Most large companies fight complexity by adding structure. Haier, under founder Zhang Ruimin, did the opposite: it dissolved structure into markets. A Harvard Business School teaching case by Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Nancy Hua Dai (2018) documents the model, called Rendanheyi, in which Haier built business platforms across five sectors and let microenterprises be incubated on top of them, with platform owners explicitly not acting as supervisors of the microenterprises. Zhang's stated design goal was to tear down the internal walls of the firm to reach what he called "zero distance" between employees and users, shortening the time it takes to respond to what a customer actually wants.
The mechanism is worth stating plainly because it is easy to romanticize. A microenterprise is a small unit with its own profit and loss, free to contract with other units inside Haier and, in some versions, with outsiders. Both employees and people from outside the company could set up microenterprises on Haier's platforms. Pay follows the users a unit wins and keeps, not a manager's rating. The layer that in a normal firm would tell these units what to do has been redefined as a platform that they use, not a chain of command they report into.
An entrepreneur, not an employee
The interesting claim inside Rendanheyi is anthropological before it is organizational. It assumes that a person given real ownership of outcomes behaves differently from a person given instructions, and that a giant can be rebuilt out of thousands of such people without collapsing into chaos. That is a bet Ricardo Semler made decades earlier and at smaller scale. As Ricardo Semler has told it, Semco let employees who wanted to leave take the equipment with them, become suppliers, and sell back to Semco and to Semco's competitors. Roughly half the company eventually went this route. He described it as building a bridge one plank at a time, with the company holding the far end. Rendanheyi is that satellite logic industrialized: instead of letting a few people spin out, Haier tried to turn the whole firm into a platform for spinning out, while keeping everyone under one roof.
The difference in scale matters. Semco's experiment ran in the hundreds and low thousands of people. Haier attempted the same move across a workforce and ecosystem orders of magnitude larger. If self-management has an upper size limit, Rendanheyi is where you would look for it.
Verified, and unfinished
Here the honest reader has to slow down. Rendanheyi is real, documented at Harvard, and still promoted by Haier a decade on. But the case itself frames the transformation as unproven and without precedent. At the time of writing, Zhang had set a hard internal deadline for microenterprises to reach a tipping point of loyalty from their resource providers, and the case openly acknowledged that no precedent existed for a transformation like this. The widely repeated figures for how many microenterprises exist are quoted loosely across secondary sources and are best treated as reported rather than audited. The safe statement is qualitative: Haier reorganized a very large manufacturer into a large number of small, market-facing units, and it has sustained the model long enough to keep teaching it abroad.
What Rendanheyi demonstrably shows is narrower and more useful than the hype. It shows that a manufacturer, not a boutique consultancy or a nursing collective, can push profit-and-loss responsibility deep into the organization and organize work around users rather than around reporting lines. It shows that "platform, not pyramid" is a design a giant can attempt on purpose. It does not show, and does not claim to show, that this outperforms a well-run conventional structure on every metric, or that it would survive a leadership less committed than Zhang's.
The lesson for anyone tempted to copy it is the same lesson that recurs across the global map of self-management. The visible artifact, microenterprises with their own P&Ls, is downstream of an invisible commitment: leaders willing to give up the right to give orders, and to be measured by whether customers stay rather than by whether the boxes are tidy. Haier is the proof that the commitment can be made at enormous scale. Whether it can be made without a Zhang is the question the next decade will answer.
Sources
- Kanter, R. M. & Dai, N. H. (2018). Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant (HBS Case 318-104). Documents the Rendanheyi microenterprise model, five business platforms, "zero distance" to users, and its unproven status at time of writing. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54098
- PR Newswire (2025). Haier Founder Zhang Ruimin Leads "Zero Distance Excellence Journey" in Italy and San Marino. Confirms Rendanheyi (introduced 2005) is still actively promoted a decade on, built on self-driven individuals, self-organized teams, and a platform-plus-microenterprise structure aimed at "zero distance" to users. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/haier-founder-zhang-ruimin-leads-zero-distance-excellence-journey-in-italy-and-san-marino-advancing-organizational-innovation-and-human-centric-transformation-302523105.html