In the Shadow of the Dragon

Haier's CEO Zhou Yunjie explains how the company's innovative RenDanHeYi model empowers employees, drives global growth, and adapts to market changes.

China's self-reliance, innovation & resilience under 'Made in China 2025' continue to shape its global role amid geopolitical tensions & policy challenges.

Your gut instinct matters in a data-driven world. IMD’s Heather Cairns-Lee & Eugene Sadler-Smith explain how intuition enhances decision-making in uncertainty.

This paper presents a compact and intuitive framework that consolidates, simplifies, and extends results on the links between technology, trade, and labour market outcomes. It makes three main contributions. First, it presents closed-form solution...

The board of Nestlé S.A. announced that Anna Mohl would become the CEO of Nestlé Health Science (NHSc) — a global leader in nutritional science — on 1 January 2024. She was delighted to hear about her new position but knew there was little time to...

The China Resources Beer (CR Beer) case study is a compelling narrative of the world’s largest beer producer by volume under the leadership of CEO Hou Xiaohai. In 2016 CR Beer embarked on a pivotal transformation journey. This case study offers critical insights that particularly resonate with Chinese corporations navigating similar challenges in an era marking the end of China’s rapid economic growth. Faced with industry saturation, changing consumer behaviors, the rise of digital technology and the imperative shift from expansive to high-quality growth, CR Beer’s story mirrors the predicament in which many Chinese companies find themselves today. The case delves into CR Beer’s strategic overhaul, how it optimized its vast 60,000-employee structure, streamlined operations and embraced digital transformation to remain competitive. CR Beer’s transformation was characterized by tackling “three mountains” – operational inefficiency due to numerous small factories with high costs and low-capacity utilization, weak brand presence in the high-end beer market and an underutilized and mismatched workforce. The study also highlights the company’s innovative approach to rebranding for younger consumers, integrating consumer insights into product development and exploring new business models. It underscores the importance of internal cultural shifts to support these external changes and the role of leadership in guiding transformation. CR Beer’s journey from traditional efficiency to future-readiness offers valuable lessons in managing large-scale organizational change, strategic management and business innovation. It provides essential insights for understanding the complexities of transformation in a rapidly evolving industry, making it a crucial read for those interested in organizational change, particularly in the context of the Chinese market and its unique challenges and opportunities.

BARCELONA, JANUARY 2023. What started in 2016 as a humble entrepreneurial attempt to contribute to a more sustainable future had turned into a solid eyewear brand present in major Western markets. François van den Abeele was even more excited by the rapid development of the Sea2see Foundation, which he set up in Ghana. But success brought its own new questions and issues. From the start, he had relied on the superb craftmanship and dedication of an Italian frame manufacturer. Over time that relationship had turned into a mutual dependency: He was now one of its major clients but, reciprocally, had developed a key supplier risk. What if something happened to that relationship? Should he develop a broader set of suppliers and, if so, how could that be done without antagonizing a great working relationship? Recycling very much set the stage for the brand’s sustainability claims, but it also took massive amounts of time to manage. As other companies started to develop their own fishing net recycling supply chains, did it still make sense to invest so much time in the upstream phase or should he pour his energy into his beloved brand? Finally, maybe it was also time to revisit the growth/profitability dilemma and open up the capital to increase the speed of growth, all for the benefit of the environment as impact fed on scale.

Honda and Nissan's $58bn merger aims to compete with China's EV dominance, but risks include cultural clashes, overlapping markets, and uncertain innovation outcomes.

Within days of Donald Trump’s election win in November 2024, China’s president Xi Jinping was at a ceremony opening a deep-water port in Peru as part of a “diplomatic blitz” through Latin America. Xi’s presence was a symbol of China’s rising influ...

The note aims to equip leaders with the knowledge and tools necessary to negotiate alliances across and among organizations and institutions from differing sectors: business, government, non-profit, international and academic. It emphasizes the im...