review - Can the company be a family? - the Lenovo story

In his book "The Lenovo Affair" the Chinese journalist Ling Zhijun offers a remarkable and in depth picture of the company that took over IBM's PC-business and because the icon for the Chinese corporate threat to the outside world. Ling writes the story with tremendous insight and the help of the key players in Lianxiang, as the company has been known for much of its fast moving history.
Ling writes more as an historian than as an business analyst or even a journalist in documenting this history. That offers a wealth of information and background, but is more directed towards a knowledgeable Chinese audience than the eager business people who want to learn how Lenovo did it: take over one of the symbols of America's glorious corporate past. The IBM take-over only appears in the last chapter of the book and the main reason to start reading the book - that basis of its current success - is not addressed.

Many jewels are hiding in the book in a typical Chinese way, by hinting at it, without clearly defining it for an audience that is less familiar with the typical Chinese ways of dealing with problems. What I found fascinating is the way how the company is trying to define its own place in the society. Beginning by structuring it along military lines, as many Chinese companies were organized in the 1950s until the 1970s. Then slowly the parallels with a family appear, where Liu Chuanzhi, the founder of the company, goes more than once against the economic logic of the market. Taking care of its people, especially the ones close to him, seems more important than short term gains.
That last illusion is then blown away as Lianxiang, because it is carried away by the first internet bubble, has to start firing people after decades of only expansion.
"The Company is not a Family", writes an employee on the Internet, and the emotions are flying high as the pater familiar Liu Chuanzhi has to address that issue. Of course the market wins, as it mostly does, but the struggle of a Chinese company getting to term with the market could have been a nice red line that would have been useful for readers to pull themselves through this historical account.
The translator has been struggle, you can see from the many quotation marks around Chinese sayings that unfortunately lose much of their meaning in English. An editor or a co-writer would have been a good idea for this in many terms amazing book. Now the reader might be at loss when the traditional ranking system is explained at length, very important for the Chinese, but rather useless information for those who are not part of this governmental system of promoting people. Painful becomes the lack of cultural sensitivity when major events are described, or sometimes ignored. For example, the company's international business suddenly tumbles into a crisis in 1989. Didn't there happen anything serious in 1989?
It is bad enough history is being sanatized for a Chinese audience, you cannot do this for a foreign audience too.

Ling Zhijun, The Lenovo Affair. The growth of China's computer giant and its takeover of IBM-PC. John Wiley & Sons, 2006.