"No urination or defecation in the working area." That admonition was among 13 rules that managers felt necessary to post on the walls of a shambolic fridge factory in Oingdao in the early 1980s. After several senior managers failed to turn it around, in 1984 the municipal government of the Chinese city appointed a young employee, Zhang Ruimin, as the firm's boss. The gamble worked. Since then a lousy local firm has turned into the world's biggest appliance-maker. Most think of Chinese companies as peddlers of cheap, undifferentiated kit or mere copycats. In contrast, Haier is recognised globally for reliability and marketing know-how. Mr Zhang had spent time in quality-obsessed Germany, where he observed that even manhole covers were precisely made and numbered. It made a deep impression. Incensed that a fifth of the products his plant turned out were defective, in 1985 he handed out sledgehammers and joined employees in smashing 76 faulty fridges in public view. That won him national celebrity and was the start of the firm's transformation.
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