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.
