“Europeans want to sell us knives and forks — but we cut the food while cooking.”
Walter Wang, General Manager of Leister China, summed up one of my core sabbatical experiences with this single sentence. We in the West often spend years developing cutlery for markets that eat with chopsticks.
I traveled to China with a seemingly simple question: Are Chinese companies actually faster and more innovative than us – and if so, why? After nearly two months, countless company visits across Shanghai, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Wuhan, and discussions with founders, managers and engineers, I sat back in Switzerland after my return, wanting to make sense of what I had experienced.
To avoid falling into pure “confirmation bias romance,” I deliberately benchmarked my impressions against the reality of studies and expert opinions – above all the work of Pascal Coppens, whose books have heavily shaped my thinking and with whom I had the privilege of discussing my hypotheses (by the way, I highly recommend him as a keynote speaker).
My key insight today is: Speed is not a national character trait. Speed is a system property.
In China, we are no longer dealing with a nation of “copycats.” Leading clusters such as Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou translate complex ideas into market-ready scale at breakneck speed. This doesn’t happen through magic, but through targeted mechanisms that radically shorten the path between a customer problem and real learning.
The Secrets of Fast Systems
Here are seven principles that make the Chinese system so fast – and that we need to critically question.
1. The Market is the Test Lab, Not the Final Exam
Walter Wang’s image of knives and forks describes exactly what Pascal Coppens calls the “Outside-In” approach. A product is not perfected internally down to the last detail (our beloved Swiss over-engineering) and then presented to the market in a grand premiere. It is thrown into the real world raw.
An unfinished first step is not viewed there as an embarrassing quality flaw or a loss of face, but as the only reliable instrument for gathering real feedback. The relevant leadership question in Chinese tech companies is not: “When is the product perfect?” It is: “How fast can we generate customer feedback and gain market share?”
2. Redundancy (Sometimes) Beats Efficiency
When tech giant Tencent developed “WeChat,” they had three teams in three different cities compete against each other. From our classic business administration perspective, that is a nightmare of inefficiency. We Swiss pool resources, avoid duplicate effort, and seek consensus.
While that saves costs, we lose valuable time and often collectively run in the wrong direction. Under high uncertainty, parallel work is rational: multiple options, rapid testing, radical termination of losers, and full scaling of the winner. (A colleague developed a prototype of a complex software product in 3 teams in 3 different countries in parallel with extremely successful results and astonishingly low overall cost this way)
3. Innovation Happens in Ecosystems, Not Ivory Towers
China analyst Dan Wang aptly calls it “Process Knowledge.” An idea is worthless if a company doesn’t know how to scale it reliably and cost-effectively. China’s dense ecosystems are massive accelerators: when software development, hardware suppliers, and customers merge spatially and organizationally, friction drops. A problem doesn’t lead to weeks of ticket escalation across three time zones; it is resolved through direct, informal networks on the ground.
4. Clear Direction from Above, Radical Improvisation from Below
One of my most fascinating observations was the combination of authoritarian goals and extremely decentralized implementation. Political economist Yuen Yuen Ang calls this “directed improvisation.”
Good Chinese leaders define the “what,” the “why,” and the red lines with razor-sharp precision. The team decides entirely freely on the “how.” In Europe, we are often paralyzed by the compulsion to have even the smallest detailed decisions approved by management layers. True speed requires autonomy and absolute local accountability for results. This means progress is continuously measured, and deviations are addressed with rigorous consistency.
5. Engineers at the Helm
In almost all successful companies, I noticed that product leads and C-level executives also have deep engineering and technical understanding. Technical trade-offs don’t drown in the translation layers of countless project managers, because decisions are made by people who deeply understand the core technology.
6. Micro-Steps and Giant Leaps
Leading companies in China as well as in the United States - as recent McKinsey studies impressively demonstrate - master a dual approach to product development. On the one hand, they relentlessly push rapid iteration and continuous, small market-driven adjustments. Simultaneously, they invest in parallel foundational R&D to force a fundamental technological leap in performance every one to two years.
7. State and Competition as a Dual Engine
We tend to reduce Chinese success to state subsidies. The truth is more uncomfortable: while the state builds massive infrastructure and sets long-term industrial goals, a brutal struggle for survival rages in the market below. Ideas are copied immediately; prices drop rapidly. If you aren’t fast, you die. Speed there is not an agile management trend; it is pure self-preservation.
The Price of Speed (and Why We Shouldn’t Copy Everything)
I returned from China full of enthusiasm (apart from the Great Firewall, which makes digital work a pain). But anyone who admires the results must also name the side effects:
Wear and Tear Instead of Focus: High personal commitment is palpable, but the 996 culture (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week) is not a sustainable model. Even in China, courts and studies now recognize its toxic and productivity-inhibiting consequences. Our lesson must be: shorten overhead and pathways, not lengthen workdays.
Waste Through Scaling: A fast system makes good bets huge – but it also burns vast resources on missteps, overcapacities, and bad investments when everyone blindly follows the same political signals.
Tinkering is Dangerous: Where mistakes are irreversible – in cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, or medtech and all kinds of safety concerns – our established European quality assurance saves us. “Tinkering” is not a solution.
Learnings for My Company – and for Swiss CEOs
I don’t want to blindly copy China. I want to understand which mechanisms can deliberately break open our deeply rooted consensus and perfection culture at Cudos and at our clients. From this, I propose eight principles:
Measure Wait Times, Not Work Hours: We meticulously track project effort. But we need to measure how many days an idea waits for a decision, or how long it takes from a customer problem to a prototype. That is where our real bottleneck lies.
Fix the “What,” Free the “How,” and Measure Progress: We need to set ambitious goals at a high level and make progress visible, instead of micromanaging. Then we have to act on it if necessary!
Allow Parallel Bets: When tackling genuinely tough strategic problems, it pays to let two small teams compete for a short time to build solution ideas.
Tech Expertise at the Decision Table: Experienced engineers and developers belong in decision-making roles, not just as advisors on the sidelines.
Customer Projects as Test Labs: At Cudos, we work on real-world problems every day. That is only an advantage if we structurally capture the organizational learning from it – ideally AI-supported and automated.
Don’t Delegate Customer Closeness to the Product Owner: The Product Owner concept is great as an orchestrator. It becomes toxic when they become the sole filter, and developers only know customers through Jira tickets and user stories. Developers must know the customers and products, ask questions, and feel the value and potential pain points directly on site. That is the only way they think along rather than just executing work. Now - in times of AI agents - this is mandatory more than ever!
A Single Source of Truth, Not 24/7 Availability: The lesson from fast-paced WeChat communication is not permanent reachability. It is the absolute necessity of a system with fast, unified, clear communication channels where open questions are never lost, and decisions and information are immediately searchable for everyone.
Don’t Optimize Away Swiss Strengths: Foundational R&D, quality, reliability, and “First Time Right” are not nostalgic roadblocks. They are our strongest weapons – if we don’t abuse them as an excuse for inertia, and if we are willing to take shortcuts and accept (correctable) risks when the situation demands it.
My Conclusion
China didn’t show me that we work too little in Switzerland. It brutally opened my eyes to how much energy we waste in our organizations between insight, decision, and implementation through poor goals, distance, frictional losses, inefficient communication, meetings, unnecessary documentation, and hierarchies.
The question for us is no longer: “Why are the Chinese faster?”
It is:
How do we radically shorten the path from a customer problem to a tangible solution – without sacrificing our Swiss values like quality, trust, and humanity on the altar of speed?
Sources and Further Reading
Pascal Coppens, China’s New Normal: How China Sets the Standard for Innovation and Business, Pelckmans, 2019.
Pascal Coppens, China’s Next Miracle: 100+ Tips to Stay in the Game as China Redefines the Innovation Model, Pelckmans, 2026.
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Global Innovation Index 2025: China Ranking as well as Innovation Cluster Ranking 2025. [online] https://www.wipo.int/edocs/gii-ranking/2025/cn.pdf and https://www.wipo.int/en/web/global-innovation-index/2025/innovation-clusters [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
Howard Yu, The Panic That Built WeChat’s $700 Billion Super-App, IMD, 2026. [online] https://www.imd.org/future-readiness-indicator/home/the-panic-that-built-wechat/ [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, Conversation with Dan Wang, What Makes Chinese Companies So Competitive?, July 28, 2026. [online] https://hbr.org/podcast/2026/07/what-makes-chinese-companies-so-competitive [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Cornell University Press, 2016. [online] https://www.yuenyuenang.org/how-china-escaped-the-poverty-trap [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
National Bureau of Statistics of China, Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2025 National Economic and Social Development, 2026. [online] https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202602/t20260228_1962661.html [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
McKinsey & Company, “Innovation Execution” – a new industrial paradigm emerges, 2025. [online] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/innovation-execution-a-new-industrial-paradigm-emerges [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
Panle Jia Barwick et al., Industrial Policies and Innovation: Evidence from the Global Automobile Industry, NBER Working Paper 33138, 2024, DOI 10.3386/w33138; Jingni Zhang and David Popp, Driving Innovation: The Policy Tools Powering Electric Vehicle Technological Inventions, NBER Working Paper 34763, 2026, DOI 10.3386/w34763. Note that NBER papers are working papers; they have not necessarily undergone a peer-review process.
Daniel Garcia-Macia, Siddharth Kothari, and Yifan Tao, Industrial Policy in China: Quantification and Impact on Misallocation, IMF Working Paper 2025/155, 2025. [online] https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/wp/2025/english/wpiea2025155-source-pdf.pdf [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
Sára Koczkás, Confucianism: Ancient ideology or driving force of the future? A scoping review on the effect of Confucian culture on innovation, Society and Economy 45(4), 2023, DOI 10.1556/204.2023.00021.
International Labour Organization, Short hours of work, long hours of work, and work hours mismatch in China’s labour market, 2025, DOI 10.54394/GEGW2758; Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China, typical labor law cases on forced overtime, 2021. [online] https://www.ilo.org/publications/short-hours-work-long-hours-work-and-work-hours-mismatch-chinas-labour and https://www.court.gov.cn/zixun/xiangqing/319151.html [accessed Aug 20, 2026]
Bertrand Theaud, Now it’s the West copying China (but they’ll never admit it). [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keH-LdEt53Y [accessed Aug 18, 2026]
Engineering News, World economy will see fast fish eating the slow fish, [online] https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/world-economy-will-see-fast-fish-eating-the-slow-fish-2015-10-27 [accessed Aug 19, 2026]
World Economic Forum, Crucial business lessons all company leaders can learn from Chinese management philosophy, [online] https://www.weforum.org/stories/business/chinese-management-philosophy-crucial-business-lessons/ [accessed Aug 19, 2026]
Ginkgo Search Partners, Chinese Leadership Style: A Guide for International Business Leaders, [online] https://www.ginkgosearch.com/chinese-leadership-style/ [accessed Aug 19, 2026]
Jordan Schneider et al., The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry, [online] https://www.chinatalk.media/p/the-rise-of-chinas-electric-vehicle [accessed Aug 19, 2026]
great summary and thank you for your insights. At the end of the day there is no magic but smart and hard work, a pragmatic approach and an amazing customer orientation.
High personal commitment is palpable, but the 996 culture (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week) is not a sustainable model! High friction and heat. The future is zero friction. Zero heat.