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We believe that a great deal of Huawei’s success is attributable to two key things
that it does very well: create a unique powerful business definition and manage its
culture effectively.

Huawei’s “Business Definition”
Management Systems has coined the term “business foundation” to describe three
key concepts: “business definition,” “strategic mission,” and “core strategy”.
Although this concept will be familiar to our clients, others can review them in our
book, Growing Pains: Building Sustainably Successful Organizations, Wiley, 2016.
Huawei has brilliantly strategically positioned itself via its business concept in a
unique way vis a vis its competitors, such as IBM, Cisco, and others. It describes
itself as being in the “ICT” business, where ICT stands for information
communications technology. No other competitor has positioned itself in this way,
which has given Huawei a strategic advantage in focus and specialization.
The tool for creating a business definition is strategic planning. So clearly strategic
planning is part of Huawei culture and tool kit to create competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, strategic planning is not always a core part of a company’s culture,
and that is a deficiency.

Huawei’s Corporate Culture and Culture Management
As described in our previous article on Huawei’s culture: “What is it about Huawei’s
culture that give it is competitive advantage and has facilitated its growth and
competitive success? In the prior article, I also discussed in depth the core value of
Huawei. That discussion is beyond the scope of the current article, but interested
readers can view it here.

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