Beijing, entrepreneurial values

• Source: Global Times
• [22:05 October 22 2009]
• Comments

By Bob Page

For four years, between 2005 and 2009, I collaborated daily with colleagues in Beijing as an employee of Lenovo, a pioneer of computing technology in China.

Like many others, my assignment was to build the brand globally and to integrate the two corporate cultures after Lenovo bought the IBM Personal Computing Division.

This was a challenge straight from Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat, and we joked about being able to quote the book's Lenovo passage from it.

I used to be a lifelong IBM employee, acquired in the purchase by Lenovo, and my initial reaction was anxiety.

Upon learning that Lenovo had become a Worldwide Partner of the Olympic Games in 2004 — a year before the company even had a worldwide footprint — my next reaction was excitement.

I began managing global communications for Lenovo's Olympic technology program, a key way to integrate cultures and build the brand.

A key lesson in this experience was the development of profound respect for the values and strengths of my Beijing colleagues.

These values are remarkable not because they are Chinese, but because they are universal. Perhaps, however, they are now embraced more passionately in developing economies like China than in the US.

This was a surprise to me. I grew up in Kansas, and still believe in the mythological values of the US Midwest – economy, enterprise, efficiency, ingenuity and industry.

My heroes were Kansas aviation pioneers: Walter and Olive Ann Beech, Clyde Cessna, Bill Lear, and my father, Warren Page, an electrical engineer at Boeing in Wichita.

After four years of commuting to Beijing, several experiences make me believe the next Beech, Cessna or Lear – or more accurately the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Thomas Watson – may originate in Shenzhen or in the Zhongguancun area of Beijing.