#127 1996 · Huawei (Ren Zhengfei) · Telecommunicationsreframe
Huawei made its whole marketing department resign at once so a third of it could leave without a fight
the problem
Entrenched underperforming managers were hard to remove without individual disputes
background
By the mid-1990s, Huawei's marketing department had accumulated the ordinary sediment of any fast-growing company: senior people who had earned their titles years earlier and had since stopped earning them. Removing them individually meant performance reviews, negotiated exits, and the risk that every departure would be read — correctly or not — as office politics, poisoning morale far beyond the people actually let go.
Ren Zhengfei's answer skipped the individual confrontations entirely. He had the whole department — every director and above, down to the acting head of marketing herself — hand in a resignation letter and a self-review on the same day, then had the company decide, person by person, which document to act on. Because everyone had resigned identically, no one who was let go could claim to have been singled out, and no one who stayed could be accused of having dodged a review that others faced.
the move
In January 1996, Ren Zhengfei had every cadre in Huawei's marketing department — directors and above, including the department's own acting head — submit a formal resignation letter and a self-assessment report at the same time. The company then accepted one document or the other for each person: roughly 30% of the department's leadership had their resignations approved and were replaced, while the rest were rehired into the same or a different role — with no individual singled out, since everyone had technically just resigned together.
the payoff
The purge reset a full layer of leadership, including the acting marketing president, without a single individual negotiation, severance dispute, or accusation of being personally targeted, because the entire department had submitted the identical letter. Huawei's own retrospectives treat it as the founding act of its "能上能下" (mobility runs in both directions) culture, formally commemorated with a ceremony and gold medals for participants in 2000.
what came after
The episode became one of the most retold events in Huawei's internal history, cited by the company itself as the moment its culture of mobility — the idea that rank could move down as easily as up — became real rather than theoretical.
filed under
references
- [1]华为1996：一个惊天地、泣鬼神的壮举界面新闻, 2019jiemian.com
- [2]【华为历史解读】1996年华为市场部集体大辞职风波腾讯新闻, 2022news.qq.com