Huawei reset its marketing leadership by mass resignation and rehire

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.

Had every marketing director resign simultaneously, then privately rehired most and let go the rest, making removals uniform and uncontestable.

Everyone resigned identically, so no removal looked personal.

The company privately chose who to rehire, hiding individual decisions.

Rehired staff accepted roles on company terms, resetting expectations.

Uniform process preempted claims of unequal treatment or politics.

When many removals would each spark dispute, make the process uniform so no one is singled out.

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.