Learning from Huawei’s Superfluidity

Most companies find it extremely difficult to achieve high organizational fluidity—even leading firms like Cisco and Microsoft. However, Huawei has made significant strides toward closing the gap between internal flexibility and the rate of external market change. The authors of this article carried out face-to-face interviews in Shenzhen over a period of five weeks, beginning in September 2015, with 15 former senior executives of Huawei, including seven vice presidents, two senior vice presidents, and one executive vice president. So how does Huawei achieve superfluidity? First, Huawei is structured primarily around customer needs so as to ensure the customer is at the centre of everything. Second, its support functions are built around flexible platforms. Third, its management-level employees are continually rotated between different jobs. Fourth, its culture is one obsessed with maintaining the pace of change. Huawei’s recipe for creating a superfluid organization is radical. It overturns the conventional wisdom that manufacturing companies need to be structured as a matrix of product-based business units, functions, and geographic subsidiaries, in favour of the kind of project-based organization used by construction companies, consultants, and investment banks.