WEP – First democracy, then a dictator – Zong, Wahaha

A great speech this morning by Zong Qinghou, Chairman of the successful private company Wahaha in Hangzhou on his leadership style with Chinese characteristics. While Zong had been dreaming away when other panelists spoke but flared up when he got the microphone. He described himself as an entrepreneur who had look at the way Mao Zedong worked, and learned from that.
“You have to catch first opportunities,” Zong talk the audience at the World Economic Forum at Beijing. “But you have to be realistic, you should not blindly invest into projects. You should see it as jogging, you take small steps, but in a high speed.”
While he looks careful at other models and philosophies, Zong warns against copying them mechanically as a receipt for a disaster.
In running his business he describes himself as a dictator, but an enlightened one: “you need to unite the people behind you otherwise you cannot have success”. Zong spends much times, on average hundred days per year, on talking to people and listening to their opinion.
He learned from the way Mao Zedong did his business. Zong: “You should look very carefully to what people are telling you, but as soon as you have made a decision, you have to put your foot down… People should be afraid of you, but they should not hate you. You should show them you really care, then they will follow you.”
What makes Chinese companies strong is that they have gone through a fast transformation in the past twenty years, the Wahaha chairman adds. “In the developed world it took companies a few hundred years to achieve what we got in twenty years.”