Chapter 14 "Huawei Basic Law" - Inheritance of Corporate Culture

The "Huawei Basic Law" is the essence of Huawei's corporate culture. It is a summary of Huawei's experience and exploration of concepts. More importantly, it ensures that Huawei's corporate culture can be passed on. If the wolf-like corporate culture is Huawei's core competitiveness, then the "Huawei Basic Law" is the cornerstone and guide of competitiveness. The "Huawei Basic Law" is expressed in written form and constrained by the system, which concretely reflects the core competitiveness.It describes the factors that build Huawei's core competitiveness, and outlines the factors of the base layer, carrier layer, and conversion layer. These factors are the "focus" for building core capabilities, so each factor is indispensable. effect.Listing out the competitive elements can help enterprises clarify strategies, standardize behaviors, and promote the formation of core competencies, which is the guarantee for enterprises to obtain market competitiveness.These elements are classified into two important parts of the "Huawei Basic Law", one part is the company's purpose mainly related to the basic layer factors, and the other part is the basic operating policies mainly related to the carrier layer and conversion layer factors.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, after 10 years of hard work, Huawei showed a great momentum of development. Looking forward to the next 10 years, if the company wants to achieve a second start-up, sustainable development, and make all work in line with international standards, it must downplay the enterprise. The family's personal color, strengthen professional management.But this "professional management" got stuck from the very beginning.The company launched the "Huawei Rise and Fall, My Responsibility" corporate culture discussion, but found that some basic concepts could not be unified; in order to meet the needs of large-scale development, the company set up a salary reform team to redesign the salary distribution plan, and found that the lack of Determine the basic basis for wages; implement the ISO9001 quality standard, but found that in the new business process system, the positioning of the duties and authorities of each department also lacks a basic basis.The final conclusion is that management must be based on the company's culture, and a programmatic document is required as the general basis for organizational, system, and cultural construction.

The "Huawei Basic Law" emerged just after Huawei had initially acquired an entrepreneurial spirit and was trying to solidify it into a systematic corporate program.Before the introduction of the "Huawei Basic Law", Ren Zhengfei himself did not have a systematic thinking about Huawei's corporate culture, corporate governance philosophy, and entrepreneurial spirit.As for what kind of document the "Huawei Basic Law" should be, Ren Zhengfei didn't figure it out at first, but he just felt that Huawei already needed something similar to the "Hong Kong Basic Law".

At the beginning, this vague idea was handed over to the President's Office. The President's Office put Huawei's main documents, such as the salary system, in a folder, added a cover, and affixed a note saying "Huawei's Basic Law". In front of Ren Zhengfei.But Ren Zhengfei said: "This is not the basic law I want." The director of the president's office asked: "Then what basic law do you want?" Ren Zhengfei replied: "If I want to know, do I still need you to do it? I will do it myself." At that time, Wu Chunbo, a professor at Renmin University of China, and others were doing assessment projects for Huawei's marketing department, so Ren Zhengfei decided to "let a few professors from Renmin University of China try it."For this reason, Ren Zhengfei opened up his heart for the first time, and talked with the drafters from personal experience and other aspects for a full three days. The Basic Law finally broke the question—Huawei must figure out three questions if it wants to get out of the chaos: First, why is Huawei successful?Second, what are the factors that support Huawei's success?Third, what elements does Huawei need to achieve greater success?And the result of this problem has been unconsciously close to the three propositions proposed by Drucker for doing business: who am I, where do I come from, and where do I want to go?

Corporate culture is not produced in the second entrepreneurship, but has a very reasonable connotation in the first entrepreneurship, and then abstracts, summarizes, improves, and sublimates it into culture in the second entrepreneurship.The drafting team communicated with Ren Zhengfei for a long time, and went deep into the employees to explore and summarize Huawei's existing corporate culture. After summarizing Huawei's existing corporate culture, they came up with several key points, such as the principle of high efficiency and pressure. On this basis, they further systematically The formation of the culture of each business unit basically achieves Ren Zhengfei's proposal of "summarizing the various elements that can promote development in the process of enterprise development and making it a promotion system for enterprise development".

After more than two years of drafting, deliberation, and eight revisions, in 1998, the "Huawei Basic Law" proposed by Ren Zhengfei was officially promulgated. The "Huawei Basic Law" is divided into six main aspects, including purpose, basic business policy, basic organizational policy, basic human resource policy, basic control policy, successor and revision of the Basic Law, and is written in the form of legal provisions. The "Huawei Basic Law" clearly and systematically deduces the basic values ​​and common vision.For example, "Huawei's pursuit is to realize customers' dreams in the field of electronic information, and relying on bit by bit, perseverance and hard pursuit, we have become a world-class leading enterprise"; "For the prosperity of the great motherland, for the revitalization of the Chinese nation, for We will make unremitting efforts for the happiness of ourselves and our families. We will stand among the world's communication powers with our excellent products; we are not simply pursuing the expansion of scale, but to make ourselves better..." "Huawei Basic Law" expresses the call from the bottom of Huawei's heart Articulate it, make it explicit, and become a powerful motivator.It is Huawei's lofty ambitions that attract and gather a large number of outstanding talents with high ambitions.

The "Huawei Basic Law" has become the first "corporate constitution" in the corporate world since the reform and opening up, leading the practice of Chinese enterprises in building corporate culture. The "Huawei Basic Law" has nearly 20,000 characters. It is another well-known corporate basic management thought and policy outline after the "Anshan Iron and Steel Constitution" 40 years ago. The "Huawei Basic Law" sorted out the original culture within Huawei, and specified the code of conduct on the basis of inheriting the original culture.Yuan Baohua commented: "With the Basic Law, Huawei can do what it wants without overstepping the rules." The "Huawei Basic Law" is the first systematic summary and comprehensive thinking of Chinese private enterprises facing the future.As one of the earliest, most systematic, and most influential cultural outlines in modern Chinese enterprises, it has become a typical model for future enterprises to formulate similar internal documents, and has a profound impact on Chinese corporate culture.