It's hard to bring two corporate cultures together in any merger, let alone one between an obscure Chinese computer maker and the struggling PC division of an iconic American brand. But that's precisely the challenge Bill Amelio faced when he joined Lenovo in 2005.
The company had just swallowed IBM's ThinkPad business for $1.75bn, creating overnight the third-largest PC maker in the world.
His biggest initial challenge in merging the two firms was simply where to locate the united company: ThinkPad operations were based in Raleigh, while Lenovo was headquartered in Beijing. Instead of picking one place, Amelio decided to go with no headquarters at all.
He works out of Singapore, Lenovo chairman Yang Yuanqing relocated to Raleigh, and top executives hold meetings in a different location every month. (They'll convene in Phnom Penh in March.)
The method, which Amelio calls worldsourcing, seems to be working.
Source: Fortune, http://money.cnn.com