Liu was born in Shanghai in 1944. His father was an executive with the Bank of China prior to the Communist victory in 1949.  Liu attended the People's Liberation Army Institute of Telecommunication Engineering, now Xidian University, from 1961 to 1966.  By 1970, Liu was an engineer-administrator at the Chinese Academy of Sciences

In the 1980s, with market reforms in progress, the Chinese government commissioned Liu to distribute foreign-made computers.  Liu came up with the idea to start Lenovo in response to a lack of funding at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Four years later, with a group of ten other engineers in Beijing and equipped with 200,000RMB and an office roughly 20sqyards, Liu founded Lenovo (whose English name was originally Legend, in Chinese “联想” Lianxiang). Gradually, Lenovo who learned from Hewlett-Packard in early times, became a distributor for HP in China and helped it take a leading position in Chinas computer market.

In 2004, Lenovo made world news as it signed an agreement with IBM to take over the latter's entire global desktop and laptop computer, R&D, marketing and sales business for 1.25 billion USD.  In December 2005, he appointed William Amelio, a former vice-president at Dell as new chief executive. Yang Yuanqing, a protégé of Mr Liu’s, became Chairman while the founder retreated to Legend Holdings. After orchestrating the takeover of the PC division of IBM, Liu tried to retire as Chairman. However only four years later after the merger, the company began to struggle. Liu once again returned as Chairman and replaced William Amelio with Yang Yuanqing to put Lenovo back on the growth path.

Liu started to get especially worried in late 2008, as the worst of the financial crisis bit into computer sales. Lenovo swung into the red, posting a $97 million loss for the quarter ending December 2008. He began seriously considering a return to management. "Lenovo was like somebody standing on the edge of a cliff," he says. "Lenovo is all of my life. When it looked like my life was threatened, I had to come out to defend it." The board approved his return, which was made official in February 2009. An old protégé, Yang Yuanqing, vacated the chairmanship for him and returned to the CEO post, which he had held before the IBM deal. Amelio, whose contract had ended, was out.

Fixing Lenovo, Liu determined, required fundamental reform. Factions had organized in the company's top echelons — among the original Chinese managers, the IBM old guard and new executives imported by Amelio — which loosened the team's cohesion. But Liu's biggest concern was that the rapid changes Lenovo had made in its culture after the IBM acquisition were undermining the effectiveness of its management. He believed Lenovo had to get back to its roots. Liu "was worried about losing that culture that had been such an important part of Lenovo's success," says James Coulter, one of the founders of private-equity giant TPG Capital and a Lenovo board member. On his return, Liu narrowed the senior management team down to an eight-member executive committee that meets regularly to discuss strategy and carefully plan its execution.

After his return, Mr Liu has reinstated a collective management style that he believes generates a greater sense of ownership among staff. In 2009 November, the company reported quarterly earnings had doubled, to $53 million USD from a year earlier. Lenovo's PC shipments surged 58% in the last quarter over the same period a year earlier, while the total market grew 24%, according to IDC.

Liu believes the Lenovo way can be the path for other Chinese firms as well. He intends to transform Legend Holdings — an investment firm that is Lenovo's largest shareholder — into a holding company, which, through acquisitions, would collect a stable of firms in industries such as energy, biopharmaceuticals, information technology and environmental protection. Then Liu and other lieutenants at Legend would work with the executives at the acquired companies to help them raise capital, strengthen strategic planning and improve everything from supply-chain management to human-resources practices. "For the Chinese economy to really rise, one of the key drivers will be capital from the private sector," Liu says. "We can find and identify the best people and use our funds and our experience to help them so their companies will grow very fast."

Liu has transformed Lenovo into one of the world's largest PC manufacturers and one of mainland China's first members of the Fortune Global 500. Before the age of 60, he selected his own successor (Yang Yuanqing) for the Lenovo Group, which made it possible for him to focus on transforming Lenovo's parent company, Legend Group, into a holding company with businesses including consumer electronics, IT services, risk management, real estate and private equity.

Liu is married and has three children.

"Our earliest and best teacher was Hewlett-Packard."  

"Whatever we do have to fit into something we are doing in China," says Liu. 

“History has proved we are good at catching up with the market’s leaders,” Liu said. “Though Apple is winning a significant share in the Chinese market, it has not gained a clearly leading position yet. Our advantage is we know this market better.”

“We have an extreme focus on the innovation of LePad and LePhone because these products will dominate the future market,” Chairman Liu Chuanzhi said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Anyone who loses this battle will be phased out from the history of this industry.” 

“I’m not leaving while just change my position. I quits as I want nto focus on Legend Holding, the parent company of Lenovo. There are veryn hard but interesting work waiting for me to do.”

“I will concentrate on getting Legend Holdings listed in 2014 to 2016.”

"When you do investments, make sure that you not only invest money, but also put in place services that can add value to the portfolio companies," he said

”It is important to Legend's long-term development to make the older generation of entrepreneurs, including myself, gradually pass the mantle to younger, more capable people who are open to new things. There are about a dozen of the older entrepreneurs who started out with me. They have a big gap in energy. When I choose someone, I apply two criteria. nThe initial criterion is whether he could put the interests of the nompany first. The second criterion is talent, or ability. What I emphasize in talent is the ability to learn, to do well at different tasks. Can he learn from foreign companies? Can he learn from practical experience? I don’t care whether he succeeds or fails at a particular task; what I care about is whether he is able to learn from his failure and what he does afterward.”

“The development of talents in a company is a dynamic process, a course from practice to knowledge, then to further practice and deeper knowledge. The best method to discover and culture talents is to let him work. Only in a horse race, can you tell out good horses, and find out the swiftest horse.”

“I still want to be an entrepreneur to work for my own business in next generation.”

Liu calls the culture as the "Lenovo way." At its heart, Liu's system is based on a collective decisionmaking process in which the CEO develops and implements strategy as part of tight-knit group of executives. Liu contrasts the Lenovo way with what he sees as the "classic MBA way," in which a dominant CEO makes decisions more independently and then works with the individual chiefs of the business units to execute them. Describing his system as homegrown, forged over his years by the trials of building Lenovo, Liu specifically refutes that it's culturally Chinese, although consensus-based management processes are common in many Asian firms. "We are not just following any menu," he says.

Liu's new management structure seems to have energized Lenovo — although a rebounding economy didn't hurt either. "The good news is, right now, they're in a good place," says William Grabe, a managing director at private-equity firm General Atlantic and a member of Lenovo's board. Wong Wai-ming, Lenovo's chief financial officer, says Liu's reforms have enhanced discussion among the senior executives and heightened the commitment among their subordinates. "Strategy-wise, there is a lot more clarity," he says.

Mr Liu explains that his passion for the business stems from the fact that, due to China’s stormy history, he so nearly missed the chance to become an entrepreneur:“What I’m especially grateful for is that I still got the opportunity late in life to be an entrepreneur,” Liu says. “I was 40 years old. People who were a little older than me didn’t have the chance.” 

1.    What is planned strategy for the IPO of Legend Holdings?
2.    Lenovo is engaged in a fight to become “the Apple of China”.  One day that battle will be without you.  What kind of leaders and board members do you need for the battle – and how will you get them ready?
3.    On Chinese entrepreneurs: how can future entrepreneurs learn from your path and be able to successfully find a company, grow it fast across China, globalize it, and finally depart from it?

"He is an icon in the IT industry, but his ability to translate that into [being] a multi-asset-class power" in private equity is unclear