27 December 2024, Fri |
6:46 AM
27 December 2024, Fri |
6:46 AM
To help accelerate digital transition, a sense of crisis should be encouraged and heightened, Huawei‘s Rotating Chairman Guo Ping has told a gathering of management professionals at the 13th Global Peter Drucker Forum.
Employees that were “on a mission” and strategic planning that was linked with the company’s aims, according to Guo Ping, were crucial in creating the climate for an effective transition.
He projected that in the future, all businesses would “become digital.” Still, he worried that some businesses in the early phases lacked defined strategic goals and were “simply following the pack.”
Guo Ping told participants at the annual Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna on Wednesday that while there was “no true alternative” to change, businesses needed to answer one important issue before embarking on digital transformation:
“By going digital, how can they improve their organizational competitiveness and achieve their strategic goals?”
High-quality planning, according to Guo Ping, is the starting step for successful digitalization. IT Strategy & Planning kicked off a twenty-year revolution of Huawei’s product development in R&D and sustainable supply chains.
“Looking back, we feel quite lucky, interlocking the goal of digitalization with the company’s overall strategic goals was certainly the right move. As a result, our organizational capabilities greatly improved, and these transformation programs made us a world-class company”.
Guo Ping stated that altering employees’ mindsets was “the most difficult obstacle” but also the most important factor in effective transformation, with urgency providing “a feeling of mission” and change momentum.
“The sense of a crisis is important. Make it visible to intensify (it) to make employees truly understand the need for a change,” he advised, adding that the current situation had “been the perfect opportunity to create a climate for change” at the company.
He said Huawei had ensured employees had understood the need for change, fostered a culture of eagerness for transformation, and ensured affected workers had felt protected.
According to Guo Ping, Huawei’s own culture of the invention begins with a tolerance for failure, with researchers encouraged to take a diverse, trial-and-error approach.
Citing the multiple 5G technologies Huawei had developed before one given technology was selected to be part of the industry standard, he recalled the words of the company founder Ren Zhengfei：“You take a path to find it only leads to a dead end. You share it with others so that they don’t repeat it and try another path: that’s also a success”.
Guo Ping highlighted the importance of transformation management and that at Huawei “the one thing that never changes is change”.
“To advance with times, we review our transformation planning every year, to ensure it aligns with our business strategy. I believe continued transformation management will enable companies to improve their capabilities in the digital era constantly,” he said. “I hope all companies will boldly embrace change, and after all, there’s no real alternative.”
Every year in the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Peter Drucker Forum honors the management master. The annual event, now in its 13th year, brings together modern management experts from around the world. The human imperative of navigating uncertainty in the digital age was the topic of this year’s conference.
