9/8/2026
I'm going to continue talking about the book I've been reading since September 3, The Way of Huawei Learning by Deng Bin.
In my previous articles, I wrote about how Huawei invested heavily in learning from Western companies such as IBM, studied the U.S. military, and used benchmarking against the best in the industry.
Another major source of Huawei's learning is its customers.
Why should a company learn from its customers? The author uses a joke to make the point.
Several philosophers are walking down a road when they see a hen about to cross from one side to the other. They begin debating why the hen would risk crossing a busy road.
One philosopher says, “It's hungry. It must be looking for food on the other side.”
Another says, “Its chicks are waiting for it on the other side.”
A third says, “Perhaps it's blind and simply doesn't see the cars.”
As they continue arguing, they bring in the theories of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to support their interpretations. They argue passionately but cannot convince one another.
Then a farmer passing by mutters, “If you want to know why the hen is crossing the road, ask the hen.”
The lesson is this:
If you want to know what customers really need, ask the customers.
Huawei believes that customers are the best teachers. The more demanding the customer, the more there is to learn. The higher the customer's standards, the more the organization is pushed to improve.
Japanese customers, for example, are known for demanding procurement and quality standards. Serving them forced Huawei to improve its quality management.
On one occasion, a Japanese customer returned a batch of Huawei products. Huawei was initially puzzled because the products had passed its own quality inspections.
The problem turned out to be something seemingly trivial: the labels were not placed consistently.
A human operator could easily read the labels, but the customer used automated scanning equipment. Because the labels were slightly misplaced, the machines could not read them, and the entire shipment was rejected.
Huawei's internal review led to an important realization: product quality isn't limited to whether the product itself works properly. It includes every detail of the process through which the product is delivered to the customer.
From then on, Huawei standardized the position of every label.
A similar lesson came from British Telecom (BT), which subjected Huawei to an extremely rigorous supplier-certification process involving hundreds of detailed criteria. The certification took three years and presented Huawei with enormous challenges.
Rather than complaining about the requirements, Huawei went through them one by one, identified its shortcomings, closed the gaps, and systematically developed the capabilities needed to serve a world-class telecommunications operator.
These examples illustrate an important aspect of Huawei's learning philosophy:
A demanding customer is not simply a customer to satisfy. A demanding customer is a teacher to learn from.
In that sense, the toughest customers can become some of the best teachers a company can have.
