1- Script of Recording

LENOVO CEO ON MANAGING ACROSS CULTURES
JANE SPENCER.
Wall Street Journal. 2006-11-21.

[Bill Amelio is the American CEO of Lenovo Group Ltd., the biggest computer company in China, and the world's third-largest since it bought IBM’s personal-computer division.]

WSJ: Do you still consider Lenovo a Chinese company?

Mr. Amelio: We're a global company. We actually rotate the headquarters between Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Raleigh [North Carolina] and Paris. Instead of having everyone travel to me, I travel to them. I feel like a gypsy at times, running around with my bag, unloading it and loading it.

WSJ: What kind of cultural issues come up between the American and Chinese sides of the company?

Mr. Amelio: Every day there's something. On both sides, you need to have great trust in your colleagues to know that their intentions are good, even though the words might not come out right.

In the US and Europe, we have highly opinionated executives who like to make their voices heard. The China team tends to listen more and express themselves more thoughtfully. The Americans and Europeans need to know that if a Chinese colleague is nodding silently, it doesn't mean they're agreeing. We also have a program in place to teach our China team better confrontational management skills.

The Chinese team also tends to be very, very thorough – and sometimes when you want to get something implemented, it's important to have conciseness.

Sometimes it's great to rally the whole team around something that everybody is interested in. Last week, we had an event where we brought in the 1992 Chinese Olympic ping pong champion, and had him play our executives.
(…)

WSJ: You've said that American companies typically use a "colonial approach" when they enter the global market. What's different about Lenovo's strategy?

Mr. Amelio: [With a colonial approach] you send an effective executive on an expat assignment to Asia. They hire talent in-country. The downside is that you tend to hire people through the filter of the language that you speak, and you don't get the best talent. It's hard to identify talent if you're conducting the job interview in English.
(…) If you look inside Lenovo, we've been hiring without a screen for English for years, and that means we really have depth when it comes to talent in China. Now we're working with our Chinese midlevel managers on English skills.
@Wall Street Journal

End of Recording

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Lenovo CEO on managing culture