Yanwen’s blog

9/5/2026

I'm going to continue talking about the book I've been reading since 9/3, The Way of Huawei Learning by Deng Bin.

One of Huawei's important learning methods is benchmarking: identify the best performers in the field, study what makes them successful, and use their strengths as a reference for improvement.

Huawei does not look for one company to copy wholesale. Instead, it breaks a business into different modules and identifies the best reference for each. Ericsson might be the benchmark for carrier business, Apple for product design and R&D, and OPPO or vivo for consumer-market channels. Huawei studies these companies in great detail, learns their proven best practices, and then adapts and improves upon them.

This approach helped Huawei make some remarkable leaps. It began as a B2B company serving telecom operators, then expanded into consumer smartphones and eventually into global markets. Each transition brought new customers, products, channels, and competitive environments. Huawei could not rely solely on its own past experience. It needed to learn from those already successful in each field.

The author describes the principle this way: compare every part of your business with the best in the industry—and learn from them.

This reminds me of Peter Drucker's principle that effective managers should build on strengths—the strengths of themselves, their employees, and the people around them. The same applies to learning. When we study someone who is better than us, the goal is to absorb what they do well in order to become better ourselves.

That may be why Huawei has been able to repeatedly move into unfamiliar territory and make such successful transitions.

What we can learn from Huawei's benchmarking practice:

Find the best. Study them closely. Learn their strengths. Then make those strengths your own.

9/4/2026

I'm going to continue talking about the book I mentioned yesterday, The Way of Huawei Learning by Deng Bin.

This part of the book really took me by surprise.

After 2009, Huawei began studying the U.S. military and its approach to standardized management and organizational efficiency. Huawei had noticed that the traditional front-to-back-office workflow used by many large Western companies could be rigid and slow. It began experimenting with military-style reforms: delegating more authority to frontline sales teams and making back-office departments respond more quickly to the demands of the field.

At first, I found this hard to believe. But the more I read, the more it made sense.

Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei (任正非), has repeatedly said that Huawei deliberately studied the U.S. military, particularly its organization, logistics, leadership, and ability to operate large and complex organizations.

In a 2019 interview, Ren was asked how his own military experience had influenced his management style. His answer was unusually candid. He said that he had been only a low-level engineer in the Chinese military and had never actually managed a military organization. Much of what he learned about military management, he explained, came from studying the West Point model and reading about American generals, while comparing how American and Soviet commanders organized and conducted military operations.

Even more strikingly, Ren has described the U.S. military as “the world's best company” when it comes to organizational and logistics management. He said Huawei wanted to learn from the U.S. military's logistics system, while also acknowledging that a company could not simply copy the military's willingness to spend without the same concern for cost.

One important lesson Huawei took from the U.S. military was the importance of putting resources and decision-making closer to the frontline.

The U.S. military has spent decades developing systems that allow combat units to focus on their missions while specialized organizations provide logistics and other forms of support. Huawei adapted some of these ideas into business practices, including the famous principle:

“让听得见炮声的人来呼唤炮火” — Let the people who hear the gunfire call for the artillery.

In practical terms, this meant:

• Making headquarters more of a supporting and service organization rather than allowing it to control everything.

• Giving frontline business units greater authority and flexibility.

• Organizing around customers, products, and regions rather than relying entirely on centralized functional departments.

Huawei even organized systematic studies of U.S. military thinking. For example, in 2015–16, Ren had Huawei employees study writings on the U.S. military and invited Chinese military scholars to lecture to Huawei executives and employees.

In another interview, Ren said that Huawei employees could find no anti-American slogans throughout the company and that “everyone is learning from the U.S.” He even said that Huawei circulated U.S. Department of Defense documents internally because they considered them well written and valuable for learning.

What strikes me most is not that Huawei studied the U.S. military. It is the open-mindedness behind that decision.

Huawei was competing in the global technology industry, much of which was dominated by American companies. Yet instead of assuming that everything developed in the United States was something to reject, Huawei was willing to look carefully at what the United States did well and ask: What can we learn from it?

That takes a high level of humility.

Ren's attitude was: If someone is better than us at something, find out why they are better and learn from them.

It doesn't matter whether the teacher is a friend, a competitor. If they have something worth learning, learn it.

I think that is one of the most valuable qualities in Huawei.

Real confidence does not mean believing that you are already the best. It means being confident enough to learn from anyone who is better than you.

9/3/2026

Huawei is a Chinese technology company specializing in telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and digital infrastructure, with operations in more than 170 countries.

There have been many books written about Huawei. Recently, I got hold of one written in Chinese by Deng Bin, titled The Way of Huawei Learning.

Deng was a senior employee at Huawei for 11 years. His book examines more than 30 years of Huawei's history, focusing on whom Huawei learned from and how it learned.

During its early years, from 1987 to 1997, Huawei's learning was largely disorganized and problem-driven. The company responded to problems as they arose, without a systematic management framework.

That began to change in 1998. Huawei started investing heavily in organizational learning, with the goal of building standardized management systems. This was the period when Huawei began learning extensively from Western consulting companies.

Ren Zhengfei, Huawei's founder and leader, once admitted that he “did not know how to manage.” Rather than trying to figure everything out on its own, Ren made a smart move. Huawei spent roughly a decade, from 1998 to 2008, systematically learning how to build modern management systems, working with Western consulting firms, including IBM.

Huawei spent enormous sums bringing in these outside experts. According to incomplete statistics cited in the book, since beginning its partnership with IBM in 1998, Huawei has cumulatively paid more than 40 billion RMB in consulting fees to global consulting firms.

At first glance, spending that much money on consultants might seem excessive. But I think what Huawei did was remarkably smart: it was willing to spend heavily to learn from the best.

Ren Zhengfei put it this way:

“Thrift alone will never build Huawei. When you seize a strategic opportunity, any amount spent counts as victory. If you miss a strategic opportunity, spending nothing still leads to demise.” (“节约是节约不出一个华为公司的，抓住了战略机会，花多少钱都是胜利；抓不住战略机会，不花钱也是死亡”。)

To capture strategic opportunities, Ren believed, a company should be willing to hire the best teachers in the world. Trying to teach yourself simply to save money, he argued, can be the worst possible choice.

Looking at Huawei today, I find this philosophy particularly interesting.

Huawei didn't just invest billions in technology. It invested billions in learning.

The company paid outsiders to teach it how to manage, organize, develop processes, and compete at a global level. It then absorbed, adapted, and eventually internalized what it learned.

That investment may be one of the reasons Huawei was able to develop the capabilities it has today.

In other words, learning, initially a cost on Huawei's balance sheet, was a long-term strategic investment.

And sometimes the smartest investment a company can make is learning how to become better at everything it does.

For ordinary people, I think the most important lesson from Huawei is that investing in learning can be one of the smartest investments we make.

What is true for a company can also be true for an individual. If you want to become an excellent tennis player, learn from a great coach. If you want to master a new skill, let the master teach you.

More on Huawei tomorrow.

9/2/2026

The end of summer and the arrival of September always bring back memories of back-to-school days, especially when my children were young.

The children would get ready for the new school year. For a child, September meant that everything started again—a fresh beginning. There were new teachers and classmates, sometimes a new backpack and new shoes, freshly sharpened pencils, and a new classroom. It was like turning to a new page.

In China, we called it 开学日. I still remember those days from my own elementary-school years.

When my children were in elementary school, I experienced those new beginnings alongside them. I was part of the annual back-to-school ritual—the preparation, the anticipation, and the feeling that something new was about to begin.

Now those years are long gone. Yet when September comes around, these seasonal memories come back, even though the people who once gave that season its meaning have grown up.

Perhaps what I miss is not simply the school days themselves, but what “back to school” represented: the feeling that life was beginning again.

As children, we had built-in new beginnings. Every September, we moved up a grade, increased in age, and began another chapter. Adulthood is different. There are no school calendars indicating a fresh start. We simply move from one day to the next, and sometimes life can begin to feel like one long continuation of the day before.

I wish we could keep that back-to-school feeling long after we leave school. Perhaps we can in our own way.

We could deliberately give ourselves a September every year—a time to start something new, change a routine, meet new people, begin a project, learn something we have never learned before, or simply look at familiar things with fresh eyes.

Maybe growing older doesn't mean we have to stop going back to school. We just have to choose our own first day.

No more new classroom, new teachers, or a freshly sharpened pencil. But we can still decide what we want to learn, where we want to go, and what new page we want to turn.

Perhaps every September can be a reminder of our own back-to-school day and we can still have the ritual and its meanings in our lives.

9/1/2026

Yesterday I saw this news story, which sent shockwaves through the taekwondo world: Isabelle Sava, 19, died in her sleep on August 17, 2026, after suffering an unexpected cardiac arrest. 

She had been a highly accomplished taekwondo athlete, with more than a decade of training, a second-degree black belt, and a silver medal at the 2022 World Taekwondo Championships.

Her cardiac arrest is the mechanism of death, not necessarily the underlying cause. So far the world doesn't know what caused her heart to stop.

If I had to speculate, I would first consider an undiagnosed electrical or structural heart disorder.

At 19, especially in someone who was apparently fit and athletic, ordinary age-related coronary artery disease would be extremely unlikely. Some of the possibilities include:

1. Inherited cardiac electrical disorders, such as long QT syndrome, Brugada syndrome, and catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT). These conditions can cause sudden, fatal ventricular arrhythmias, sometimes during sleep and sometimes in people who have never experienced any symptoms.

2. Structural heart disease, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). This is particularly relevant in young athletes because it can remain silent until a dangerous arrhythmia occurs. An athlete can appear exceptionally fit and healthy and still have an underlying heart condition.

3. Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, including arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), another condition that can cause dangerous arrhythmias in young people.

4. Myocarditis or another inflammatory condition affecting the heart. In some cases, inflammation of the heart muscle can trigger a fatal arrhythmia even when there has been no obvious preceding illness.

There are also much rarer possibilities, including congenital abnormalities of the coronary arteries, severe electrolyte disturbances, or toxic exposure. Without an autopsy or other medical findings, however, there is no basis for ranking these possibilities with confidence.

People naturally associate sudden cardiac death in young athletes with intense exercise. But that isn't always the case. Some inherited electrical disorders can trigger fatal arrhythmias even when a person is resting or asleep. Brugada syndrome, for example, is well known for its association with dangerous arrhythmias that can occur at night.

So at this point, we simply don't know what caused Isabelle's death. An undiagnosed inherited cardiac disorder is one possible explanation.

What can we learn from this tragedy?

The first lesson is that being an elite athlete does not necessarily mean having a completely healthy heart.

In fact, sudden cardiac death in a young athlete is one of the most sobering examples of how a person can look exceptionally healthy on the outside while carrying an underlying cardiac abnormality that has never produced symptoms.

The second lesson concerns cardiac screening.

A standard sports physical generally relies on a medical history, family history, physical examination, blood pressure measurement, and, depending on the setting, a basic cardiac evaluation. However, some potentially dangerous structural or electrical heart conditions can remain silent and escape detection.

This raises a legitimate concern: Should young people who are about to undertake years of strenuous athletic training receive a more extensive cardiac evaluation before they begin?

When a young person is preparing to push his or her cardiovascular system to an extreme level for years, perhaps it is worth knowing whether there is a hidden congenital or inherited heart condition that could make that training unusually dangerous.

Many serious athletes begin intensive training when they are still minors, which makes this not only a medical question but also a question for parents, coaches, doctors, and sports organizations.

Is the current level of cardiac screening enough? Or should we do more to look for the silent heart conditions that a routine physical may miss?

Finally, Isabelle Sava's death reminds us that sometimes we need to do more and ask more questions than what the standard screening provides.