Zhang Ruimin

Zhang Ruimin is one of the most influential business leaders and management innovators of the modern era, the founder of Haier Group and the architect of Rendanheyi, a radical management model that has reshaped how organizations around the world think about hierarchy, entrepreneurship, and the customer. Over nearly four decades, he transformed a bankrupt refrigerator factory into the world’s number-one home appliance brand, and along the way became a management philosopher whose ideas are studied far beyond China.

CEO keynote speaker Zhang Ruimin is best known for creating the Rendanheyi model, which dismantles the traditional corporate “empire” by breaking the company into thousands of self-managing microenterprises on an open platform. The aim is “zero distance” between employees and customers: by removing layers of middle management (he famously eliminated more than 10,000 such positions), Rendanheyi turns ordinary employees into entrepreneurs directly accountable to the users they serve. Once a devotee of Jack Welch and Six Sigma, Zhang went on to build a distinctly new philosophy that fuses classical Chinese thought with Western management science, an achievement recognized with the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award.

From Smashing Refrigerators to Reinventing Management

Zhang’s legend began in 1984, when he took charge of the failing Qingdao Refrigerator Factory. To instill a culture of quality, he had employees publicly smash 76 defective refrigerators with sledgehammers, each worth roughly two years’ wages, a shocking act that became a turning point in Chinese industrial history. Over the following decades he grew Haier into a global enterprise, sealed the $5.4 billion acquisition of GE Appliances in 2016, and in 1998 became the first Chinese business leader ever to lecture at Harvard. Ranked repeatedly among the Thinkers50 most influential management thinkers, he stepped down as chairman and CEO in 2021 to become Haier’s Chairman Emeritus, and now devotes himself to spreading Rendanheyi worldwide through the global Zero Distance Excellence movement, in which companies across Europe and beyond are adopting his model.

As a speaker, Zhang Ruimin offers audiences something exceedingly rare: the firsthand wisdom of a founder who not only built a global giant but invented a new way of running one. He speaks on the Rendanheyi model and self-management, dismantling bureaucracy to unleash entrepreneurship, leading in the age of the Internet of Things, and fusing Eastern and Western management philosophy. Audiences gain a profound, practical, and genuinely original perspective on the future of the organization, from a leader widely regarded as the godfather of modern Chinese management.