From his crew cut, clean shave and open-neck shirt, to his straightforward manner, you might still classify Kevin Nolan as the archetypal General Electric engineer.
That is exactly what GE Appliances’ chief executive was until 2016, when Haier of China bought the Kentucky-based white goods business from GE for $5.4bn in cash. The takeover set up what looked like an inevitable clash between a managerial model inherited from the US conglomerate and the radically decentralised vision of Haier. Nolan, then the GE unit’s chief technology officer, went to China to answer the question that baffled observers had often posed — and still pose — about its new owner: “Who is this company? What are they about?”
Zhang Ruimin, Haier’s founder, took the helm of a Qingdao municipal-owned fridge factory in 1984 and encouraged its transformation into a network of thousands of devolved “microenterprises”, based on a unique transformation model called Rendanheyi. Zhang became honorary chair last month, having created what the company describes as a “self-organising, self-driven and self-evolving ecosystem enterprise” with an annual turnover of Rmb300bn (£35bn). Each microenterprise takes the initiative in developing products and services with and for customers. They often compete with each other for capital, and buy in central services such as human resources.