Pioneers - Huawei Stories

Given to me by a Huawei executive during a trip to China, I had left this book lying around without really intending to read it. After having absent-mindedly opened it, I finally read it almost from beginning to end. Make no mistake, written by and for Huawei, the book is an unreserved eulogy of the company. Gathering testimonies from Huawei's first employees, the book is captivating for what these stories evoke: stories of employees dedicated to their company to the point of accepting to be poorly fed or housed in obscure representative offices located in the most unlikely places of the world. For therein lies the strength of the company: having a dedicated staff bordering on fanaticism, as well as an ability to "get by" with a difficult environment that is barely conceivable. These testimonials also reveal an important part of Huawei's strategy, which was to develop its technologies in a typically Chinese way - rudimentary, cheap, robust - and primarily aimed at emerging markets. Later, as the company gained confidence with more sophisticated solutions, some testimonies also mention how it entered more mature markets, systematically using alternative operators and not hesitating to dedicate significant resources to small customers, whose symbolic significance was potentially strong.