"Extreme Entrepreneurship · Zhongnan Intelligent Makers Speak" — WeChat Official Account Serial, Week One

Book Reviews by Company Leaders — October 21

01 The Ledger Carries the Original Aspiration; Steady Strides Go Far — Reflections on Reading the Company's Growth Story

Zhu Libo's personal quote: "True value creation is always written beyond the ledger, yet in the end it returns to the ledger."

Many people read corporate histories for the founder's lone courage and the technical team's breakthroughs. But as CFO, what I read in Extreme Entrepreneurship 4: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent is a financial storyline hidden beneath the narrative—how technology was converted, step by step, into assets, and how innovation ultimately settled into cash flow. Over seventeen years, the book lays bare the most essential financial proposition of a "latecomer" enterprise: in a capital-heavy, long-cycle, fiercely competitive track, what keeps you alive, and what makes you grow.

First, technological premium is the hardest moat a company can have, and on the books it shows up as gross margin and orders. The book's first ten-million-yuan order in 2008 came from a recognition precision of 0.01 mm surpassing imported equipment; order value breaking RMB 100 million cumulatively in 2015 rested on the whole-line capability built from 9 invention patents and 11 utility-model patents; and the 2016 "Changsha No. 1," with fully independent intellectual property rights, meant the company had fundamentally shaken off dependence on imported core components. From a financial perspective, every technological breakthrough directly changed the cost structure and bargaining power: independent control brought structural cost reduction on the procurement side, security of supply, and the continuing cash-in of "innovation rent." Technology was no longer an R&D department's KPI, but the most value-adding asset on the balance sheet.

Second, in an industry like intelligent manufacturing—asset-heavy and long-cycle—the rhythm of financing decides survival. In 2019, revenue grew 60% year on year and R&D investment stood at 15% of revenue—a typical growth-stage profile, and one that meant an enormous thirst for capital. In 2020, the National Fund for Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading led an investment of over RMB 100 million, making the company the fund's first unlisted lead investment. Behind these numbers is capital's combined vote on the technology route, the governance structure, and the business model. The book writes that in financing, "money is a signal, and also a judgment." As a finance professional, I know well that behind the signal lie hard battles—rounds of document preparation, due diligence, and valuation bargaining—and every successful financing is a milestone on the company's road from "staying alive" to "living well."

Third, cash flow is the enterprise's lifeline, and the details in the book most easily overlooked are precisely the daily bread of the finance front line. Through fine operations—splitting large acceptance bills into smaller ones, Yunxin supply-chain financing, and clearing letter-of-guarantee deposits—the cashier saved more than RMB 1 million in financial costs a year; when funds were tightest, the supply-chain team recovered large overdue payments and defused a cash-flow crisis; the industrial park construction saved more than RMB 20 million through centralized procurement and optimized plans, with procurement saving over RMB 10 million for the year; in the Wuxi technical renovation project, a single proactive cost review saved hundreds of thousands of yuan. These figures lack the drama of technical breakthroughs, yet they genuinely constitute the company's "living water"—three-tier supplier classification, inventory alerts for key materials, and risk early-warning mechanisms: every one of them frontline experience in cash-flow management.

Fourth, moving from "selling equipment" to "selling solutions" is a business-model upgrade, and even more a reshaping of the financial structure. With the launch of the five-dimension intelligent manufacturing platform, revenue shifted from one-off equipment sales to continuous solution delivery and services; customer stickiness strengthened and cash-flow quality improved. With the landing of the intelligent decision-making system, production planning, cost control, and risk early warning shifted from experience-driven to data-driven—precisely a microcosm of finance's digital transformation from "post-event accounting" to "forward-looking insight."

Fifth, the financial footnote of institutional reform lies in governance and risk control. From a wholly owned subsidiary of a central SOE to a mixed-ownership enterprise, employee shareholding and the professional-manager system unleashed the drive of the people; the finance department consolidates the statements of four companies monthly and supports IPO-grade compliance, while special Party-discipline oversight fortifies the internal-control line. Only an organization that can "keep the accounts straight, hold the line, raise the money, and aim its investment right" is qualified to speak of surpassing and catch-up.

What moved me most is that the book proves finance work and industrial ideals never conflict: every yuan saved, every financing, every payment collected ultimately converges into the confidence with which this ship of intelligent manufacturing on the banks of the Xiang sails far. For every finance professional, it is a mirror—true value creation is always written beyond the ledger, yet in the end it returns to the ledger.

Last, a Few Heartfelt Words to Our Colleagues in Finance

Today the company stands at the wind mouth of AI, and the digital-intelligent transformation of finance is the general trend; the role of finance professionals is quietly changing, and traditional accounting models will be transformed beyond recognition. Only by going with the tide of the times—continuously learning new knowledge, raising professional competence, bringing AI into the work, and adapting quickly to new work scenarios—can finance professionals avoid being left behind by the times. AI can change many things, but what never changes is the professional integrity that finance people hold to. The value of finance lies not in how many surprises it creates, but in how many shocks it prevents. Each account, each statement, underpins the operating base; each receipt, each disbursement, guards the boundary of risk. All seemingly steady operation is certainty bought bit by bit through repeated checking and constant calibration. With the external environment fluctuating more sharply and internal requirements growing stricter, we must always put risk first and embed compliance in the details—staying clear-headed under pressure and holding the bottom line amid complexity. An unimpeded trickle becomes the river; daily diligence builds true confidence. Only with this restraint and rigor can we hold up the company's sense of security and order.

The road ahead is not smooth, but crossing mountains and rivers does not change our resolve to press forward; the mountains are high and the road long, but the scenery is boundless. Facing challenges, we choose to rise to them; facing uncertainty, we insist on answering with professionalism. What we guard is principle; what we carry is responsibility; what we steady is the whole. Looking ahead, finance must still advance steadily and go far—refining continuously on the existing foundation and releasing value within compliance. "The burden is heavy and the road long—spur the horse; the wind is fair and the tide level—hoist the sail." With clearer goals and steadier steps, we will expand space while holding the bottom line, providing the company's high-quality development with financial support that can stand the test of time.

02 The Far End of Entrepreneurial Idealism — Extreme Entrepreneurship

Hu Qiyuan's personal quote: "A prototype pieced together in the greenhouse is only a clay blank; only when this lump of iron has been thrown into the customer's oil-and-fire-steaming workshop, withstood ten thousand hammer blows and still stands rock-solid, has it truly taken its edge—and found its soul."

Reading Extreme Entrepreneurship: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent, what struck me most was the founding team's early assault on rail-transit automation equipment. Conditions were limited, yet the project's demands on recognition precision were high; the team revised the scheme and ran trials again and again before finally bringing the equipment up to the level the customer required. The book does not write R&D as an easy thing—which makes me think of my own work today.

Over these years working at Changtai Robot, I have come to feel more and more that developing a machine and truly making a good product are two different things. That the machine can move and the sample can be made only shows the scheme is basically feasible; at the customer's site, what matters is whether it can produce continuously, adapt to different processes, and keep quality stable. Especially in the embodied-intelligence winding robot project we are now pushing forward, these questions are very concrete every day.

1. The problems on site deserve more attention than the numbers in the reports

From October 12 to 17 this year, three winding machines at a certain core project site ran continuous production and changeover verification; over six days, a total of 16.5 product-equivalents were recorded. This figure includes the partial winding progress of work in process and does not mean that 16.5 finished units actually came off the line. In the same period, the daily reports also recorded a cumulative 28 problem occurrences, involving wire pressing, wire dropping, layer climbing, dimensional deviation, and false vision alarms.

If you look only at progress, you would think the machines can already take part in production; put the problem records side by side, and you know how much work still separates the product from stable operation. On October 15, all three machines ran changeover winding and each delivered one product, but that day wire-pressing, layer-climbing, and wire-dropping problems appeared in concentration. On October 16, quality inspection found wire-pressing problems in the previous day's products. This reminded me: a machine finishing one winding run does not mean the process is stable; product quality still needs follow-up inspection and continuous verification.

The oversized-dimension problem is especially typical. On the surface it looks like the dimensions were not controlled well; in fact it may be related to die deviation, laser ranging, bending parameters, wire-guide wheel deflection, and other factors. Adjusting a parameter on site may let the machine keep producing, but the next time the wire gauge or the die is changed, the problem may reappear. If the cause is not clearly found, every rectification becomes repeated labor.

In sorting through the production daily reports and problem ledgers, I mainly watch whether problems recur, whether interim measures have been verified, and whether it is clear who handles the next step. Mechanical, electrical, process, and software people may understand the same problem differently; quality management needs to organize the information clearly so that everyone discusses against the same record instead of judging from their own impressions. This process is not complicated, yet it directly affects rectification efficiency.

1. To use new technologies well, first solve the old problem

These days the industry talks constantly of embodied intelligence, physical AI, and digital twins—everything sounds cutting-edge. For Changtai, these technologies are of course worth studying, but we cannot stop at feature demos. Take winding vision inspection: that the system can recognize wire-winding anomalies is one capability; whether false alarms are few, whether missed-detection risk can be controlled, and whether site personnel are willing to use it are another layer of capability.

After false vision alarms occurred at the core project site, I paid more attention to whether the alarm images, equipment numbers, wire gauges, and on-site recheck results were retained. With these records, algorithm engineers can know which were normal conditions misjudged and which were genuine defects needing handling. Simply lowering the alarm threshold seems to reduce the prompts, but may let the problems that should be found slip through. Vision inspection must ultimately help production, not add another task to the site that requires repeated confirmation.

Digital twins are the same. Virtual-real synchronization and running-state display can raise the equipment's visualization, but what matters more is whether they can be used to troubleshoot anomalies, replay motions, and assist debugging. For a multi-mechanism, coordinated machine like a winding machine, the value of a technology lies not in how new its name is, but in whether it can reduce downtime, lower trial-and-error costs, and raise stability.

Another real problem is product cost and scope of applicability. Customers' wire gauges, capacities, and automation requirements are not identical, and the machine cannot keep adding mechanisms and configurations to satisfy every demand. The project team is currently doing focused wire-gauge screening, bending and wire-arrangement structure optimization, and standardized sample verification. In my view, this work looks less eye-catching than new concepts, yet it decides whether the machine can become a standard product and whether it can later be replicated and delivered at reasonable cost.

1. Next step: leave the rectification results inside the product

Combining the stories in the book with the actual project, I now have clearer thoughts about my work on the quality post. First, quality work must extend toward the front end of R&D. Before the equipment scheme is fixed, confirm with R&D and marketing the main wire gauges, winding precision, production takt, changeover requirements, continuous-running conditions, and acceptance methods. When a customer raises a new requirement, first assess the process and machine capability—verify promptly what can be verified, and state the boundaries clearly for what cannot yet be done, to avoid repeated changes later.

Second, problems must not stay in the daily reports. For anomalies that recur—wire pressing, wire dropping, dimensional deviation—beyond recording the phenomenon, they should be linked to machine number, wire gauge, working condition, cause analysis, rectification measures, and re-verification results. Solutions proven effective must be promptly fixed as drawing revisions, assembly standards, process parameters, or software versions. Otherwise, although the problem is solved on this machine, the next machine may still see it happen again.

Third, put cross-department collaboration onto concrete items. What problem the site needs solved, who leads it, who provides data, and when verification is completed must all be spelled out. Mechanical-structure changes must consider electrical and maintenance; vision-algorithm optimization needs real defect samples; procurement cost reduction must also consider quality risk. In the end, everyone should be accountable for the same result: whether the machine can produce stably as required and be delivered smoothly.

Having finished the book, my biggest feeling is not how hard entrepreneurship is, but that many inconspicuous details ultimately decide a company's product level. From the earliest technical breakthroughs to today's on-site verification of the winding robot, what truly needs to be persisted in has not changed much: find the problem, analyze the cause, verify the solution, then leave the experience behind. For me, doing these things solidly is the most practical answer to Extreme Entrepreneurship.

03 Breaking Through with Tenacity, Passing On the Changtai Fighting Spirit Through Solid Work

Zhu Chuiqiao's personal quote: "The ceiling is not our limit; our limit is the sky."

1. The spiritual undertone of Changtai people

Closing the book, that scene keeps turning in my mind. In the high summer of 2008, in a leaky workshop in Changsha, seven or eight people in raincoats, in the dark of night, took turns wiping down the precision equipment by the weak beam of phone flashlights, fearing that a trace of moisture might ruin the next day's demonstration. The book says that when the customer's technical lead later mentioned that night, it was one sentence: "Your spirit of sparing no cost is what finally won us over." From that rainy night on, this company called Changtai Robot—and the stubbornness behind it—was remembered by many.

Reading this, my heart clenched. Are not these seven or eight faint beams of light exactly the grit in the bones of us Changtai people? Things others judge undoable and unworkable, we calmly bite into and push forward, bit by bit—that tenacity has long been engraved in the undertone of Changtai people.

1. Feeling the predecessors' road of independent innovation

This book is written about exactly such a group of fellow travelers. After his doctorate, Dr. Yang Yang gave up the stable platform of a Beijing research institute and went south, plunging into the industrial-robot track then firmly held by foreign capital. Conditions in the early days were crude—there was not even a proper office. To get the ticket to bid, the team made door-to-door visits and polished the technical scheme over and over, and under the squeeze of industry giants like Siemens and ABB, forced out a sliver of opportunity. Later, although it borrowed strength through a joint venture with a German company, Mr. Yang stayed clear in his heart: the joint venture was only borrowing momentum, not something to lean on. Across seventeen years, starting from one leaky old workshop and holding to the road of independent innovation, the company grew step by step into a benchmark of the industry. That line from the book—"Tenacity is, in itself, a silent language"—has stayed with me since I read it.

It is different from many glossily packaged business biographies: it does not deliberately beautify, but writes out truthfully the embarrassment of the startup days, the frustration of projects hitting walls, and the hardship of gritting one's teeth and carrying on. It is precisely this truthfulness that moves me. Having read the whole book, I feel deeply: the roads our predecessors trod and the burdens they carried are the road we came by, our roots. We are rooted on the front line of manufacturing, in many inconspicuous technical links, settling down and straining forward in the chase.

1. Rooting on site to investigate the process

Reading this book was, for me, mostly looking in a mirror. When I first took over the new product in 2026, my mind was in fact blank. This kind of machine had no existing landing case either at home or abroad; no predecessor could tell me how to do it, and I could not even find one reference prototype. The only thing I could do was go to the customer's site and dig the whole production process out, bit by bit. I squatted three days and three nights in the customer's workshop and shot seventy or eighty videos—material flow, process linkage, forming operations, auxiliary-material matching, layered operation, process switching—watching detail by detail, recording segment by segment. The workshop staff were wary of me at first; I did not rush to ask about the process, but first chatted with them about life—about house prices in Changsha, children's schooling, pay and benefits. Only after all that small talk did they loosen up and talk in detail about practical on-site essentials and operational tricks. With the workshop director, I seized every chance to ask about material specifications, adaptation differences between specifications, changeover essentials, capacity, and cost structure. Only after squatting a full week did I slowly piece together the first-version scheme. In that period the drawings were changed again and again; mechanism-motion interference, workpiece forming, auxiliary-material positioning—a series of problems arose one after another, laid out one by one, and pressed down one by one. I knew clearly: once this machine was made, it would be the first of its kind in China, something that could open a new road for the company. For us mechanical people, many technical difficulties were never thought up in front of drawings—they were dug out beside the machine, in the oil and grime, in the question-and-answer with the frontline masters.

But the scheme did not go smoothly. We held two online meetings and one offline meeting with the customer, and the scheme failed to pass each time. Holding my breath, the last time, I went alone to the customer's site, hoping to talk face to face with their general manager. But he was too busy; I could not get an appointment for days. So I sat waiting on the fifth floor of the customer's office building—a dimly lit place; I vaguely remember it was a Sunday, past five in the afternoon, when a black figure passed before my eyes. I looked up—it was the customer's general manager. I called out instinctively; he turned back, surprised to see me: "Xiao Zhu, you're still here?" With that one sentence, we talked the scheme through on the spot. Later, he approved my scheme. In that moment I suddenly understood: very often, what the customer is waiting for is not a perfect scheme, but whether you have the resolve to see the thing through to the end.

1. Bravely take the first step

Looking back now, what I most want to say is this: whatever the outcome, only by bravely taking the first step can there be what follows. Just like that rainy night of 2008—without those few faint lights that night, there might have been no later Zhongnan Intelligent, and no today's Changtai. The hours I squatted on the fifth floor of the customer's office building, though far from the night they endured in the leaky workshop back then, are in essence the same thing—where others believe it impossible, step out first and plant the first step solidly. The book speaks of "beyond catch-up," of cultivating the second growth curve before the old business peaks. Landed on us, the elliptical winding machine is probably just such a new curve. In the dry-type transformer industry, elliptical coils are the mainstream; by making it, we are planting a new seed for the company. It is still only a prototype that has just landed, with countless hurdles ahead—but as long as the first step is taken, the road is underfoot. This road was never walked by one person; it is walked by everyone together, gritting their teeth to turn one "impossible" after another into "possible."

1. Passing on the Changtai fighting spirit

I often tell myself and my team one sentence: the ceiling is not our limit; our limit is the sky. The landing of the elliptical winding machine is only a beginning. Ahead there are problems harder than winding, and more passes like the rejected schemes. But I have made up my mind: follow the footsteps of the predecessors—work hard, hold on, never give up—walk this road together with the company, and pass the grit of the Changtai people down, generation after generation. I believe that as long as we keep this grit, starting from today's one prototype, we will step by step reach a bigger stage, letting the Changtai spirit take root and sprout in more products and more industries.

04 The Original Heart Unchanged, Products Ever New

Li Xuanhong's personal quote: "Let excellence become a habit."

Over the weekend I read Extreme Entrepreneurship 4: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent carefully; closing the book and looking back at the ten years I have walked together with the company, many thoughts arise. The book sums up "extreme entrepreneurship" as: "the ten thousand tribulations of scarce resources, and the ingenious creation that breaks through desperate situations." Entrepreneurs advance not merely by weighing pros and cons, but by the mission to take on hard problems, the passion to face desperate straits, and the holding to the ideal of the enterprise. This spirit exists not only at the start of the venture; it is just as present in today's product development and technical assaults.

I. Ten years of growing together with the company

In 2016, I joined Changtai Robot; the first project I took part in was an automotive welding-line project, starting from accompanying production on the customer's line. In the ten years since, I have gone through equipment commissioning, electrical design, technology R&D, and department management posts, and witnessed the different stages of Zhongnan Intelligent's road.

As an electrical engineer in the past, I often traveled to commission non-standard equipment. Non-standard equipment depends on experience: every project's process, site conditions, and customer requirements differ. Even if a first-of-its-kind unit is successfully delivered, it may not bring follow-up orders, and project experience is hard to replicate directly. This model trained the capacity for technical assault, but also brought problems: experience hard to reuse, long project cycles, and difficult wrap-ups.

In 2024 and 2025, I took part in the assault on the problems of multiple legacy projects, facing basically long-standing technical difficulties. In those two years, most business trips went like this: work at the company by day, catch the high-speed rail in the evening, arrive that night, go straight into the customer's site the next day, and arrange the return trip at night whenever possible.

A vision-recognition problem in a project in the first half of 2026 was one example. Faced with recognition rates that were hard to raise and cumbersome program maintenance, we kept testing and analyzing, seeking breakthroughs through round after round of brainstorming and testing, and finally—using a production-halt window—rewrote the program, lifting the recognition rate from 90% to 98%. This made me more certain: the value of technical assault lies in persistence, and even more in accumulation. Only by turning personal experience into team capability can one breakthrough become a reusable product achievement.

II. From non-standard assault toward standard products

The transformation toward standard products is something I had long hoped for but never truly realized. This year, as the company's standard-product development work advanced step by step, this idea began to move into practice. We need to extract the commonality from industry scenarios and customer cases, turning the experience accumulated in non-standard projects into product capability that can iterate continuously and be delivered repeatedly.

From the end of November 2025 to January 2026, I took part in a key stage of the winding robot product development. The company gathered backbone specialists of every discipline to attack together, with design, assembly, and testing advancing in parallel. When problems were found, the design was changed on the spot; when parts could not be machined through the normal process in time, everyone found ways to make them by hand. At the tensest moments, the project team often worked at the site until two in the morning—summarizing problems, reporting progress, and aligning information every day, then throwing themselves into the next round of testing with new schemes. This spirit of not avoiding problems, verifying fast, and breaking through collaboratively pushed the product forward step by step.

The first half of 2026 was the period of greatest pressure. The Engineering & Technology Department had to both push legacy projects to closure and carry product delivery and testing support. I served as project manager on several projects at once, personally took part in polishing-station commissioning, and had to coordinate personnel support for the winding machine at customer sites. When we were short-handed, my colleagues and I kept filling gaps across the projects.

Heavy as the tasks were, we were fortunate to have a group of like-minded colleagues charging side by side. The process had its sweat, and also the joy of technical breakthroughs and project closures. For technical people, having hard problems solved and machines running stably is the most down-to-earth sense of achievement. In early July this year, I was appointed product manager for cleaning-and-polishing. The project team had to restore and commission a cleaning-and-polishing station within one month, but much of the equipment and many parts had been dug out anew from long-idle corners. Facing limited conditions, everyone screened, assembled, modified, and tested together, turning a heap of dust-gathering steel parts into a platform that could carry subsequent product testing. When the machines turned again, I truly understood what it means to create conditions within limited resources and find a way out within difficulties—precisely the real embodiment of "the ingenious creation that breaks through desperate situations" in standard-product development.

From non-standard projects to standard products, what changes is the development model; what never changes is the responsibility, tenacity, and creativity in facing difficulties. We must not only build the machines, but—through continuous testing and technical iteration—settle each success into stable, reliable, repeatedly deliverable product capability.

III. Let excellence settle into product capability

From on-site production accompaniment to product management, the posts have changed over ten years and the technologies have changed, but the original heart of facing problems squarely, shouldering responsibility, and serving customers has not. For me, "let excellence become a habit" is not a moment's enthusiasm, but being perfunctory about no process, evading no problem, and holding strict requirements on results. Only when individuals persist in pursuing excellence can a team form an excellent style of work—and ultimately make excellent products.

Facing the future, we must also proactively engage the technological frontier and embrace the AI era. Technological innovation requires sustained investment, and it also needs constant verification and iteration against real needs. Only by converting new technologies into stable, reliable, easy-to-use product capability can we develop better products and create greater value for customers.

The extreme entrepreneurship recorded in the book is a history of growth—and also a spirit still continuing. For me, the best inheritance is to blend responsibility into every product-development battle, ground creativity in every iteration, and settle the pursuit of excellence into every machine.

05 Persevere Without Pause, and Dawn Will Come

Kou Jilei's personal quote: "Persistence is an invisible force that helps us overcome difficulties and surpass ourselves."

This week, using my free time after work, I finished reading Extreme Entrepreneurship: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent. The moment I closed the book, its words seemed to turn into images, letting me, like one who had lived it, walk once more through Zhongnan Intelligent's road from nothing to something. Reading the whole book, what moved me most was the persistence of the company's predecessors—not a slogan, but the plainest and most powerful survival philosophy, watered by twenty years of wind and rain.

I. From a wooden plaque to the perseverance of three hundred

The company's starting point was so plain it hardly looked like a company aspiring to intelligent manufacturing: an unremarkable small workshop in the Environmental Protection Science & Technology Park, a simple wooden plaque at the door, and inside a founding team of only five or six people. No grand facade, no ample funds, no mature market channels—not even decent office conditions. From just such a starting point, the team, led by Mr. Yang, with firm conviction—daring to fight, to shoulder, to challenge, to innovate—walked forward one solid step at a time.

It was precisely this undertone of "starting from zero and believing it can be done" that kept Zhongnan Intelligent from falling when it had nothing, and let it seize the opportunity when opportunity came. Within a few years, the enterprise gradually walked out of that small workshop, gained its own production and office campus, and grew the team from six people to more than three hundred, becoming a company with complete R&D, manufacturing, and delivery capability. Looking back on this journey, I understand ever more clearly: the scale of an enterprise can be a number, but what supports the number is always that group of people who, at the starting point, did not choose to give up.

II. Three cases, three footnotes to perseverance

Reading the whole book, what touched me most was the tenacity passed down in one line through the company's predecessors. The book piles up no grand narrative; it uses technical assaults and business negotiations concrete to the utmost to explain "perseverance" thoroughly.

The first case is the breakthrough of 0.01 mm. To win the company's first order, the team ground away at recognition precision, attacking and testing over and over, and finally conquered the 0.01-mm recognition error. This seemingly tiny number was the watershed between "can we do it" and "dare we take the order"—it won Zhongnan Intelligent its first order and formally launched the company's dream. I know well that behind 0.01 mm in intelligent manufacturing are countless all-nighters, countless tear-ups and start-overs, and the team's zero tolerance for "a hair's difference."

The second case is the leap of 0.1 mm. Through unrelenting polishing of different toolings and parameters, the precision error was strictly and stably controlled within 0.1 mm. Behind this number lies, in fact, a harder engineering proposition: no longer a one-time extreme qualification, but a quality baseline that can be held stably in batches, over the long run, under all working conditions. It was precisely this stability that let Zhongnan Intelligent successfully enter the automotive industry and helped the company achieve diversified development.

The third case is the Chongqing casting-line project. Facing the high-heat, harsh foundry environment, the team went through a hundred-odd rounds of debugging and improvement and conquered the robot high-temperature protection system, letting Zhongnan Intelligent stand firm in the casting and welding industry, with a technical level dominant in Asia. This case shook me the most—it let me see that a true technical barrier is not written in patents but in failure after failure and improvement after improvement, in that instant when others gave up and you did not.

It was precisely these batches of predecessors and colleagues—persevering and striving ceaselessly toward their goals under Mr. Yang's leadership—who brought the company step by step to today's height. They are not geniuses; they simply, in every choice of "try once more," chose to persist.

III. Six years together: this persistence is being passed on

While reading, I could not help putting myself into the book. I joined the company in October 2020—a full six years now. In these six years, I have gone through twenty or thirty projects, big and small. Some went smoothly, concluding successfully by the book; others met technical difficulties midway and could only be conquered by mobilizing resources from all sides and pulling together. Every project, from undertaking to implementation to acceptance, is a long run demanding patience and tenacity. When I hit hard problems, I often think of the predecessors in the book gnawing hard bones—they had no shortcuts; the only way was to test solidly and improve persistently. Walking these six years, I deeply feel that this spirit of "perseverance" has been passed on in the team in good order. It is not a slogan on the wall; it falls in every bout of overtime, every on-site debugging, every tearing-up and redoing of a scheme—leading us to conquer one fortress after another and move, bit by bit, toward the light.

IV. A closing word

Extreme Entrepreneurship: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent seems to tell the founding story of an enterprise, but really tells the story of how people face difficulty and hold on to conviction. It made me understand that extreme entrepreneurship is, in the end, a contest with yourself—who can persist longer, who can bear the repetition, who is still willing to take one more step when no result is in sight.

Looking back from today, I count myself lucky to be in such a team; looking to tomorrow, I will carry this "perseverance" on my shoulders and, together with the company, walk toward the next dawn.

06 "Ba De Man" on an Ordinary Post

Zhu Hao's personal quote: "Improve a little every day: let time prove that you, too, can be excellent."

The touchpoint

In the striving story of a certain classified project: "We are all Hunanese youth who can eat bitterness, endure tedium, and ba de man (refuse to yield)." It was precisely this kind of responsibility—"able to step up and hold fast at critical moments"—that let the project be delivered on time and to quality, winning high praise from the customer. These two sentences resonate strongly with the conviction I have held for years: "Born ordinary, one can still have an extraordinary story."

My story

As a Changsha native born and raised here, the "ba de man" cultural gene of Hunan has deeply influenced my career. In the bidding work for a certain classified project, I was responsible for presenting the design scheme for the project's IT part. Before this, I had never in my career dealt with military-industry customers; the usual means—getting close to the customer, understanding their pain points, guided communication—all but failed in this project. How to establish effective communication with the customer, feel out their pain points, understand their business processes, and propose optimization schemes became the primary problem awaiting solution. Without WeChat or any other instant-messaging channel, how to do the customer-requirement research became extremely urgent.

Facing this situation, the moment our team received the bidding assignment, we arranged travel at top speed to the customer's location, met face to face with the then sales director to discuss the customer's situation, and together drew up a corresponding Q&A list. In the end, through everyone's unremitting efforts, we obtained the customer's external contact information. After establishing contact, because classified business sensitive information could not be discussed, the work of understanding the customer's needs and pain points stalled once more. Facing this complex situation, we used rapid internet searches to gather reference material on military-industry projects, searching and reading hundreds of times, continuously collecting, organizing, and aggregating valid information. At the same time, unable to obtain high-value reliable information head-on, we proactively contacted friends who had done military-industry IT projects and obtained first-hand material on how to plan intranets for classified networks. It was precisely this first-hand material that ultimately gave enormous help to the winning design scheme. It was precisely this unyielding "ba de man" spirit that supported us in winning, with maximum probability, a task that seemed impossible to complete.

In a certain cross-shearing line vision project where I served as project manager pushing the implementation, because vision developers were short-staffed and the vision-inspection algorithm could not break through, the project faced serious delay risk. Had things been left to worsen, the customer could easily have lost confidence in the implementation and come to doubt the company's technical strength. To push the project forward and achieve the algorithmic breakthrough, I laid out my learning of vision algorithms in advance and took on part of the algorithm development myself. In taking over the development, I found a series of problems: man-made introduced error, the nonlinear measurement error of non-perpendicular camera mounting, ghosting caused by reflective measurement materials, and so on. By organizing technical discussions on the implementation of the difficult points, and through repeated iteration and verification of the algorithm and study of measurement theory, hammered through the cycle of failure–success–failure–success, we finally achieved continuous progress and breakthroughs in this new vision field.

In a 2026 implementation project, I was assigned to support the sorting-out of legacy problems in the IT-system part. Facing a new business system (one where complete after-sales service could very likely not be guaranteed and accurate business-system scenarios could not be obtained)—what the system framework was, how the components ran, how to deploy and operate—these were the great challenges I faced when taking the task. In earlier work I had touched similar tasks and accumulated some experience. In this project, I tried sorting the business logic from a reverse angle and, combined with reverse analysis, completed the organizing of the business processes and service call chains. Meanwhile, by continuously learning new tools and trying new methodologies—when the verification of one process had walked into a dead end and I was on the verge of giving up, though beaten hard by reality I stood up again and gritted on—through the collision of negation–verification–testing–re-negation, I finally restored that process within the limited time and achieved a major breakthrough.

"Eating bitterness, enduring tedium, ba de man" enabled us to display our solid technical strength at a high posture even in unfamiliar fields, and it is precisely this special cultural deposit that forms part of the arduous-striving "soul" of the Zhongnan Intelligent family.

My actions

In the team building ahead, I will lead by example and inject the work spirit of "eating bitterness, enduring tedium, ba de man" into the team to implement and carry forward; meanwhile, relying on past successful management practice, I will encourage bold innovation and cultivate a work style of dare-to-think → dare-to-do → can-do → done, implemented through culture, institutions, and workflow—continuing to build for the company an outstanding team that can win battles.
07 Rooted at the Customer's Site, Polishing the Product in Practice

Guo Linhang's personal quote: "Let technology stand the test on site, and let every problem solved become one step of product progress."

Reading Extreme Entrepreneurship 4: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent, the line "We are not salesmen; we are workshop doctors" left a deep impression on me. A doctor must first understand the illness and find the cause before prescribing the right medicine; the same is true for industrial-robot and machine-vision engineers. However good a technical scheme may be, in the end it must stand the test of the customer's site. Only by truly finding and solving problems and keeping the machines running stably can technology be converted into product value.

As a newcomer to the workplace just over three months out of school, I am honored to be one of the company's sixty launch lead readers, and I take this chance to thank the company's leaders for their constant trust and cultivation. Looking back on my work since joining, the most unforgettable part was going, in my second month, to Tiandingfeng in Dezhou to handle fabric-inspection machine problems. I remember it was at the Friday fabric-inspection weekly meeting; Department Head Guo Dongni had originally planned to go to the customer's site alone. At the meeting, Director Di proposed that Head Guo take me along—and so came my first trip to a customer's site.

When I learned I was to travel, my mood was both expectant and nervous. To walk out of the office and touch real products and customer sites was a rare learning opportunity for me. But as a recent graduate with limited experience, facing real software problems, I could not help worrying: what if I don't understand? What if I can't find the cause and, in the end, can't solve it?

Problems at school can usually be answered step by step by looking up references and doing experiments; at the customer's site, you face real machines and real needs, and the engineer must analyze causes and find methods in light of the situation on site. I still lacked experience then, but having taken the task, I had to muster the courage and take this step.

From not knowing what to do to gradually finding the way to solve problems

After arriving at Tiandingfeng in Dezhou, I began to truly touch the problems of the fabric-inspection machine software in real application. Under Head Guo Dongni's lead, I familiarized myself with the site while learning methods of analyzing and handling problems. For the me of that time, this was not just a work task but a rare tempering.

As my understanding of the program and the product deepened, I went from not knowing many things at all to being able to independently fix some of the bugs in the program. This process was not achieved in one leap; it accumulated through continuous learning, trying, and practice. With every problem solved, my understanding of the program deepened by one point; with every additional analytical approach mastered, I had one more measure of confidence the next time I faced a problem.

A few days ago, when problems arose again at the customer's site, I clearly felt the difference from my first trip. Facing the problem, I was still serious and aware of my many shortcomings, but I no longer merely worried whether it could be solved—I began to analyze the phenomena faster, judge the possible causes, and think about how to investigate and verify next.

Of course I still cannot solve every problem, nor guarantee that every judgment is completely right. But the change from fearing it cannot be solved to thinking about how to solve it is, for someone just months into the job, already an important growth. I have gradually understood that an engineer's growth is not the absence of difficulties, but having more methods for analyzing problems and more courage to keep looking for answers when facing them.

Root at the customer's site, let technology truly create value

The book's "workshop doctor" concept also gave me a more concrete understanding of product development. For a machine-vision engineer, a program that runs and an algorithm that recognizes are only part of the work. What the customer truly needs is a machine that adapts to the real production environment and stably completes inspection tasks.

Verification in the laboratory helps us judge whether a technical scheme is feasible; the customer's site shows us more complex, more concrete problems. Only by truly touching these problems can we discover the product's shortcomings in real application and find the direction of improvement.

After this on-site training, I came to see that product development cannot focus only on whether functions are realized, but must also attend to whether the machines run stably, whether customer needs are met, and whether problem-solving helps the product keep improving. Solving problems matters, but so does clarifying why they arise, timely summarizing the handling experience, and thinking about how to reduce the recurrence of similar problems. Only so can on-site practice truly convert into experience for product progress.

Going forward, I hope to keep strengthening my study of the fabric-inspection machine software and machine-vision technology—not only learning to handle problems, but striving to understand the causes behind them; taking every piece of customer feedback seriously and promptly summarizing troubleshooting approaches and solutions; and gradually cultivating a product-oriented mindset, not only solving the problem at hand but proactively thinking about the direction of product improvement.

Turn every on-site experience into a step of growth

Looking back on the time since I joined, I have gained something in professional ability and on-site experience, and I see more clearly how much I still have to learn and improve—from the nervousness of my first business trip, to being able to independently fix some program bugs, to being able to locate causes and find solutions faster when facing site problems recently—I can truly feel myself growing, little by little.

Here I want to especially thank Department Head Guo Dongni, who brought me into customer sites at the start of my employment and gave me guidance and help. For a newcomer just starting work, being able to follow experienced colleagues into real problems and learn handling methods is a most valuable exercise. My thanks also to Director Di and the company's leaders for giving me this opportunity to come to know the product, accumulate experience, and build capability in practice.

Extreme Entrepreneurship 4: A Chinese Case—The Story of Zhongnan Intelligent showed me that a company's growth is inseparable from long persistence, rooting in reality, and ceaseless problem-solving. For someone just starting work, these truths apply just the same. We may not be able to shoulder important tasks from the start, but we can take every debugging session, every problem, and every piece of customer feedback seriously, building up our skills in daily work.

In the future, I hope not only to be a vision engineer who can write code and fix program problems, but gradually to understand the product, the customer, and the site—striving to become an engineer who, facing problems, can proactively analyze; facing difficulties, is willing to keep digging; and facing tasks, is responsible to the end.

The value of technology must be shown in real application; the growth of an engineer, too, is realized in solving problems one after another. For me now, handling every site problem carefully and accumulating every piece of experience solidly is the first step on the road of product development.
08 From "Computable" to "Usable"—Understanding Product Development Through Calibration After Calibration