The Lenovo Way: Managing a Diverse Global Company for Optimal Performance

CHAPTER 4

Leading through Chaos

        Lenovo Principle 3: Identify What’s Broken, Then Use Every Internal and External Resource to Fix It.

It didn’t take long for Peter Hortensius, who by now had become one of our unofficial cross-cultural ambassadors, to figure out that developing a personal relationship with each of his team members in China would go a long way toward fostering trust. In some cases, it happened naturally. For example, Peter and George He, now SVP of Ecosystem and Cloud Services, clicked from the moment they met because they already had a common language and frame of reference.

“We were both engineers, so we understood each other pretty well,” Peter recalls. “When you think the way we do, there are only a few ways to solve ...