Huawei’s campus in Shenzhen, Guangdong, houses over 30,000 of its employees. The company will be one of the defining multinationals of the future. What is driving this? One of the most interesting business cultures to have emerged in the digital era, and the creation of Ren Zhengfei – who deserves a place in the global digital pantheon, which is as yet unfairly denied him in the West. He has a very clear sense of objective: amidst the deluge of data: “Google will provide the water, and we will provide the pipelines”. He is driven as much by a sense of history and philosophy as by the future. (He has, for instance, encouraged Huawei’s top 20 managers to study the rise and fall of the great nations from the sixteenth century, admires the British Glorious Revolution of 1688 and quotes the Duke of Wellington). Perhaps this is what gives him a uniquely Eastern-Western perspective of the “Age of And”. Huawei culture officially lauds “greyness”. The Chinese concept is “hui” – which represents those shades of grey which lie between black and white. It implies the ability to be flexible, to compromise, to “control the pace”, without losing the sense of direction. This does not imply softness: the wolf is the animal metaphor