Haier Group

China's largest appliance manufacturer ($55.9B revenue) that killed the org chart and replaced it with 4,000 competing micro-enterprises.

Under CEO Zhang Ruimin's leadership since the 1980s, Haier progressively dismantled traditional hierarchy and rebuilt the company as a living organism. The RenDanHeYi model operates 4,000 autonomous micro-enterprises, each with P&L responsibility, strategic autonomy, resource access through internal markets, direct market exposure, and evolutionary selection. Units that serve customers survive. Units that don't dissolve. This is radical distributed organization at scale - no central planning, no traditional management, just market signals and entrepreneurial autonomy.

But Haier's real innovation is institutionalized death. The company intentionally dissolves 200-300 microenterprises annually - 5-7% of the portfolio - in a continuous regeneration process analogous to forest litter turnover. When units fail, their components (talent, technology, customer relationships) are systematically redistributed to thriving units. This is organizational decomposition as strategy: breaking down what doesn't work and redistributing resources to what does, continuously, without the drama of layoffs or restructuring announcements.

The result: Haier has sustained growth and innovation for 40+ years in a brutally competitive industry, proving that distributed structures can provide adaptability advantages that centralized command-and-control cannot match. The lesson: organizations don't have to choose between stability and adaptability. Stable platforms (IT, manufacturing, brand) can support radically unstable operating units that constantly form, fail, and reform based on market feedback.