#167 1996 · Huawei (Ren Zhengfei) · Telecommunications
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.
what everyone would do
Run individual performance reviews and remove underperforming managers one at a time — the standard approach to entrenched leadership. It fails because each individual removal becomes its own negotiation and dispute, reads as office politics whether or not it actually was, and damages morale far beyond the person actually let go, since everyone remaining watches and draws conclusions about who's safe and who isn't.
what they saw
Ren saw that the problem wasn't identifying who to remove, it was that removing people individually made each removal contestable and personal. If every director resigned identically and simultaneously, no single removal could be read as someone being singled out — the actual selection happened invisibly inside a process everyone went through the same way, converting many separate, disputable personnel decisions into one uniform, uncontestable event.
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.
why it works
Having every director and above submit an identical resignation letter and self-assessment on the same day removed any visible difference in how people were treated — from the outside, everyone did exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. The company then privately decided which document to act on for each person, but because the process itself was uniform, nobody who was let go could claim unequal treatment, and nobody who stayed could be accused of dodging what others faced. The people who were rehired had also technically reapplied for their roles, resetting the relationship on the company's terms even for those who kept their jobs — achieving in one clean, simultaneous event what dozens of individual difficult conversations would have required.
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.
where it breaks
The mechanism only works if the affected group genuinely accepts the mass resignation as procedurally legitimate rather than recognizing it as a disguised individual purge — if employees see through the uniform framing, it can read as mass intimidation and damage morale more broadly than individual firings would have. It also depends on having clear, defensible criteria for the actual decision, since the substance is still individual even though the process is collective; an opaque selection criterion just moves the unfairness from visible to hidden, which can breed a different but equally corrosive suspicion. And it requires the organization to have enough internal authority and trust for such a sweeping move to stick — a company without Huawei's standing risking the same tactic could trigger mass departures or legal challenges from employees who read it as constructive dismissal rather than a legitimate reset.
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.
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