Understanding Modern Corporate Management from the ~~Resignation Letter from a Former Vice President at Huawei to Ren Zhengfei~~

　Xu Jiajun is the head of Huawei’s data centers; he is an extremely talented technician, a director at the first-level department, and a vice president at Huawei, with an annual income of over ten million. From an ordinary company employee to a Huawei vice president with an annual salary of tens of millions, and then to moving from Huawei to Baidu, Xu Jiajun’s ten years of professional experience are certainly valuable lessons for anyone who aspires to success. They also allow us to gain insight into how Huawei operates and into Xu’s career planning. There are no good jobs in the world; if you put in enough effort, good jobs will come to you. And the most important thing: cherish life. 　　Brother Zheng Fei: In the blink of an eye, ten years have passed since I started working here. These ten years at Huawei have seen the company evolve from being unknown within its professional circle to becoming a well-known large enterprise recognized by everyone; it has been a decade of rapid development, one that has witnessed the company’s years of hard work and efforts. I also threw myself in, learning while swimming through the tide, and have made it to this day. I’m leaving the company now to embark on a new career and take on brand-new challenges. What I’m about to do involves great risks; it’s very likely to be a life-or-death situation. Whether I’ll still have a chance to live after facing those nine deaths is uncertain. Before starting a new career, I thought about putting together a detailed summary of the past decade. Working at a large company that is growing at such a rapid pace like Huawei can sometimes be a hellish experience. If I can summarize the experiences and lessons from these ten years and learn the key principles for working and behaving, I believe it will be of great benefit to me in the future. 　　Over the years, some people have left the company to write articles or books, criticizing and commenting on it, offering their opinions on its senior leaders one by one. Personally, I don’t see any benefit beyond providing some entertainment value. The company continues to develop, and behind that development are the dreams, efforts, contributions, sacrifices, struggles, complaints, dissatisfactions, departures, hopes, and disappointments of 60,000 people. Behind that development are also various opportunities, major decisions, crises, mistakes, and so on – logic that outsiders can hardly understand fully. I don’t want to talk much about the company; I just want to reflect on my own work experience, think about what efforts I’ve made, what contributions I’ve offered, what brought me the most joy, what was most beneficial for me, and what I’ve learned. In general, my ten years at Huawei were spent in a state of confusion; back then I didn’t seem to have any grand ambitions or detailed plans, I just focused on doing each task well. Through my own summarization and reflection, I hope to be more organized and clearer in the future. 　　After some thought, I believe there are several points that represent the experiences and lessons gained over the years, and which are worth carrying forward in the future. 　　1. “Start with small things, learn to endure losses, and work together with others.” This was the last lesson before graduating from graduate school; the teacher who taught us electronic circuits gave us a few words of advice. Although I have forgotten his name, those words are still etched in my memory to this day. Through my work at Huawei, I have come to realize even more the profoundness of these few simple principles. Starting with small things does not mean being satisfied with only doing minor tasks, nor does it involve making grand claims or setting unrealistic goals. Learning to accept losses does not mean enduring them; it means not getting stuck on temporary gains and losses, and having the courage to give up at critical moments. 　　Second, “The bigger your vision, the bigger your stage.” Many of our successes stem from our willingness to think and take action. For example, when I first received a task that I didn’t understand at all, I still dared to give it a try and to find a solution, and I indeed succeeded. Similarly, when working on SPES, even though we had no resources, no expertise, or prior experience, and even though large companies like Cisco were also involved in this project, we still dared to undertake it and to push it forward. By not blindly admiring authority or fearing it, we were able to achieve success. Of course, this is not just blind recklessness; being bold also means actively paying attention to the broader outside world, and having an open and tolerant mind to embrace various new things. 　　III. “Study hard* and make progress every day.” This phrase is the most appropriate way to describe the expectations for IT professionals. True success stories and experts are those who are least afraid to learn*; whenever they don’t know something, they just pick up and learn it. Our IT department has a talented expert named Tan Bo. In fact, he wasn’t born an expert; he became one by learning from a beginner. He once told me that when he first started working as a UNIX system administrator, he was surprised to see the # prompt, because he had spent many years developing under UNIX using the % prompt and had never had administrator privileges. 　　Look at the level of the expert back then! When I was working on a backup project with him, I asked him to research methods for backing up and restoring data in ORACLE databases using point-in-time recovery. He interpreted this literally, thinking that database restoration meant walking backward like a human being – which was quite amusing. Yet, he would spend an hour reading every morning before going to work, and over the years he has become a super expert in various fields such as systems, databases, and development, one whom no one can challenge. However, learning is by no means just about learning from books; in fact, it is more important to learn from practical work and from those around us. 　　For example, the most important lesson I learned at Huawei was the need to know how to make use of adversity. Instead of constantly emphasizing the difficulties during the winter months, Huawei focused on using those times as opportunities to change the global competitive landscape, and it succeeded in doing so. Without those difficult times, Huawei might have remained far behind its industry rivals for many more years. When faced with a lawsuit from Cisco, Huawei did not panic but responded proactively, using that situation to increase its popularity in a way that would not have been possible by spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Things like these – turning what could have been a catastrophic situation into favorable conditions for success – left a deep impression on me, and I really admire the company’s leadership. 　　IV. Be brave in taking action, willing to make mistakes, and good at reflecting. Many things are easy to understand but difficult to put into practice; what’s key is to take action, especially when it comes to various management theories, methods, and concepts. Empty talk and vague plans are of no use; it’s better to actually put things into action, and then keep reflecting on and improving them – that’s what’s truly convincing. Without repeated practice and reflection in real situations, it’s not easy to do well even things that are well-known to everyone. For example, as a manager, one needs to know how to listen. I believe 99.9% of Huawei’s managers understand this, but how well do they actually do it? How many managers at Huawei manage to avoid interrupting others while they speak, refrain from rushing to draw conclusions or give definitions, and avoid rushing to offer solutions? How many managers can guide others to express themselves naturally, ask about their feelings, and ensure they understand what the other person is saying? Fifthly, there must be methods and approaches; problems need to be considered systematically, and solutions require strategic planning. In the years prior, due to some success and some technical research I had done, I became overconfident. Later, the company hired a large number of consultants at great expense, but at first I wasn’t very interested in them. In the following years, as the company grew larger and IT complexity increased, I gradually came to understand many things. 　　Western companies have professional experts who approach everything with a specific methodology and set of procedures; even the way meetings are held follows established patterns. I became interested in studying these patterns, developed my own set of them, and used them to train and discuss with the key members of my department. In a complex environment, many problems can no longer be studied and resolved by looking at them in isolation; systematic approaches and a strategic perspective are highly necessary. 　　For the operation of an organization, this is particularly important when it comes to the design of systems and processes. Einstein said: \"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.\" VI. Think independently, don’t follow others blindly. As a company grows and has more employees, it becomes easier to muddle along. It is easy for people to end up going with the flow without delving deeply into the business, thus failing to see the problems and dangers. Experts have conducted research showing that during avalanches, victims usually appear in groups; there are very few individual victims. The reason is simple: individuals in areas prone to avalanches are quite careful and vigilant. But in a group, the larger it is, the more each individual tends to feel an illusory sense of security and to make decisions based on what others do. Yet in reality, no matter how strong a group may be, an avalanche is unstoppable. Therefore, I believe that in large organizations, the ability to think independently is particularly important. 　　VII. Complain less, talk less, be proactive, and do more practical work. I used to be a complainer who often fell into the habit of complaining. But years of work have changed me, as I’ve come to realize that complaining is completely useless. There will always be imperfections in the world, and there will always be problems. The only solution is to face them and deal with them. 　Do tangible things to change the unsatisfactory situation we are in, and to change the unsatisfactory version of ourselves. In fact, there are many things worth complaining about that are the result of our own actions. For example, it is common in society for senior officials, after retiring, to complain that people’s hearts have changed and that the world has become heartless. If we examine this carefully, the reason is likely to be their arrogance when they held power and treated others as worthless. 　　VIII. Be responsible for one’s career, one’s goals, and oneself. Successful people are usually self-disciplined, keep their promises, and remain focused. Large companies certainly have performance evaluations, systems of rewarding merit, KPIs, leadership directives, and even a certain degree of corporate politics. But if we focus solely on achieving good evaluation scores, on meeting KPI targets, or on gaining power and financial benefits; if we are only responsible to those above us or to others, but not to ourselves or to our own goals, and if we lose our sense of mission, responsibility, enthusiasm, and curiosity in our work, then we will surely fail to reach our best potential. And a company that manages to create an environment in which each individual can perform at their best will be invincible. 　IX. Cultivating humanistic qualities and aesthetic taste may seem unrelated to work, but in fact they are highly relevant. Outstanding achievements are inseparable from the pursuit of beauty; the greatest scientific discoveries often embody order, simplicity, and beauty. Lacking any sense of aesthetic pursuit, one dares to do anything ugly, uses any means necessary, and settles for whatever will do – it’s far from elegant, and such an approach surely cannot last. 　10. “It’s only when everyone is treated well that things truly get good.” Pay attention to others, help them, treat people with sincerity, and be honest in your behavior. In today’s rapidly developing society, the media tends to exaggerate the increasingly cold and deceitful relationships between people. But in reality, society and communities may not be like that at all. At least before I joined Huawei, I had some fear regarding the interpersonal relationships within a large company; yet in fact, everyone in this group seemed to be open and sincere with one another, creating harmonious relationships. 　So the key is for us to be able to treat others sincerely, and to put ourselves in their shoes when interacting with them. Of course, conflicts at work are inevitable; in fact, there is no need to avoid them, as many conflicts can even be highly beneficial for an organization. Just like couples often end up with a stronger relationship after having a fight. 　As long as we adhere to two main principles: 1) Focus on the matter, not the person. 　2) Be kind to others. It is certainly possible to channel moderate conflict in a direction that is beneficial for both oneself and the organization. 　XI. An open and sharing attitude Working in a high-tech company, if one adopts a conservative and closed-minded approach, growth will surely be hindered. 　XII. Manage time well. Having worked at Huawei for ten years, over 3,650 days in total, including around 3,000 workdays, it is doubtful whether all this time was spent on the most important tasks; it’s uncertain just how much of that time was actually used for productive work. Time management is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned while working at Huawei. It might also be a problem inherent to the company as a whole: there is a lack of planning in work, with constant interruptions occurring – either from others interrupting colleagues or subordinates, or from endless meetings and discussions that take up most of the time. One might also be drawn to their own interests and spend a lot of time on trivial matters, or devote excessive time to minor details, delaying handling of important tasks until they become urgent and force hasty action. Looking back now, if I had really been able to manage these ten years well, I think the achievements would have been much greater.

Corporate management is far too distant from us ordinary people at the grassroots level.

A soldier who doesn’t want to be a general... had better think about it: first, to keep up with the trends of the times; second, to be able to offer advice to the company; third, to build up the momentum needed to start a business for themselves or those around them; fourth, to pass it on to future generations.