Within Huawei’s organizational philosophy, advanced equipment and high-quality resources positioned in the rear are designed to provide rapid, effective support once front-line targets and opportunities are identified, rather than allowing those who control resources to dominate decision-making or hoard forces for their own interests. This approach is encapsulated in Ren Zhengfei’s principle of “letting those who can hear the gunfire make decisions,” which places authority in the hands of those closest to the action and emphasizes delegation as the core of effective command.
As the most distinctive feature of Huawei’s personnel and management system, this principle has significantly enhanced operational efficiency and accelerated the company’s rise toward world-class status. Ren Zhengfei’s thinking was inspired in part by the U.S. military’s call-for-fire and Close Air Support(CAS) kill-chain logic used in the Afghanistan War, where real-time information from the front lines enables swift coordination and decisive action.
The Origin of “Hearing the Gunfire” in Huawei’s Management Philosophy
The phrase commonly rendered as “hearing the gunfire” within Huawei emerged from practical challenges in frontline operations rather than abstract management theory. As Huawei expanded globally and pursued large-scale contracts, its frontline marketing teams often faced manpower or capability constraints during complex project delivery. In response, they would request expert support and resources from second-line departments. This process was vividly described inside the company as “the frontline calling for artillery fire,” a metaphor that captured the urgency and realism of market competition.
Over time, this internal expression evolved from a tactical description into a broader management concept. The idea that “the front line calls for artillery fire” gradually transformed into the more strategic principle of “letting those who can hear the gunfire make the decisions.” This phrase was formally articulated by Huawei’s founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei, who elevated it from operational jargon into a guiding philosophy for organizational design and delegation of authority.
Ren Zhengfei first publicly articulated this idea in 2007 during a speech at Huawei’s UK representative office. He explained that to truly serve customers, Huawei had deliberately moved its “command post” to a place where it could “hear the gunfire.” This meant delegating authority over planning, budgeting, accounting, and sales decisions directly to the front lines. In his formulation, customers determine whether a battle should be fought, while frontline teams decide how it should be fought.
The concept was further clarified and institutionalized in January 2009, when Ren delivered a keynote speech titled “Let Those Who Hear the Gunfire Make Decisions” at Huawei’s Sales and Service System Striving Awards Ceremony. Against the backdrop of ongoing organizational reform, he addressed two core questions: who is entitled to call for “artillery fire,” and what constitutes “artillery fire” within Huawei. From this point onward, the phrase began to circulate widely across the organization as a shared managerial doctrine.
Within Huawei’s internal language, “firepower” came to denote the company’s deployable resources—personnel, expert support, funding, logistics, equipment, and other operational assets. “Frontline firepower,” by contrast, referred to real-time intelligence from the market, including customer needs, competitive dynamics, and local conditions. Those deemed able to “hear the gunfire” were the teams in closest contact with customers—sales staff, pre-sales engineers, and after-sales technical personnel—whose proximity to the market positioned them best to make timely and informed decisions.
Understanding “Hearing the Gunfire”: Authority, Proximity, and Execution in Huawei
To understand what Huawei means by “hearing the gunfire,” it is useful to begin with a concrete operational story rather than an abstract definition. In one real case, a level-13 junior employee—effectively an entry-level staff member—called a level-21 senior cadre at headquarters in the middle of the night to request project resources. Despite the seven-level gap in seniority and the absence of any personal relationship, the senior cadre answered the call and provided support. This incident vividly illustrates what Huawei internally calls “calling for artillery fire.”
The significance of this case lies in Huawei’s grading system. Level 13 is the starting point for most new graduates after one year of employment, while level 21 typically requires more than fifteen years of service and exceptional contributions. Under conventional corporate hierarchies, such a junior employee would have neither the confidence nor the authority to directly mobilize someone so senior. At Huawei, however, the ability to do so is not personal power but organizationally granted authority.
This authority is exercised primarily through Huawei’s distinctive communication culture, centered on conference calls. One of the most recognizable internal phrases at Huawei is “Welcome to join the conference,” reflecting the company’s global operations and its reliance on real-time, cross-functional coordination. Meetings often begin with only a few participants but expand rapidly as additional departments are connected on the spot to resolve emerging resource needs. Decisions about cooperation and resource allocation are frequently made during the call itself, not deferred upward through layers of approval.
At the conclusion of such meetings, even a junior frontline employee may summarize decisions, circulate meeting minutes, and set execution timelines. At Huawei, there is an unwritten but widely respected rule: meeting minutes carry binding force, and emails function as formal orders. The authority behind these actions does not come from rank, but from the frontline position of the individual who is closest to the customer and the problem at hand. In this sense, it is the organization—not the individual—that empowers the frontline.
Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder, has explicitly articulated the logic behind this system. He has stated that senior leaders cannot accurately determine how many resources the front line truly needs, because they are too far removed from customers. Only those who are closest to customers can accurately judge urgency and priority. Therefore, Huawei chooses to trust frontline teams first, allowing them to call for resources when needed, and only later conducts post-action reviews to assess efficiency and correct waste.
This philosophy also explains Huawei’s terminology for its internal structure. Second-line departments are referred to as “office personnel” rather than “headquarters staff,” emphasizing their service role. Ren Zhengfei has remarked that Huawei “has no mines at home”—all value is created in the market by customers. Consequently, anyone not facing customers directly exists to support those who are, and should not act as a distant authority issuing commands from above.
The idea of “hearing the gunfire” is also shaped by Ren Zhengfei’s cross-disciplinary learning from the U.S. military, particularly special forces operations in Afghanistan. In traditional warfare, frontline commanders lacked authority to deploy firepower directly and had to wait for approval from higher headquarters, resulting in slow responses. To overcome this, the U.S. military developed the “call for fire” or Close Air Support (CAS) kill chain, enabling authorized frontline personnel to identify targets and request firepower rapidly without multiple layers of approval.
Although often simplified in civilian explanations, this system relied on tightly coordinated roles and strict authorization to ensure precision and avoid civilian casualties. Ren Zhengfei drew from this model the core principle rather than the full technical structure: modern competition, like modern warfare, favors small, empowered units with high autonomy and rapid access to resources. He described this shift as a transition from large-scale mechanized warfare to “the war of squad leaders.”
Huawei operationalized this insight through its “Iron Triangle” model, first implemented in overseas markets such as North Africa. Each frontline unit consists of an account manager, a solutions expert, and a delivery expert, forming a project-centered team capable of acting within predefined authority without seeking repeated approval from representative offices. The purpose is to break down functional silos and focus resources on identifying opportunities and converting them into results.
Ultimately, “hearing the gunfire” at Huawei does not simply mean being present at the front line; it means possessing the informational advantage that comes from direct customer contact and being entrusted with real decision-making authority. By ensuring that resources flow toward those closest to the market—and by requiring the back end to serve rather than command—the company seeks to deploy its limited firepower precisely, quickly, and effectively, maximizing overall organizational impact rather than preserving hierarchy.
Making “the Sound of Gunfire” Actionable: Turning Principle into Organizational Reality
The principle of “letting those who hear the gunfire make decisions” is intuitively compelling, yet its effectiveness depends entirely on whether an organization can translate it into concrete systems and capabilities. Without deliberate organizational design, the slogan risks becoming symbolic rather than operational. In practice, ensuring that “the sound of gunfire” is truly heard requires coordinated construction across several interrelated dimensions.
First, an organization must ensure that the gunfire can actually be heard. This means deliberately expanding and strengthening frontline teams so that market signals, customer needs, and competitive intelligence are captured directly at the source. Decision-making should be informed by real-time feedback from customers and markets, rather than relying primarily on internal assumptions, reports, or abstract strategic reasoning detached from reality.
Second, it is not enough to hear the gunfire; the organization must cultivate people who can accurately interpret it. These individuals—often described at Huawei as “company commanders”—must combine execution capability with judgment. They need not only courage and resilience in high-pressure situations, but also the ability to develop teams, mobilize cross-functional resources, communicate effectively with customers, and exercise sharp business judgment. In essence, they must translate raw frontline signals into sound operational decisions.
Third, those who understand the gunfire must be granted the authority to act on it. Empowerment cannot remain rhetorical; it must be institutionalized through clearly defined decision rights. This includes thoughtful design of authorization scopes, limits, and escalation mechanisms so that authority is neither excessively centralized nor indiscriminately delegated. The goal is calibrated empowerment—granting sufficient autonomy for speed and initiative while maintaining overall coherence and accountability.
Finally, the organization must be capable of delivering “artillery fire” at any moment. This requires a responsive back-end system with strong execution discipline and coordination mechanisms, ensuring that resources can be mobilized quickly once authority is exercised. Only when support functions can respond promptly and reliably does frontline empowerment translate into tangible outcomes.
Taken together, these dimensions illustrate that hearing the gunfire is not a matter of attitude alone, but of system design. It requires frontline proximity, capable leaders, real authority, and a responsive support structure. When these elements are aligned, decision-making authority and organizational effectiveness reinforce one another, allowing the organization to respond swiftly and decisively in competitive environments.
Why “Hearing the Gunfire” Is Not a Universal Management Formula
The principle of “letting those who hear the gunfire make decisions” does not imply that all businesses or individuals must operate permanently at the front line, nor that frontline autonomy should replace leadership responsibility. As Jack Ma once observed, if most decisions are made solely by those closest to the action, organizational order can quickly deteriorate. A company still requires commanders: leaders who are willing to assume responsibility, integrate information from multiple levels, and make final judgments. Pure bottom-up management is as ineffective as rigid top-down control.
The core insight, therefore, lies in balance rather than imitation. Huawei’s practice does not advocate abolishing leadership or transferring all decision-making downward. Instead, it emphasizes empowering frontline teams within clearly defined boundaries, while leaders retain accountability for direction, coordination, and risk. The real lesson is not simply learning how to “call for gunfire,” but developing the ability to listen systematically to frontline voices and accurately understand customer needs.
Ultimately, whether such a model is appropriate depends on an organization’s industry, scale, and capabilities. To build an efficient system, enterprises must critically examine their existing structures, improve operational efficiency, and design mechanisms that enable timely, accurate, and effective decision-making. When adapted thoughtfully rather than copied mechanically, such systems can gradually reshape talent management and provide durable support for long-term development and strategic goals.
The Strategic Implications of “Letting Those Who Hear the Gunfire Make Decisions” at Huawei
Huawei’s practice of “letting those who hear the gunfire make decisions” is not a rhetorical management slogan, but a foundational institutional innovation embedded in its organizational design, process architecture, and long-term strategy. Rather than functioning as a simple empowerment policy, it operates as a systemic mechanism that has shaped Huawei’s evolution into a global leader in information and communication technology. Its implications extend across efficiency, resilience, talent development, strategic transformation, and corporate culture.
At a fundamental level, this mechanism addresses the classic problems of large organizations—often described as “big company disease.” As firms grow, layers multiply, information weakens as it moves upward, decisions slow, and resources are misallocated. Huawei counters this by shortening decision chains and relocating key authorities—such as planning, budgeting, pricing discretion, and delivery coordination—to frontline “iron triangle” teams. As a result, customer opportunities rather than headquarters hierarchy drive the flow of resources. In complex markets such as Africa and the Middle East, Huawei’s ability to respond 24 to 72 hours faster than competitors like Ericsson and Nokia has often proven more decisive than pure technological advantage.
Beyond efficiency, the mechanism has enabled a distinctive form of organizational resilience based on distributed operations combined with centralized empowerment. Authority is granted to the front line, but within a disciplined closed loop of authorization, execution, review, and iteration. This structure allowed Huawei’s overseas operations to remain stable and adaptive under intense external pressure after 2019, supporting rapid supplier substitution, delivery-plan adjustments, and local ecosystem reconstruction. Resilience, in this sense, is not reactive improvisation but a product of institutional design.
The mechanism has also driven a deep transformation of Huawei’s talent structure and incentive system. Frontline leaders are expected to function as “company commanders,” possessing technical judgment, business negotiation skills, resource-integration capability, and the willingness to bear risk. Frontline experience has become a critical criterion for leadership selection, reinforcing the implicit rule that “those who have never fought cannot become generals.” Incentives are increasingly tied to customer satisfaction and cash collection rather than hierarchical position or back-office metrics, ensuring that rewards follow value creation.
Strategically, this system has supported Huawei’s transition from a cost-driven equipment supplier to a scenario-driven solution provider. As Huawei expanded into enterprise networks, cloud computing, and intelligent vehicles, success depended on deep contextual understanding and rapid customization. Frontline teams, by directly “hearing the gunfire,” identify real customer pain points, while back-end units quickly abstract recurring needs into scalable product capabilities. This dynamic has enabled Huawei to enter vertical industries such as energy, ports, mining, and automotive manufacturing with remarkable speed, building industry-specific know-how in a short time.
In the context of technological decoupling and supply-chain disruption, the mechanism has provided a form of institutional immunity. Frontline teams deliver immediate feedback on the operational impact of sanctions, while the internal system enables rapid mobilization of alternative technologies and localized solutions. This redundancy-by-design allows Huawei to maintain strategic continuity even when external supply chains fracture, preserving an efficient internal response loop under extreme uncertainty.
Finally, the mechanism has profoundly shaped Huawei’s corporate culture by turning “customer-centricity” into an operational instinct rather than a slogan. Performance evaluations, internal coordination, and accountability systems are all oriented toward frontline effectiveness and customer value creation. By institutionalizing the idea that all value originates with customers, Huawei sustains a sense of urgency and humility even during periods of success, mitigating the complacency that often afflicts large enterprises. In this sense, “hearing the gunfire” is not merely about decision rights—it is about embedding customer reality at the core of organizational behavior.
Decentralized Command in a Divided World: The Ironies of Huawei’s “Gunfire” System amid the U.S.–China Tech War
Huawei’s principle of “letting those who hear the gunfire make decisions” has taken on heightened significance in the context of the U.S.–China technology conflict. Far from being a managerial slogan, it represents a deeply institutionalized system whose implications are structural, historical, and philosophical. Ironically, under conditions of external pressure and strategic confrontation, this system has revealed contradictions that challenge conventional assumptions about culture, control, leadership, and power in modern corporations.
The first irony is ideological. A Chinese company operating within a society often characterized as hierarchical and collectivist has implemented a form of operational decentralization more radical than that found in many Western firms. At Huawei, authority flows from information proximity rather than rank: junior frontline employees can mobilize senior cadres, and frontline truth routinely overrides headquarters status. By contrast, many Western corporations that openly champion empowerment remain constrained by legal risk aversion, matrix paralysis, and executive gatekeeping. The paradox lies in the fact that Huawei does not merely speak the language of empowerment—it operationalizes it with unusual rigor.
A second irony is organizational. As Huawei strengthened its headquarters through massive investments in systems such as IPD, IFS, ISC, digital platforms, and global resource pools, the outcome was not tighter centralized control. Instead, headquarters gradually transformed into a service-oriented organ designed to respond rapidly to frontline demands. The stronger the back end became, the more power it was required to relinquish. In effect, Huawei built one of the most formidable corporate headquarters in order to ensure that it could obey the front line more efficiently during moments of competition.
Closely related is the irony of control. By relinquishing ex ante control and granting frontline autonomy, Huawei achieves tighter control over outcomes. Faster feedback loops, reduced information distortion, and more accurate market signals allow the organization to correct errors through post-action reviews rather than pre-emptive restraint. Control is exercised after execution, not before it. This inversion challenges the traditional belief that tighter supervision produces better results; instead, Huawei demonstrates that trust-first systems can generate stronger discipline when accountability is enforced ex post.
There is also a risk-related irony. Huawei deliberately tolerates a degree of resource waste—what it metaphorically calls “wasting ammunition”—in order to avoid missing strategic opportunities. Many firms, fearing inefficiency, delay decisions until certainty is achieved, only to lose critical timing advantages. Huawei accepts limited inefficiency as the cost of speed, learning, and adaptation. In an environment shaped by technological blockades and rapid shifts, strategic time proves far more scarce than physical resources.
Culturally, Huawei reverses conventional status hierarchies. Back-office and support functions are explicitly framed as service providers to the front line, while prestige is systematically stripped from roles distant from customers. The farther one is from value creation, the less symbolic authority one is allowed to retain. This cultural inversion reinforces the system’s logic: dignity and status follow customer proximity rather than organizational rank.
At the leadership level, the system’s deepest irony is embodied by Ren Zhengfei himself. By repeatedly stating that he cannot “hear the gunfire” and does not know how much “ammunition” the front line needs, he publicly denies personal omniscience. This self-denial prevents power from recentralizing around the founder and legitimizes decentralized authority across the organization. His strongest act of leadership lies not in commanding decisions, but in institutionalizing his own irrelevance in daily operations.
Finally, there is an ultimate irony embedded in the system’s apparent egalitarianism. While decision rights are broadly pushed forward, only a small number of individuals—those capable of bearing intense pressure, accountability, and risk—can survive and thrive within it. Extreme decentralization does not produce equality; it produces elite concentration. What appears as empowerment is, in reality, a ruthless redistribution of responsibility. Freedom is offered to all, but only the strong can use it. In the crucible of the U.S.–China tech war, Huawei’s “gunfire” system reveals itself not as idealism, but as a disciplined, high-stakes institutional response to existential competition.
Summary & Implications
The grand geopolitical irony is that while Huawei is sanctioned and technologically constrained by the United States, its internal operating logic is deeply shaped by American military thought. Even as access to U.S. chips, software, and markets is restricted, Huawei’s management “nervous system” reflects principles drawn from the U.S. way of war: the call-for-fire and CAS kill-chain logic, mission-command practices adapted through the U.S. military, and a structure that combines decentralized authorization with centralized accountability. In attempting to contain Huawei materially, the United States confronts an opponent that has already internalized a form of organizational power far more difficult to block.
This paradox underscores a deeper reality of the U.S.–China technology confrontation. Sanctions can interrupt supply chains and slow technological exchange, but they cannot easily prevent the diffusion of ideas about how to organize authority, speed, and decision-making under uncertainty. In this sense, Huawei did not merely import components from the United States; it absorbed and institutionalized an American model of effectiveness. The blockade constrains materials, but the ideas endure—and it is on those ideas that Huawei continues to operate and adapt.