Have you ever heard of Foxconn Technology Group and its founder and CEO Terry Gou? It is the largest exporter out of China. Foxconn is a Taiwanese contract manufacturer employing 920,000 Chinese workers across more than 20 mainland factories. Its business is fuelled by the United States’ and the world’s hunger for high-tech gadgets and toys at rock-bottom prices, share-holders demanding solid profit margins, and workers eager to move up the economic ladder.

Foxconn has been the most trusted name in contract manufacturing services. Some of the major companies Foxconn makes contracted products for include IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple. If you have a PlayStation, computer, or smart phone there is a good chance that all or pat of it was made by Foxconn. It is the only manufacturer that makes the ipad and one of two producer of the iPhone.

Foxconn has a plant in Houston, Texas, that employs around 1,000 workers, specializing in high-end servers for corporate clients. Gou plans to move additional automated production to the United States and shop its goods to China. Foxconn is the second largest exporter in the Czech Republic, and it also plans to expand to Slovakia and Turkey and may lead to plan to expand Brazil’s electronics industry.

Gou started Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, the anchor company of Foxconn Technology Group, in 1974 at age 23 with a $7,500 loan from his mother. He has been characterised as always thinking about a way to shave another nickel off the cost of a product, as a charming salesman, as a daring strategies, as a ruthless taskmaster, and as a reincarnated Henry Ford. Gou was ranked sixth on the Fortune Asia’s 25 Most Powerful list. Forbes estimated Gou’s personal fortune at $5.9 billion, but he says, “I think for me, I am not interested in knowing how much I have. I don’t care. I am working not for the money at this moment, I working for society; I am working for my employees.

Although Terry Gou’s tory is interesting, in this case we focus on lower-lever manager Li Chang (not real name). Li Chang worked her way up to become the manager in a department making parts for the iPad. Chang’s job was to supervise the production of one part that is used as a component in other products. Running the machines to make the standard parts is not complicated, and her employees generally find the job to be boring with low pay. Chang closely supervised the employees to make sure they kept production on schedule. She believed that if she did not watch the employees closely and keep them informed of their output, they would slack off and miss production goals. Chang’s employees viewed her as an okay boss to work for, as she did take a personal interest in them, and employees were productive. Chang did discipline employees who did not meet standard productivity, and she ended up firing some workers.

Jackie Lee, the manager of a larger department that made instruments to customer specifications, retired, and Chang was given a promotion to manage this department because she did a good job running her old department. Chang never did any design work, nor supervised it. The designers are all engineers who are paid well and who were doing a good job according to their prior supervisor Lee. As Chang observed workers in her usual manner, she realised that all of the designers did their work differently. So she closely observed their work and looked for good ideas that all her employees could follow. It wasn’t long before Chang was telling employees how to do a better job of designing the custom specifications. Things were not going too well, however, as employees told Chang that she did not know what she was talking about. Chang tried to rely on her authority, which worked while she was watching employees. However, once she left one employee to observe another, the workers went back to doing things their own way. Chang’s employees were complaining about her being a poor manager behind her back.

The complaints about Chang being a poor manager got to Terry Gou. Gou also realised that performance in the design department had gone down since Chang took over as manager, Gou decided to call Chang into his office to discuss how things are going.