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People-first, the Haier way

Unbossers partners with Haier Model Research Institute (HMI) to help organizations with their RenDanHeYi transformation.

As changemakers for human organizations, the purpose of Unbossers is to help transform companies to become people-first organizations (as a precondition for performance and growth). The partnership with HMI is a unique and most natural collaboration aimed at creating the organizations for this era of change. We strongly believe in Haier’s RenDanHeYi management model as the engine to free untapped human potential and creativity. Our partnership reinforces our joint ambitions to build an ecosystem economy based on lifelong and sustainable value creation for users enhanced with the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Haier and HMI

Bureaucracy is extremely resistant to any efforts to kill it. Perhaps the most successful challenger of the bureaucratic model is a company called Haier, based in Qingdao, China.

Haier is one of the world’s largest appliance makers and Fortune 500 companies. As a part of Haier, HMI is a global management consulting service platform. Based on RenDanHeYi (RDHY), a management model initiated by Haier, it provides users with a complete set of customized strategic transformation solutions by building an open global network and connecting top consulting companies, research institutions, experts, and scholars. At present, HMI has fourteen research centers all over the world, bringing together 300+ industries experts.

Over the past decades, Haier took out almost all of its 12,000 managerial positions and reorganized 70,000 staff into some 4,000 micro-enterprises of entrepreneurs which are responsible for their own profits and losses, each with its own P&L, balance sheet, and customers. Also, micro-enterprises have “three rights”: the right to make independent decisions, the right to hire talent, and the right to distribute profits. Baseline for its success are empowered staff, with more freedom and autonomy at zero-distance to the customer. 

The micro-enterprises (MEs) spontaneously organize themselves around user needs to form clusters (EMCs). EMC, known as Ecosystem Micro-enterprise, is an organizational unit that is formed to meet users’ needs more efficiently. To achieve this goal, a type of agreement is introduced into the EMC and binds everyone’s interest together, which makes it stand out among a lot of organizational structures. With the help of EMC contract, EMCs and MEs are able to cooperate with one another to accomplish goals. The more value is created by EMCs, the more profits everyone can get.   

The deep purpose behind RenDanHeYi

The RenDanHeYi business model was created in 2005 by Zhang Ruimin, who was the founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Haier Group. After 17 years of iteration and evolution, EMC contract, Win-win Value-added Statement, RenDanHeYi Scorecard, and other tools are created and applied into practices based on the principle of RenDanHeYi at Haier. More than 80,000 enterprises are learning and implementing RenDanHeYi which reveals its general applicability.

‘Ren’’ means employees in its broadest sense. First of all, it is an open definition, and “Ren” refers to any person, in or outside the company, who is competent to bid for a position in the company. Second, employees are no longer passive executors of orders, but entrepreneurs and dynamic partners who have the 3 Rights: the right to make independent decisions, the right to hire talents, and the right to distribute profits

‘Dan’ refers to user value. The definition of “Dan” (user value) is also broad. First, one has to compete for a “Dan”, or an “order”, instead of being assigned an order by his supervisor; second, the “Dan” is a dynamic, optimized leading-target, rather than a narrow, fixed order.

`HeYi’ means the integration or alignment of employee value and user (the customer in most cases) value realization. Every employee should directly face the users and create user value. Employees should realize their own value through creating value for users.

A transformational partnership

Unbossers has partnered with Haier Model Research Institute and William Malek to provide implementation services and help deliver RenDanHeYi through transformation projects.

“Combining the global management and research wisdom of HMI with Unbossers’ expertise and capabilities in organizational transformations provides global organizations with the secure and can-do mentality that the successful implementations of RenDanHeYi requires”

Nick Van Langendonck, driving force at Unbossers.

The partnership with HMI provided Unbossers a global platform to change how organizations function today and how work takes shape.

To successfully apply RenDanHeYi in business, one must be deeply ingrained by its beliefs and practices, much of what traditional consulting companies fail to deliver. They are still very much operating from a top down, command & control mindset and can hardly grasp the deeper human meaning of RenDanHeYi.

“RenDanHeYi model aims to achieve “human value maximization”. Practice has proven that the RenDanHeYi model is applicable in different countries, cultures, and industries. The effects it brings to organizations are concrete which make them important.”

Shi Lutong, executive director of HMI. 

“I believe this management model has no boundaries. RenDanHeYi appears to be a model that can break the cultural and organizational layers and we want to make RenDanHeYi benefit everyone in this way.”

Sun Jiaze, international researcher of HMI.