In 2001, *Who Moved My Cheese?* Showed Chinese People the Way Into Business Civilization | Bestseller Series ③

In part this is a look back at the stories behind these legendary books. But the bigger question is this: why did we end up with the society we have today? What have we been through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?

A society gets the book market it deserves.

We picked a number of books that have had a major impact in China, tracked down the authors or editors involved at the time, and asked them to tell the story of each one.

In part this is a look back at the stories behind these legendary books. But the bigger question is this: why did we end up with the society we have today? What have we been through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?

This is the third book in the series.

Around 2000, a Chinese society racing through its own transformation found its spokesmen in two mice.

The mice came from a bestseller of the day, Who Moved My Cheese? In it, Spencer Johnson tells the story of two little people and two mice living in a maze. They hunt for cheese and enjoy it, and they have to keep adapting as the old cheese disappears. Johnson's point was that change matters, at work and in life.

Who Moved My Cheese? came out in the United States in September 1998. The business fable ran to just 32 pages, and it became a bestseller overnight: 20 million copies in two years, five years on The New York Times bestseller list. America in the 1990s was booming, its high-tech industry rising fast, internet companies being founded, growing and going public one after another — Netscape, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, Netflix and Google among them. "New economy" theory was in fashion at the same time: the claim that economic globalization and advances in information technology could hold inflation and unemployment down and keep the economy growing indefinitely.

Enormous change was hitting Americans. Who Moved My Cheese?, a slim book about change, became reading matter for a great many of them — though as a psychological self-help bestseller, meant to steady people's minds so they could face change better, with a motivational tint.

Three years later the book was published in China, and sales quickly topped 1 million copies; today they are past 10 million. But the backdrop to that success was quite different in China from what it had been in America.

If you know something about the state of Chinese society then, you might split Who Moved My Cheese? into two sides.

On one side, the reform of state-owned enterprises that began in the 1990s pushed huge numbers of workers out of their jobs. Who Moved My Cheese? became a book that state-owned enterprises bought in bulk for their employees.

"A company as big as Angang Steel — every employee got a copy, supposedly. There weren't enough legitimate copies to go around at the time, so they bought a lot of pirated ones too, because management wanted everyone to read the book and then discuss it together," Tang Xiaoming, who planned the Chinese edition, told QDaily. There was something ironic in it, too: "During the state-enterprise reform, huge numbers of employees were laid off. And then everyone handed this book to the employees, saying: you've lost your job, but you have to adapt to change, embrace change," Lu Jun, deputy editor-in-chief of CITIC Press Group, recalled to QDaily.

The phrase "who moved my cheese?" turned into a catchphrase as well, used again and again to describe how interests get redistributed after a reform. Scholars, officials and journalists were fond of playing with it, in headlines such as "After WTO Accession, Who Really Moved Whose Cheese?", "Wage Reform: Who Moved My Cheese?" and "'Daring to Move Your Own Cheese': Four Years of Judicial Reform." "Wherever there is reform there is change, and wherever there is change there are vested interests and a fresh redistribution of interests — that is the redistribution of the cheese, and that is what gets everyone's attention," Tang Xiaoming said.

On the other side, "whose cheese can I move?" was part of the backdrop of those years too.

China's entry into the WTO and the arrival of the internet were remaking tradition. Every industry was shifting. Companies that are household names today — NetEase (1997), Sohu (1998), Sina (1998), Tencent (1998), Shanda (1999), Alibaba (1999), Baidu (2000) — were all born in this stretch of years.

At the same time China's entrepreneurial class was rising, and private companies were taking a larger share of the big cheese that is the market economy. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of private enterprises grew from nearly 140,000 to 2.435 million, an average of 33% a year; their registered capital went from 22.1 billion yuan to 2.4756 trillion yuan, an average of 60% a year; and the people they employed went from 2.32 million to 34.09 million, a nearly 15-fold increase.

These changes and the Chinese mood of the moment were an almost perfect match. The publisher Tang Xiaoming decided to buy the rights. "In China and around the world, this trend of change — its scale, its frequency, its speed, its reach — cannot be stopped. China needs change, and we should embrace it," he told QDaily. Beijing Dushuren Culture and Art Company, which he had founded, had already planned and published another mega-bestseller, Rich Dad Poor Dad, which sold more than 2 million copies.

Getting it into print, though, did not go as smoothly as he had imagined. "We went round four or five publishing houses and none of them wanted it, because they thought Chinese readers were practical people and this book simply wasn't practical enough. It was too short — only about 40,000 characters. [Buying the rights] wasn't worth it," Tang Xiaoming said. And because it was "too thin," just a single story, the publishers didn't know "how to do it," "didn't even know how to price it," "didn't know whether anyone would buy it at all." They all turned it down.

In the end CITIC Press came to Tang Xiaoming and proposed publishing Who Moved My Cheese? together. CITIC Press was only eight years old then and carried little weight in publishing. Wang Bin had just taken over as its president. In Tang Xiaoming's eyes, Wang Bin "had the nerve for that kind of reform." Wang Bin had earlier built the Huazhang imprint at China Machine Press and led the import of foreign business books into China. The "Huazhang Series" he brought in during the late 1990s was China's first batch of facsimile computer-science titles, and Huazhang became the first company to import facsimile management books from overseas. Wang Bin also oversaw the import of 120 MBA textbooks. Peter Drucker's management series, Positioning and other business bestsellers later came out of Huazhang.

Who Moved My Cheese? also became CITIC's first true "business bestseller" — a category the book itself prompted people to name. CITIC went on to publish a long line of imported business bestsellers: Jack: Straight from the Gut, Built to Last, Good to Great, The Long Tail, Free, Zero to One, Currency Wars, Steve Jobs and many more. At different moments these books chimed with the mainstream mood of Chinese society, and they made CITIC one of the strongest publishers in the field. According to CITIC Press's share-transfer prospectus of October 2015, CITIC held 10.37% of the business-management book market, more than any other publisher. And of the top five business-management bestsellers on Amazon China in 2016, three were CITIC's: Zero to One (first), How Google Works (third) and The Hard Thing About Hard Things (fourth).

Who Moved My Cheese? came out in September. Tang Xiaoming had just learned that China would formally join the WTO two months later, which meant every industry in the country was in for enormous change, so he and his colleagues built several publicity hooks around exactly that. According to a report in China Reading Weekly on April 3, 2002, at the press conference they held they brought in a psychologist to speak to "soft" psychological problems (that is, the everyday worries of ordinary people); a director from the National Re-employment Guidance Center to speak to the changes coming after WTO accession; and HR managers from large corporate clients such as IBM and Lucent to speak to big enterprises. Each expert, from his own angle, relayed to the public through the media his reading of the book and of what it meant for China at that particular moment.

In December, China Central Television's program Dialogue and China Entrepreneur magazine jointly produced two special episodes about the book, "Chinese Entrepreneurs Face Change" (Parts I and II). The guests and the audience were all famous Chinese entrepreneurs of the day, and all had appeared on the cover of China Entrepreneur: Liu Chuanzhi of Lenovo, Wang Shi of Vanke, Li Shufu of Geely, Duan Yongji of Stone Group, Liu Chijin of Nokia, Zhang Zhengyu of Hi-Tech Wealth, Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu, Ai Xin of Santong, Zhang Shuxin of Lianhe Yuntong and Liu Erfei of Merrill Lynch, among others.

Across the two episodes these Chinese entrepreneurs argued heatedly about Who Moved My Cheese? To them the cheese in the book could mean the market, or it could mean life; either way China's private companies and the people who ran them all had to change. On the show Li Shufu, then known as the "car maniac," said his cheese was "China's potential automobile market." But "I don't think Mr. Li has got his cheese yet — what he has got is only the right to look for cheese," Liu Chuanzhi said on the program. Like Liu Chuanzhi, many entrepreneurs in the audience had no faith in Li Shufu's "car dream": he would have to "survive eighteen levels of hell first, and even that's not certain."

Li Shufu had spent eight years preparing to build cars in China. The industry stayed closed the whole time, so even after he had mastered the manufacturing technology he still had no right to produce. Only two or three days before China's WTO accession on November 10 did he finally get a production permit. Like him, nearly all the private entrepreneurs in the studio had entered the market economy only a few years earlier and had little experience running a company. For them the future held the possibility of violent change. Guo Wei, then president of Digital China, went as far as to say: "Chinese people have been poor for too long. China needs reform. What else can we do?"

"The world is changing, society is changing, humanity is changing, everything is changing. If you look at this new world with old thinking, with traditional ideas, then the world is one giant maze to begin with," Li Shufu said on the program.

At the end of the show, Liu Chuanzhi, Duan Yongji, Liu Chijin and Wang Shi each made a "prediction" about the futures of Li Shufu, Ai Xin, Zhang Zhengyu and Zhang Chaoyang, in that order. Sixteen years on, Li Shufu — the man who was supposed to "lose several layers of skin" — has not only built his own cars but bought Volvo and pushed into international markets. On the 2016 Hurun Rich List he and his son Li Xingxing ranked 50th, with a fortune of 30.5 billion yuan. Zhang Zhengyu, who had once ridden the Shangwutong handheld PDA to the top of his industry, faded long ago; hardly anyone remembers him.

"I think we should accept change, and accept that change is the normal state — the only thing that doesn't change is change itself. That's a cliché by now. But at the same time you need a kind of fear and trembling, a sense that the cheese on your desk will not always be yours," Zhang Chaoyang said in summing up on the show at the time.

In 2001 the internet bubble began to burst, starting with Nasdaq. At the top of the bubble Yahoo was worth nearly $38 billion, more than Boeing, though its total 1998 revenue came to $203 million and its profit to only $25 million. Amazon, which had gone public in 1997, saw its share price climb 2,300% by the end of 1998. On March 10, 2000, the Nasdaq Composite set an all-time high of 5,132. Then the collapse came fast: from over 5,000 points down to under 1,500, more than $5 trillion in market value gone, more than 500 internet companies in trouble or dead, more than 40,000 people out of work. The shock reached Chinese internet companies too, which laid people off and in some cases shut down.

So Who Moved My Cheese?, a business fable meant to teach traditional companies to embrace change, turned into an alarm bell for internet companies instead. According to a December 14, 2001 report in Beijing Youth Daily headlined "The Fashionable 'Cheese' Gets You Fired": a few days earlier, a systems-integration company near Hangtianqiao had given every employee a copy of the book. The next day some of them suddenly got layoff notices. The company's headcount fell from a peak of 1,100 to 700. "[Back then] employees were afraid that when they came in the next day they'd be handed a book called Who Moved My Cheese?," Tang Xiaoming recalled to QDaily.

After all this discussion and these fermenting incidents, Who Moved My Cheese? became a bestseller, and it drew a wave of copycats: Whose Cheese Can I Move?, No One Can Move My Cheese, Whose Cheese Did I Move, I Don't Want to Move Your Cheese, Enough Cheese, and more.

The year Who Moved My Cheese? came out in China produced another bestseller as well: Jack: Straight from the Gut. It passed 1 million copies in its first year and has since reached two or three million.

The advance for the Chinese rights to Jack: Straight from the Gut was $30,000, a very high price at the time. But Chinese readers didn't know General Electric, and knew even less about Jack Welch. Wang Bin's bet was that Chinese readers love heroes, and Welch had the makings of one: "Neutron Jack," flamboyant, the man behind the "number one or number two" strategy, who had taken General Electric to new heights over 20 years. "Among Chinese entrepreneurs, a model like this could really be set up as an example," Wang Bin said in a media interview.

The book was also warm and easy to follow, easy for anyone interested in business to identify with. "More importantly, in that era the whole society was hungry for wealth and success. In China the closest path to that goal was going into business. Welch had the classic meaning of an ordinary man succeeding. Jack: Straight from the Gut describes how a person grew from a child into a successful figure, and it fit the social psychology of a great mass of people going into business and starting companies," Wang Bin added.

Even so, "reading Jack: Straight from the Gut doesn't solve any practical problem for anyone. [It's just that] Chinese business circles were very lost at the time and badly needed something spiritual," Wang Bin said in a media interview. And so a man Chinese readers hardly knew, from a company they hardly understood, became a hero to Chinese entrepreneurs.

Two mice, some cheese and Jack Welch: together they gave China, nearly twenty years after reform and opening-up began, its first feel for the way into a business civilization.

From 2001 on, how did Chinese business bestsellers — and Chinese society — change?

The story of how business bestsellers changed in China stands fairly well on its own, so we have chosen to present it separately, as an oral account. The narrator is Lu Jun, now deputy editor-in-chief of CITIC Press Group. He has been in publishing for 15 years, 13 of them on business books. He interned at CITIC in 2002, then spent eight years at China Federation of Industry and Commerce Press, moved to Fenghuang Liandong as editor-in-chief, and returned to CITIC in 2013. The bestsellers he has helped put together include Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Currency Wars 2, Currency Wars 3, Zero to One, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and How Google Works.

As told by | Lu Jun

Business publishing became a category only with Who Moved My Cheese?

Before 2000, business books had no record of selling hot at all. Trace it back and the boom in Chinese business books starts in 2001, with Who Moved My Cheese? That's when business publishing became a category of its own. Before that, finance and economics books were specialist titles that basically never reached the general public.

Who Moved My Cheese? is a management fable. Honestly, when we published it we had no idea it would be such a hit, or how big it would get. But there was a larger backdrop: the reform of China's state-owned enterprises and the marketization of Chinese business were a huge wave of change. So this was a book about how to respond to change. We felt responding to change was what society was preoccupied with then, because the book happened to fit the tide of the era. During the state-enterprise reforms huge numbers of employees were laid off, and everyone handed employees this book, saying: you've lost your job, but you have to adapt to change, embrace change.

Responding to change is still something all of us have to face today. Moving from an industrial society to an information society, we meet this kind of fast-moving change every day.

The gap between America and China wasn't that big — the essence of the story in both places was how to respond to change. It's just that the change American society faced then was different from China's situation. America was facing the rise of a post-industrial, internet society. China's internet had only just started and hadn't made any real noise yet; China was still in the middle of putting its companies and their management on a formal footing. Before that there had hardly been any private enterprises. The rise of private enterprise also happened around 2000.

The wave of large-scale industrialization, reform and opening-up, and social mobility in China

From 2001, after China joined the WTO, Western management thinking and the outstanding representatives of corporate leadership were imported — the ideas of Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and other management gurus, along with the books of Jack Welch, Andy Grove, Lee Iacocca and Lou Gerstner. All of it was a product of that era.

Jack: Straight from the Gut was the first time we turned a Western executive's memoir into a mega-bestseller in China. Iacocca: An Autobiography had been imported earlier, but there had never been a wave of consumption for that kind of book.

In the early 2000s Jack Welch was facing retirement; he was the last great management guru of the industrial age. In other words, Welch then was roughly what Google's Eric Schmidt or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is today. He was the world's number one CEO, climbing from the bottom rung as a salesman to the top of the food chain of industrial society, running the largest industrial group in the world.

After reform and opening-up China was industrializing on an enormous scale, and Jack Welch [had a huge influence] on the China of that time. Right up to today: in 2016 we published one of his books, The Real-Life MBA. He was 81 by then. The book came out in China and still sold several hundred thousand copies. In between he also wrote Winning and Winning: The Answers. Those four books have probably sold more than 5 million copies in China between them, and they gave enormous insight to the companies, entrepreneurs and managers of this round of China's industrial society and internet economy. He used his own experience, combined with academic ideas, to explain the common sense of running a company and the essence of business to managers and entrepreneurs around the world. He is really the entrepreneur who brought China's entry into business civilization to something like a mass audience. There had been all sorts of entrepreneurs before him, but none had entered the public eye like this.

What Jack Welch stood for was, on one hand, the wave of large-scale industrialization and reform and opening-up in Chinese society. On the other, it was people rising from the bottom, which was the great social trend of the time. Movement between social strata was a huge mainstream force back then. Society was changing so fast that the small-time hustler you saw on the street today might be somebody two or three days later. That was a feature of the period: the upward surge of grassroots people was an extremely powerful social force. And Jack Welch was too legendary a figure — a man who worked his way from front-line salesman to CEO of the world's largest industrial company, right to the top of the food chain. In spirit, in the knowledge and awareness he carried, he was formidable on every count. He essentially shaped several generations of Chinese entrepreneurs. He was an idol to many of them.

We were really speaking to two groups. One was entrepreneurs and corporate managers, for whom these books were a reference. The other was people with big ambitions and a wish to rise — what were then called the quasi-middle class and the middle class, who wanted to change their fate through effort. There was a motivational quality to it: spiritual support for people who had dreams and a lowly position.

Andy Grove was a very volatile entrepreneur, and those books of his — Only the Paranoid Survive, Swimming Across, High Output Management — are still a long way behind Jack Welch's. All of Grove's books put together didn't reach a million copies. Jack Welch stood for the 20th century, and GE could stand for the greatest, most outstanding company of the 20th century. Its scale then was larger than IBM and Intel combined; it was a super-giant.

Intel was one of the few companies, from the 1970s through the 1990s, that got through the discontinuity of corporate development — going from mainframes to microprocessors, essentially dodging several near-death crises. The decision-maker who got it out of those crises and into microprocessors was Andy Grove. So I think he is a pivotal figure. But clearly, as the boss of an IT company, a newer kind of enterprise, he still ranked below the industrial titans.

Still, Andy Grove's High Output Management gives a very good description of the standards and elements of the Western corporate-manager system as it developed over 100 or even 200 years. Andy Grove was a great entrepreneur too. He died last year.

The larger backdrop is that we looked at outstanding Western entrepreneurs, famous entrepreneurs, and felt it was our job to bring their books in. China needed to learn how the West ran companies of every kind, and later we did the same with Eastern business figures — Kazuo Inamori, for example — and brought in their management thinking too.

Jack Welch, Iacocca, Gerstner, Thomas Watson, Thomas Watson Jr., Andy Grove — they all came from the front line of business. Drucker counts as academic: a business-school background, a more scholarly synthesis of theory, though of course he had good practical experience as well. Drucker basically represents the best summary of industrial-age management thinking, and to this day he is the management guru most revered in mainstream Chinese business circles. Liu Chuanzhi and Zhang Ruimin in China both hold Drucker in very high regard. Basically no entrepreneur opposes Drucker — there's nothing about him to oppose.

Drucker's line of thinking isn't necessarily the same as that of many newer management gurus, Jim Collins for instance, but they arrive at the same place by different roads. Academic titles came out around the same time as Jack Welch's, such as Built to Last and Good to Great. That kind of case-based academic synthesis was also hugely popular in China. Both Built to Last and Good to Great passed a million copies, very large numbers.

The academic school does summarizing, abstracting writing; entrepreneurs do first-person writing. One boils ten people's experience down to an essence: I looked at 100 companies, and out of those 100 I've drawn three or five lessons. The other says, this is how I did it, this is how I think a good company should be run. That's the entrepreneur's way of writing.

As the settings where you apply it change, some management knowledge goes out of date. The academic material lasts a little longer. But the entrepreneur's material has more life in it — it is new knowledge, not philosophical reflection. Someone like Drucker, who rises to the level of philosophy and management thinking, transcends time and place. Books by figures with less name recognition — Gerstner's, or Andy Grove's — might sell only a few tens of thousands a year. Even Jack: Straight from the Gut might sell only 70,000 or 80,000 a year now, under 100,000. But Drucker's books are still selling; they have never faded, and they move 100,000 to 200,000 copies a year, year after year.

Business books started with kids' stories and entrepreneurs' stories, went on to management gurus, then to the details of management, and finally to innovation and the internet

America and China are essentially on a time lag in their stage of development. In the early 2000s, for instance, there was a book called Execution that was enormously popular. Back then you didn't need new ideas or new creativity; you just followed the company's management rules and executed. Being able to execute was enough. That's why Execution sold so well then.

At the same time, though, Ram Charan wrote another book called Transformation《转型》. Transformation was published by CITIC; Execution was published by Huazhang at China Machine Press. Clearly Transformation, which came out in January 2005, was no great success in China, because China lacked the setting and the language for transformation. China was still in the world of No Excuses, Who Moved My Cheese? and A Message to Garcia. The context then was execution; transformation and innovation were not yet what society cared about.

Look at the first wave: those kids' stories. China had a particularly odd one, which we also published, called Three Kingdoms, Boiled《水煮三国》 — it retold the tricks and the logic of management through stories from the Three Kingdoms. Everyone knew those stories already, so the moment you read it you could see the management thinking hidden inside. It works on the same logic as Who Moved My Cheese?: use metaphor and story to convey business wisdom and management wisdom.

In fact a great many entrepreneur memoirs and company histories tell things through story too. It's just that Who Moved My Cheese? and Three Kingdoms, Boiled are fables, not true stories, while entrepreneur memoirs like Iacocca's are all true stories. The third kind of writing is the macro understanding of running a business — Drucker, as I said, and Jim Collins, Michael Porter's theory of competition and so on, all of it management thinking and corporate strategy. That was the first wave of mainstream publishing.

In the second wave, bestsellers about specific areas of management appeared. Running a company takes more than management wisdom in general; that wisdom breaks into categories — how to advertise, how to market, how to handle human resources, how to manage finances, this kind of specialized management knowledge. After 2005 these books gradually caught on.

From entry-level, kids'-level entrepreneur stories, to the management gurus, on to Jack Trout and Al Ries's Positioning, and then books on selling, markets, marketing and branding such as The Sales Bible and Sales Giants《销售巨人》. Along the way came the 4P framework and more concrete corporate practices, including the HR technique of the day, the KPI balanced scorecard. These became the popular books of the moment.

When this round of competition over management detail ran its course, that wave of business publishing ended. The next wave turned to innovation and to the new round of change brought by the internet and the mobile internet. Free and The Long Tail, by Wired editor Chris Anderson, both grew out of new internet business thinking. Both sold around a million copies. After that came a stream of new theories about the internet, such as The World Is Flat and Blue Ocean Strategy.

By then America's internet society was already rising. Academia hadn't distilled a universal, effective theory that worked everywhere, but out on the business front line Wired, a technology and business magazine, had editors who watched business closely. He drew out lessons and theoretical models that the people actually running companies had no time to work out. W. Chan Kim wrote Blue Ocean Strategy; Wired produced Free and The Long Tail — all of them started as a single magazine article. Someone published a piece in the magazine, and everyone felt it opened their eyes, that it had an enormous effect on people, so they thought: this is good, let's expand it, add cases, explain it further. Eventually it became a book.

In the second decade of the 21st century, innovation became a very important keyword in China. Between 2010 and 2017, books about innovation — Clayton Christensen's trilogy The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution and The Innovator's DNA, along with Zero to One, How Google Works, Creativity, Inc. and a whole series of books on innovation and starting companies — all made a huge splash in China. Even the Steve Jobs biography grew out of that innovation environment; it is not a work produced by an industrial-manufacturing environment. Those two decades are worlds apart. Christensen's "innovation trilogy" had been published earlier by another house, but innovation wasn't what society cared about then, the books didn't sell, and they gave up on them. We took them over in 2010 and redid them, and they gradually became bestsellers.

There was also new knowledge coming out of the shift from an industrial society to an information society. The social setting then was the rise and arrival of America's internet society, which rebuilt the way social resources are organized from scratch. Capital, labor, even the dissolving of organizational boundaries — completely unlike industrial society. Drucker's thinking collapsed under it. The way industrial society organized itself changed. People were no longer organized into factories and workshops to work; it wasn't the assembly line any more. Today's internet company is a honeycomb, a matrix, a networked, distributed structure — completely different from industrial society. The underlying structure changed enormously, but at the start nobody understood what was actually happening.

So everyone was trying all sorts of things — the first round of Google books, The Search, King of Search《搜索之王》 and so on. Google's rise happened between 2007 and 2010. To this day Google is one of the most outstanding representatives of the American internet industry. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, Netscape and the rest: none of them put out much management thinking. Even Jobs never put out management thinking; he only ever put out his own sense of how to make products. But how did he run the company? How Jobs managed Apple never got passed around. Everyone talked about how wonderful Apple's corporate culture was, but mostly people said Google had been the best employer for however many years running. What does "best employer" mean? It means Google was building a new kind of efficiency, a new efficiency system — new ways and elements of connection, capital and labor, combined to produce a new efficiency system. That is what Google gave society. So in Google's first round they didn't understand it themselves either. They just wrote down what they were doing: what Google's business model was, and they wrote it.

Then in 2015 we published Eric Schmidt's book How Google Works. It used the logic of internet society to redefine how social resources and companies should be organized after the transformation of industrial society. That was an enormous shift. So the publishing of this category of business books in that period, Schmidt's book included, never produced the neat frameworks the academic school produces. It just said: this is how Google runs, here is Google's experience. There wasn't really management thinking that "redefined the company." Which is to say, the way Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb or Uber are managed may all be different from Google's, each with its own differences.

Most readers of this wave of books were young founders and people working at internet companies. The "redefine" series was read at traditional companies too, of course, because they were facing the challenge of transformation as well. It caught old and new entrepreneurs and managers alike. Zero to One and The Hard Thing About Hard Things both sold extremely well — close to 2 million copies.

Only a book that sells a story has a chance of becoming a mega-bestseller

There was something else in the middle of all this: the financial crisis of 2008, which produced a crop of finance bestsellers. Finance got the attention of the Chinese public only because of the crisis. There was a book called Currency Wars, a bestseller born out of that backdrop.

Currency Wars predicted the financial crisis before it arrived. When the book first came out nobody paid attention. Then the crisis broke, people started saying the book had predicted it, and everyone went to read it. It is really an unofficial history of American finance, a description of the hidden logic behind the unofficial version of events. In serious financial circles it is treated as a novel. Plenty of people criticized it for having no grasp of the basics. But some felt it revealed unwritten rules, secret information about financial markets, a hidden underworld, this and that. This one book probably sold four or five million copies. The whole Currency Wars series has certainly passed 10 million.

The crisis had a huge effect worldwide. What ordinary Chinese people understand about finance, about the Federal Reserve, about the odds and ends of financial history — this kind of basic financial literacy — came mostly through popular books like this one. It is very story-driven. It essentially comes from an American documentary called The Money Masters. The ideas in The Money Masters overlap quite a bit with the content of the book.

Against the backdrop of the crisis, people felt, first, panic; second, curiosity; and third, the book was accessible. It told the story of finance instead of handing you a pile of mathematical formulas and building principles out of them. That isn't how it's written. It's storytelling: the Rothschild family did this and that, they are hidden billionaires, a low-profile family that in fact controls who knows how much of the world's wealth; and then it says the Federal Reserve is actually a private company, not a national reserve institution at all. It is a heap of gossip that forms some hidden connections, from which it infers why the crisis broke out — that someone engineered it. A pile of claims that sound plausible, that look very reasonable, that may not be true but also feel a bit like the truth. That's the method. Everyone who read it found it a thrill, because it felt like seeing through things that look murky to everyone else.

After Currency Wars, finance books took off. The Big Short; Flash Boys, which we published a couple of years ago; Liar's Poker; and The Partnership about Goldman Sachs, and so on — all storytelling. Those were the popular finance books of the day. Several hundred thousand copies each.

There have been plenty of bestselling biographies of Chinese entrepreneurs too. The first company biography CITIC published was The Lenovo Saga, in 2005. After it came Winning the Systems War《系统战必胜》, about TCL's Li Dongsheng. Then Wu Xiaobo's Thirty Years of Turbulence, an economics book. It passed a million copies as well.

These came from Chinese companies riding that earlier wave: they read those books and then produced thinking of their own. Wu Xiaobo's first bestseller was Great Failures. He was a Xinhua News Agency reporter and wrote up case after case of how companies had failed. Then he started researching China's private-enterprise reforms since opening-up, which became Thirty Years of Turbulence. That book wrote up the whole thirty years, told the stories of the entrepreneurs of the reform-and-opening-up era, and reviewed and organized the arc of corporate and economic development over those years. So it sold. At the thirtieth anniversary of reform and opening-up everyone thought it was wonderful: at last a book that sorted through all these entrepreneurs' stories, looked back at them and summed them up, in one place.

There's also a book that passed 1.5 million copies, You Can't Learn From Haidilao. It belongs, of course, to the change in the service industry in the second decade of the 21st century, the book that truly raised service to the level of respecting people. That was a landmark for China. The core idea of You Can't Learn From Haidilao is to treat people as people: employees or customers, treat them like your own family and friends and look after them properly. The stories in the book add up to that. It reflects the wider change in management culture as well — in the past you put people in a workshop and told them to work hard for you every day, to put in so much overtime. This case went into the Harvard case collection; it's a genuinely successful management case.

Look at the logic these bestsellers have shared from 2001 until now and there are two things. First, every one of them disclosed a large amount of asymmetric information. Second, every one of them created a wholly new interface for expression. The interface was the innovation.

Who Moved My Cheese? tells a story about mice; Three Kingdoms, Boiled talks about management through the Three Kingdoms; Currency Wars talks about finance through unofficial history; You Can't Learn From Haidilao talks about management through small Haidilao stories. All of them tell a story well. Whatever you're selling, you're selling a story. Only a book that sells a story has a chance of becoming a mega-bestseller. It's the same everywhere in the world. Everyone likes to listen to narrative. Nobody likes to listen to logic and argument. That's because narrative has a friendly interface. Interface innovation just means the interface is easier to use. A bestseller has to have a very friendly interface. A very few books have no friendliness at all and still sell — A Brief History of Time, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, One Hundred Years of Solitude, books like that, which are hard going; but they are famous, and when something is famous people follow the crowd. A small number of unfriendly books can become bestsellers, but the great majority of bestsellers need a friendly, innovative interface. New ways of speaking, new registers — these are important traits of a bestseller.

Books planned for this series:

The Ugly Chinaman (《丑陋的中国人》, 1986)

China Can Say No (《中国可以说不》, 1996)

Rich Dad Poor Dad (2000)

Who Moved My Cheese? (2001)

Jack: Straight from the Gut (《杰克·韦尔奇自传》, 2001)

Unhappy China (《中国不高兴》, 2009)

Wild Fire (《野火集》, 1988)

The Birth of Tragedy (《悲剧的诞生》, 1986)

Tolerance (《宽容》, 1985)

The Path of Beauty (《美的历程》, 1981), and others

Cover image: a still from the film Ratatouille, source: Douban