A large company can become slow when small improvements need permission from several managerial layers. Autonomous microenterprise units try to move more decisions into small teams close to a customer or opportunity. Each unit has a defined business responsibility rather than merely completing tasks assigned by a central department.

At Haier, many small units operate alongside shared support structures. That second part matters: dividing a company into smaller units leaves the problem of how they obtain resources and coordinate with one another.

Autonomy requires an operating system

Imagine a manufacturer giving a small team responsibility for a specialized product line. The team might choose features, work with suppliers, and respond to users while drawing on shared manufacturing, finance, or technology services. The larger institution still defines constraints and supplies infrastructure the small unit could not build alone.

The meaningful questions are concrete: can the unit choose its partners, allocate its budget, recruit people, or change its offer? Who absorbs losses? Who decides whether the unit continues? Calling a team a microenterprise does not make it legally independent or give workers ownership.

Internal markets have politics

Contracts and performance measures between units can make costs visible, but they can also reward local success at the expense of the whole. A team may avoid useful work whose benefits appear elsewhere, or spend excessive effort negotiating internal charges.

Shared standards and coordination remain necessary, especially for safety, long-term investment, and services that cannot easily charge each beneficiary. The appeal is initiative at a small scale within a large resource base. Its difficulty is preserving that initiative while handling dependencies and responsibilities that refuse to fit neatly inside one unit's accounts.

Real cases