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| Visions & Revisions |
Worker of the World
11/01/2007
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I was surprised to see how quickly they took to the computers.
It’s quite amazing. In any culture you can see children struggle with education,
and all of sudden they get to a computer and their eyes light up and they learn
how to use it pretty rapidly.
Yet even in a computer company, enormous cultural differences
remain. For example, any training manual on doing business with the Chinese
will say they consider it the height of rudeness to express a personal
opinion, as Americans do on a daily basis.
The culture at Lenovo was always
a little edgier than most Chinese companies, but it is still not an easy thing
for the Chinese staff to speak out that way. If you see somebody looking antsy
and you ask some probing questions, then they for sure will tell you what’s on
their mind. At our meetings, we’ll stop and have someone give an interpretation
of what was just said so everybody can catch up, because a lot of our colleagues
find it difficult to follow the quick back and forth in different languages. We
also stop and ask for viewpoints to make sure we get all the key stakeholders’
opinions.
Yang Yuanqing, who is known as "China’s first global capitalist," became fluent in English in a little more than a year after the IBM acquisition. Do you speak Mandarin?
No, I wish I did. I’d want to go
into an immersion program for x amount of days. Given my travel
schedule, I’d have to justify being away from my wife and kids a lot longer than
I’d like to be. I would like to learn every language there is. It would be
wonderful to be able to sit down with someone speaking another language and know
exactly what they’re saying but I make do with what I have.
There are science fiction stories in which technology has made
it possible for everyone’s brain to instantly translate every language.
That would be cool.
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