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Editorial · The Post-Project World

Haier: Four Thousand Startups Inside One Company

12 January 2026 · 00:07:04

In 2012, Zhang Ruimin fired ten thousand middle managers. Not because Haier was failing—because he saw where the future was heading. Today, Haier is the world's largest appliance maker. Inside it operate over four thousand micro-enterprises, each functioning like an independent startup. No traditional hierarchy. No central coordination bureaucracy. Just small teams competing and collaborating simultaneously. This episode tells that remarkable story. I explore:→ The burning platform: why Zhang dismantled a structure that was already working→ Micro-enterprises: how teams of ten to fifteen people operate with full profit and loss responsibility→ The internal market: how micro-enterprises buy and sell services to each other→ Rendanheyi: the philosophy of zero distance between employees and customers→ What happened to the ten thousand middle managers (it's not what you'd expect) Haier proves that radical decentralization works at massive scale—eighty thousand employees across multiple continents, coordinating without traditional project management. If Netflix shows that tech companies can operate differently, Haier shows that manufacturing giants can too. No industry is exempt from this transformation. The coordination tax isn't inevitable. Haier stopped paying it. 🎧 Available now on Spotify and all major platforms.

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