About Business Sucess

Success – What really makes a business work? How do we get the likes of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google and their like all springing up and driving stellar performance on the Stock Exchange? Well, the answer isn’t really that hard to understand.

In 2012, the world’s largest supplier of domestic appliances, Haier, based in Qingdao, China was revolutionised by its CEO Zhang Ruimin who developed a system of management that he called

For the past 130 years, we have all followed a model devised by the father of business management Frederick Taylor. It became known as Taylorism and companies like Ford Motor Company and GE were key practitioners. Companies built whole departments around the nature and construct of departments such as design, marketing, sales, accounts etc etc.

People worked in silos created by Taylor’s departmental model and it worked very well if you wanted a Ford pop in black (it was all you could have at the time). Modernist thinkers played with the model and introduced us to concepts like mass customisation, customer derived brand variants and other wonderful subsets of management.

Zhang Ruimin realised that an organisation the size of Haier had stagnated and was unable to grow through anything other than marginal gains. An efficiency here, a trimming of the fat there. Staffing levels grew but the output was very sluggish. He had no influence over the performance of the business. It was grinding to a halt (well, almost).

So he thought long and hard about what to do and came up with a management system that breaks down Taylorism and replaces it with a system known as Quantum Management. QM is a system that creates entrepreneurial teams at every level in the organisation. The only way he could really get this to work was when he also made the decision to surrender all of his power at the top, cleared away all middle management and turned many of them into CEOs of their own self-organising microenterprise.

All decision making powers, hiring of staff, remuneration packages were devolved to the microenterprise. Zhang Ruimin provides just the vision, inspiration and resources to the team and establishes the organisation-wide culture of each group consistently across the whole organisation. The ‘energy’ for this revolution came from the employees. ALL employees are driven by purpose…they want to make the world a better place. This is the energy that powers a quantum management system.

Companies such as Roche India, GE Appliances and the USA Green Berets have adopted Quantum Management in all that they do. So why Quantum? Well, Isaak Newton was convinced that all atoms were made of matter, substance, mass. Quantum scientists discovered that there was a second element called energy. Businesses are made up of matter (the substance of what it is and what it produces) and energy (the will of employees to drive a business to success, the purpose) – Quantum.

If you’d like to read more about it you can do so here… QUANTUM MANAGEMENT

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash