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| Visions & Revisions |
Worker of the World
11/01/2007
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Shortly after the Chinese personal computer maker Lenovo Group bought IBM’s PC division in May 2005, Lenovo’s maverick chief executive, Yang
Yuanqing, poached William Amelio from Dell, and the two former competitors
oversaw the biggest corporate East-West merger to date. They are still working
out the cultural transition, but by all reports have come a long way since the
early meeting of design teams at which a Western designer said the company
needed a "common" design element in the commercial and consumer lines, and the
Mandarin speakers understood that to mean Lenovo needed a "boring" design
element.
 With Yang as chairman of the board and Amelio as CEO, the
company is preparing for a tight race. Lenovo won the design competition for the
2008 Olympic torch, which a mountaineering team will carry up to the summit of
Mount Everest, but the business world is now watching for an Olympic-size battle
as Acer prepares to acquire Gateway, a move that will edge out Lenovo as the
world’s third-largest PC maker behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Amelio, 49, who
has athletic credentials of his own with a second-degree karate black belt,
spoke with Worth features editor Jan Alexander about
competing for domination of the global personal computer market.
Generally, analysts say it’s hard to compete with hardware, that a
PC is a PC. Now you have to sell the world on the Lenovo brand, and distinguish
it from IBM as well as from your actual competitors.
Just take a look at our ThinkPad
T61 series, launched in May. I have one next to my phone and you can’t even hear
the fan on it. We were inspired by the wings of owls to redesign our fan blades
to take the noise level down. Additionally, we don’t like the idea that when you
sit with a laptop on your lap it gets hot, so we’ve made all the ThinkPad
laptops significantly cooler.
How do you do that?
If I told you, I’d have to kill
you.
Where are these innovations taking place?
In what we call our innovation
triangle—Raleigh, N.C., Yamato, Japan, and Beijing. We also have a national
research center in Beijing. We have about 250 engineers there who do nothing but
applied research. This is the team that designed the Olympic torch.
As China produces more innovations, how long is it likely to
remain a center for low-cost engineering?
There’s no question about it, in
countries like India and China the acceleration rate of job expenses is four
times that of the rest of the world. But even if you plot that, it’s still going
to take a long time to catch up. Furthermore, there will be more people coming
into the labor pool, which will create a tendency to drop the rate back down
again. They’re talking about a concept called "world sourcing," where
essentially you find the best and most efficient low-cost spot for each portion
of the value chain. The companies that are able to figure out how to do that
most efficiently are the companies that are going to win in the future.
Reaching out to the entire world for the best ideas, best
components, design, processes, management, etc., will become something that
really helps build your brand internationally. There are plenty of places in the
U.S. where the work is still the most efficient. We still have much of our
software and hardware designed in the Raleigh area. All of us have to focus on
what we do extremely well and then make sure that we exploit that as much as
possible. If we try to hold on to outdated ideas and things we’re not the most
efficient at, the outcome is never going to be good.
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