Advani:We are all united by a common purpose. That purpose is to make Lenovo a great company. I feel very comfortable working together with my Chinese colleagues. Executives of Lenovo I have met are very market driven and everybody understands the importance of marketing and strong brand. We have developed very close personal relationships.

Yong Tang: Have you encountered any culture shock or misunderstanding based on cultural difference?

Advani: For the most part the relations are very good because we spend a lot of time face to face together in US or in Beijing. We will go out for drinks and talk about our families and show pictures. We have built strong trust. And then you can do things via emails.

One time when I came up with a Lenovo branding strategy, we had different opinions. Right now Lenovo is such a strong brand in China that sometimes we are also building sub-brands like Yantian and Tianjiao. But for a global strategy, I told my teams that we should not build products of sub-brands other than ThinkPad. I want to do a master brand, the brand of Lenovo is what I want to build. So the names of the products are less important. I don't want people to say I have got Yantian PC. I want them just to say I have got Lenovo. When people buy a Samsung cell phone they didn't say they buy H256. When people buy Panasonic TV they will not say they bought 43 inch Panasonic with DLP projection. So Samsung and Panasonic and Microsoft and Intel are all master brands. We want to build master brand for Lenovo.

But some Chinese colleagues in Beijing said, no, no, we have to get exciting names for our product lines. But I said, no, we have to focus, we only have so much money and so much energy and so many people, we have to focus everything on one thing. Some Chinese colleagues still insisted that, no, we have Yantian. So we had a face-to-face meeting. I explained the rationale in more detail. They completely understood what I was trying to do and thought it was a right thing. At the very beginning there were just emails. It was not enough to come to agreement. It is also not my style to say, I am the Chief Marketing Officer, I have decided to do something. That doesn't work. People need to understand why and what is your point of view. So when we encounter issues like that, we can resolve it if you have good personal relations and talk about it face to face.

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