Li Ning's Decentralization and Centralization of Senior Executives' "Shift" Xu Hao's Departure

Li Ning store sports shoes new

After the wave of the departure of a wave of executives in the first half of 2011, the crisis of Li Ning Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Li Ning") has not ended. Recently, Xu Wei, the vice president and chief product officer of the company, Zhang Xiaoyan, director of the government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (hereinafter referred to as the “Public Affairs”) has also been confirmed to leave.

The outside world cannot predict that this is the end of the personnel turmoil in Li Ning's three-year adjustment period, or the beginning of a new aftershock.

Executives "shift"

At the end of June 2010, considering that the horizontal growth relying on store expansion was unsustainable under the background of labor costs and skyrocketing store rents, Li Ning took the initiative to launch brand rebranding and launch a brand new “Make the Change” brand. Slogan. However, a large number of squeezed old standard product inventories and failure to straighten out the integration of channel companies have allowed the company's orders to remain flat or even lower year-on-year. Li Ning’s three-year adjustment period kicked off.

More than half a year later, the poor performance led CIO (Chief Brand Officer) Fang Shiwei, COO (Chief Operating Officer) Guo Jianxin, and Lotto (Lotus) Business Unit General Manager Wu Xianyong to leave their core executives.

This is also considered to be the second personnel "earthquake" in the company's history after Li Ning's former general manager Chen Yihong left the company in 2005.

Although they are all poor performers, unlike Chen Yihong, the departure of this wave of executives is far from the “warmth” that Chen Yihong left when he left.

In 1991, Chen Yihong joined the second year after Li Ning was founded. In early 1996, Li Ning merged three companies from Beijing, Guangdong, and Yantai into the Li-Ning Sporting Goods Group Corporation. He was the chairman and general manager of the company, and Chen Yihong was the deputy general manager of the company. Because Li Ning, regardless of the specific business, played the role of the de facto CEO. , And in 1996 achieved sales of 650 million yuan.

The ambitious Chen Yihong, with aspirations, put forward the goal of “over 1 billion yuan in 1997”. However, due to a series of reasons such as the Asian financial crisis and macro-control, from 1997 to 2001, Li Ning's sales have not been able to exceed 1 billion yuan. Li Ning realized that 1 billion yuan may be Chen's "ceiling." Balancing again and again, he euphemistically asked Chen Yihong to find an "assistant."

Since then, in July 2005, Li Ning Company was listed on the market for a year. Chen Yihong and her wife, 93% of Shanghai Titan Corporation, made a bid of 44.814 million yuan to acquire 80% of the equity held by Li Ning, and formally went solo.

At Li Ning's reception party for Chen Yihong, both were drunk. Independent director Wang Yafei of Li Ning Company described it as "The two people were soaked in the wine by their chests, and they cried in tears."

Now, the number of executives who are worthy of Li Ning himself to serve with wine is becoming less and less. Fang Shiwei and Xu Wei belonged to the "airborne force" and were both "upgrade three" in Li Ning within a short period of two years. They were soared to vice presidents; Guo Jianxin, Wu Xianyong, and Zhang Xiaoyan all belonged to Li Ning's "Old Department," but apparently Zhang Zhiyong is not Li Ning.

As the chief executive of Li Ning Company, Zhang Zhiyong once proposed an opinion of “who is not annoyed by big business”, “has no trouble doing small things” and “poor soldiers” when interviewed by reporters.

"Inappropriate" is of course not a soft hand when the knife is used.

In the eyes of people in the industry, since June 2010, product design and development under Xu Wei's administration have at least matched the company’s goals in terms of cutting-edge apparel and fashion sense. Zhang Xiaoyan, as the assistant to the president, has long managed Li Ning’s government public relations and corporate affairs. Communication, due to poor corporate performance caused by frequent negative news, always need someone to take responsibility for this, especially in July there have been reports pointing to Zhang Zhiyong's "employee" loss.

"In addition to Zhang Zhiyong, the company's internal CXO (such as CEO, COO, CMO, etc.) level executives have been fully exchanged," said a Li Ning employee.

Previously, on May 24, 2011, Li Ning had issued an announcement regarding the departure of senior executives. “There is sufficient talent pool and appropriate management structure to meet the corresponding job requirements and the development needs of the company.” The fact is, in the original After COO Guo Jianxin left the company, Zhang Zhiyong had to personally serve as COO. Lu Ning, who has been with Baosheng International for about 3 years, was recently announced as the new COO.

Decentralization and centralization

On October 14, 2011, at the time of announcing the restructuring of the company's organizational structure, Li Ning’s announcement also announced Lu Ning’s appointment and Xu Hao’s departure.

According to the new distribution of functions, COO Lu Ning will “plan the three main business segments of Li Ning brand sales headquarters and sales regions, products and supply chain”. At the same time, general manager of shoe products and general manager of apparel/accessory products also “reported to the chief operating officer to coordinate product planning, design development and production management, reduce costs and increase efficiency”.

In this regard, a resigned executive used only the "white cloud dog" 4 words expressed emotion.

The fact that Li Ning's senior executives have changed over the past few years is truly stunned.

As mentioned above, within the Li Ning Company, Fang Shiwei and Xu Hao of the "Airborne Forces" are all "upgraded by three levels."

In 2007, Fang Shiwei joined Li Ning as a director of strategic marketing from Ogilvy and was promoted to CMO of the company in 2009. At the end of 2009, Fang was also appointed as the coordinator of Li Ning brand remodeling; and Xu Hao was also established because the company was established in 2009. Only after the CPO job was held responsible for the product category was the vice president and CPO.

In order to enrich the CMO's terms of reference, Zhang Zhiyong established a brand new functional department under the CMO's position - the Brand Initiative (BI). The establishment of BI aims to solve the problem of Li Ning's brand and product planning. It not only controls the brand's life cycle, but also integrates the company's brand strategy, sports marketing strategy and product strategy. In the words of Zhang Zhiyong, the BI department must be able to draw A complete brand map.