness”: If you cannot penetrate it, you’d better recognize it, tolerate it, and even appreciate it.

Source: Jhon Jairo Monedero.

A Project Team Went to Check a Site Located in a Remote area Of Africa. As It Was the Rainy Season, Some Low-lying Roads Became Flooded and Some Even Turned into Channels Carrying Streams of Water. Their Vehicle Got Stuck in the Quagmire and Broke Down. Everyone Jumped in the Knee-Deep Water and Pushed and Pulled, Yet They Could not Free the Vehicle. With the Help of Some Locals, They Eventually Succeeded and Got the Vehicle Restarted. In Spite of Extremely Adverse Conditions, Including Electricity Outages, Water Shortages, Underdeveloped Infrastructure, and Local Conflict, Huawei Persisted in Mobilizing a Wide Array of Resources Over a Period of Eight Months to Complete Network Buildouts. This Tenacity Paid Off as 11 States Were Provided with Communications Services That Were Previously Unavailable, Thereby Creating Turnarounds and Opportunities for Development in This Country.

Welcome!

Source: Liu Zhixiong.

Massive Earthquake Hit Wenchuan, China

Source: Yang Jie.

Baicao Garden

Logistics Manager Went to Survey the Warehouse and Road Conditions for a New Project on Kalimantan Island in Indonesia. Due to Muddy Road Conditions, the Vehicle Got Stuck on the Way to the Facility. All Efforts to Dislodge the Vehicle Proved Unsuccessful Even after Numerous Attempts from the Late Afternoon All the Way till Midnight. After Spending the Night Beside the Vehicle, They Treaded the Mountain Roads for Nearly Two Hours Before They Were Able to Find Some Locals to Help Them…

An Ice-capped Base Station in Finland

Successfully Complete the Survey, Paving the Way for the First Project Deployment on the Island.

Source: Lai Leiyu.

Ren Zhengfei at the Okavango Delta in Botswana (November 2012)

Source: Huawei. Source: Huawei.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet, once said, “Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.” Then what if we change the perspective?

Ren Zhengfei said:

We don’t expect the manager we select through the competency review pro- cess to be a perfect person. A perfect person is a saint, or a Buddha, or a priest. We would rather pick strong fighters who can form an army. Our competency review is a scientific evaluation process by which we hope to upgrade our management that has appealed more to emotions. But an emo- tional management system has its merit: It does not require perfection, or rather, we do not demand that everyone should be a perfect person.

At a conference reviewing Huawei’s cloud strategy and solutions in 2010, Ren Zhengfei said even more directly:

In the future cloud of Huawei, you may not tell exactly how many leaders will emerge, leaders that are still invisible today. You cannot deny them; they could be the next Vincent van Gogh or Ludwig van Beethoven. Who knows? We once threw away an instant messaging product. We didn’t want it. But Tencent picked it up and has become a giant. Why can’t we tolerate anyone else walking a different path? Yes, we are walking on the main road with great confidence, but we should also tolerate those who tread on a narrow path. Can you be absolutely certain that the narrow path won’t lead to a much broader main road? I mean we should be ambitious, and an ambitious person has a far and wide inner world where there is enough room for vari- ous other people and ideas. If you wish to occupy the whole world you must first accept everything and everyone in the world. You must endure any dis- sident in the core network business unit.

Scientists seek simplicity. They believe that white is white and black is black. Nothing is white and black at the same time. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, should not go to extremes. If the executives of Huawei put each employee under a microscope on a daily basis, they would drive themselves insane and ultimately break up the company. Facing thou- sands of people with diverse characters, the managers must possess an open and inclusive mindset as well as strong nerve.

From the historical perspective, Ren Zhengfei elaborated further: The Protestant ethics represent the philosophical spirit of religious reform in the Middle Ages. This is the humanist spirit which later evolved into the

capitalist spirit. It is a liberal spirit that embraces and protects personal dif- ferences and human rights. In this way, the capitalist spirit releases and motivates the human potential and drives individual and social progress. Capitalism has two major assumptions: The first is that man is selfish; and the second is that man is greedy. The capitalist social system restrains human defects and sets human motives free.

With such a great insight into human nature, the senior management of Huawei has designed and promoted its core values: customer centricity and dedication as the key to success.

Here, the diversity and complexity of human nature are simplified and clarified. Every person at Huawei will play a certain role in the com- pany as long as they have both material and spiritual motives and accept the principle of “more work for more pay,” no matter how many defects they may have.

We could say that management by grayness is an invention of Ren Zhengfei and has been first implemented by Huawei.

Science Is a Lamp in the Dark

What is science? What is reason? According to a Western scientist- philosopher, science or reason is a lamp in the dark that has guided man- kind all along. In the vast universe, there are innumerable galaxies, and the Earth is but one cold stone rotating in the galaxy by the balance of gravitation and repulsion forces, while mankind is but a special species living on this big rock. Since it had first appeared, mankind has developed great inventions and creations, which are, however, really paltry in com- parison with the unknown. From the ancient past, mankind has been trying to light up the world with the flame of science and reason, but there is still darkness under the lamp: There are relative truths and fallacies.

Therefore, great tribute should be paid to accomplished leaders, sci- entists, artists, and entrepreneurs. They are heroes of the human race; they are the Titan Prometheus who defied the gods and gave fire to humanity, an act that had enabled progress and civilization. There is some risk with them, however. Any deviation of their reason would push mankind back into the dark, and they would become the victims of history.

The same is true with nations and companies, since both national leaders and business leaders are adventurers who usually bet against unknown risks through intuition and calculation. As Ren Zhengfei said,

“A clear direction is often developed amid gray fuzziness, but the direction is changing as circumstances change. It would sometimes turn indistinct again. The world is not either white or black; it is something of both.” Ren argued that the mission of a leader is

to offer his followers a clear direction and lead them down the road. But where is the road leading to? How can they travel on the road? This is a matter of direction and tempo. And what is a leader? A leader should be one like Danko who saved his people from the dark forest by holding up his own ripped-out heart, burning like the sun. We should play the role of Danko and lead the telecom industry down the road.

Steve Jobs had mapped out the direction for Apple; at least Apple was an invincible aircraft carrier when he was still there. Similarly, the lead- ers of Huawei have gathered over a hundred thousand intellectuals on the ground of grayness, turning the company into a midsized aircraft car- rier capable of navigating most oceans in the world. Now, this vessel is venturing into more and greater unchartered seas guided by adventurous captains with a strategic vision and strong will.

Ren Zhengfei, however, often sighs:

The business environment is changing too fast and too dramatically. No one knows for sure where the road is leading up to. Take cloud computing for example. We have no idea how far we can go with cloud computing. When I was told that Eric Xu knows, I wondered how he could predict anything. He is not God, anyway. God has created mankind with such perfection that your kids would inherit your complexion and character. But as the creation of God, we cannot predict how the information society will turn out in the future. Therefore, we cannot design a perfect business model.

Ren Zhengfei has, therefore, reiterated, “We must form a strong unity within the company and partnerships along the value chain, so that we can find the right direction together.” In this sense, grayness has both internal and external implications.

In this world, there are no enemies; there are only counterparts and competitors. Ren Zhengfei said, “We have turned many friends into ene- mies during the past 20 years, and we will turn our enemies into our friends in the next 20 years.” Enemies may turn into allies under certain circumstances. In 2009, when it was about to take antidumping actions against Huawei, the EU asked Ericsson, Nokia, and Siemens for their

opinions. To the surprise of the EU, all the three companies expressed their opposition. This was partly because they had come to regard Huawei as their respected competitor and partly because they needed to work with each other on markets, products, and technologies. In short, they are not engaged in a cut-throat zero-sum game with Huawei but rather a cooperative competition.

This is the only way the captains can let more and more light into the industry.

Ren Zhengfei prefers to explicate this grayness theory with Chinese traditional bagua (literally “eight symbols”) trigrams. In the center of the trigrams, there is a circle known as the Ultimate that consists of a black fish and a white fish, also called the yin fish and yang fish, respectively. It should be noted that the white fish has a black eye and the black fish has a white eye. This means white and black contain each other, or yin and yang are interchangeable. This also means, when it refers to an individual, that the person has both strengths and weaknesses, and these strengths and weaknesses complement each other.

This is the idea of change. It is obvious that there is an immense unknown world, but it should be recognized that this immense unknown world is changing. Therefore, leaders, including business leaders, must try to get a clear picture of the indistinct gray world in order to cope with vast changes.

Openness, Compromise, and Grayness

In December 2007, Ren Zhengfei met in Hong Kong with Madeleine Korbel Albright, the former US Secretary of State, who had been considered an iron woman in the international political community and an aggressive foreign minister of the first superpower of the world. At the meeting, Mrs Albright told Ren Zhengfei with rare sentimentalism: “I have read some of your articles, including ‘My Father and My Mother’ and ‘Huawei’s Winter.’ I am deeply impressed, and I believe that people share emotions.” She proceeded to share several stories of her father.

At this meeting, Ren Zhengfei told his guest the history of his com- pany and the logic behind its success. This is the first time that Ren Zhengfei interpreted openness, compromise, and grayness all at the same time. He said he believed they are the secret weapons by which the com- pany has reached its current scale and strength after having started out from nothing. Ren Zhengfei said, “We have been learning from others,

including the United States, and in this way I believe we will set new tar- gets and feel the urgency. If we had stayed close-minded, we might have collapsed long ago.”

Since then Ren Zhengfei has elaborated on the three concepts on various occasions and asked his corporate advisors to collect relevant resources and conduct further research. On January 15, 2009, at a global market conference, Ren Zhengfei gave a speech titled “Openness, Compromise, and Grayness,” in which he said,

One of the core values of Huawei is openness. A leader should be able to control the direction and tempo and maintain a certain level of grayness. To hold onto the right direction and keep an appropriate tempo is an art, not a skill or method. The key is compromise and tolerance.

Regarding the relationship between compromise and grayness, Ren Zhengfei said, “To maintain a certain level of grayness, we must create a certain harmony among various factors of development within a certain period of time. This process of harmonizing is compromise, and its result is grayness.” To illustrate this point, Ren Zhengfei said:

The managers at Huawei are mostly young and passionate. They don’t under- stand the necessity of compromise, so they meet with strong resistance. In the history of China, reforms have affected the course of social development, but most reformers had not really reached their goals. I believe that, in their own time, they had gone too far and had been too rigid with the resistance before them. If they had taken a softer approach and been more patient, they might have achieved better results. In fact, they lacked certain grayness. The direction would not change, but the course could bend a little bit. It may not necessarily be a straight line; it could be a curve, and at some point it could go around a circle. If we take a step back, we may find that the course leads exactly to the same goal.

In this speech, Ren Zhengfei elaborated fully on compromise and toler- ance, but little on openness and grayness, and the relationship between compromise, openness, and grayness was not thoroughly explained. In particular, “grayness” was not touched upon in the third section, even though the section was titled “Without Compromise Grayness Cannot Be Achieved.” This miss indeed was a pity.

While we were drinking tea one evening after the New Year of 2012, I proposed to Ren Zhengfei that grayness should be the core of Huawei’s

management philosophy and the basis of all other concepts. First, I argued that grayness represents a profound understanding of human nature and an insight as to the diversity and changeability of the world. The man- agement of an organization ultimately aims at attracting, retaining, and motivating people. And the key is to bring out their latent positive energy, suppress the idle or evil part of their nature, tolerate their defects and mistakes, and therefore, lead them all, in spite of their differences, in the

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