In 1991, I boarded a plane to Taipei. A one-way ticket and no contacts. I had just launched my first business at the age of 19. We sold laptops in Italy at a time in which the market was dominated by bulky desktops. Choosing mobility over the mainstream wasn’t a strategic insight based on market data; it was pure intuition. It was a huge risk. And yet it was the only way to stand out.
I walked through the halls of Computex that year, knowing I needed to find the right suppliers to bring differentiated products back home. I bet on a future where portability would matter as much as performance in a PC…
And it paid off. Within a few years, we were the leading local laptop brand by market share. Back then, that was how I defined entrepreneurship. We were instinctive and personal. But the more experience I got, the more I realized that this same spirit could thrive in places we don’t usually expect.
Like, for instance, inside large and matrixed organizations.
Here’s what I discovered: Entrepreneurship doesn’t belong to any one scale. It lives in individuals who take initiative. In side hustles and family-run businesses. In small teams that are agile, flexible, and adaptable. And yes, it can thrive inside large organizations—if you let it.
We’ve always associated entrepreneurship with startups. But in truth, it’s a mindset. This mindset is defined by ownership, risk-taking, creativity, and relentless focus on solving real problems. And it’s not exclusive to early-stage companies. It’s not something you outgrow when your company scales.
The real challenge is keeping it alive.
So what does entrepreneurship look like in Lenovo—a company of over 70,000 people, operating in 180 markets? How do you make space for bold thinking, speed, and local intuition without losing alignment, trust, or direction?
When I reflect on the decisions, I’ve been part of at Lenovo, what strikes me is how often we’ve had to think and act like entrepreneurs—even at the enterprise scale.
In 2015, our business in Brazil was under intense pressure. Our operational expenses were unsustainable, our manufacturing costs too high. We could have applied a top-down global solution. And yet we paused and studied the market. We pivoted and made decisive, and painful changes—cutting expenses, adjusting our manufacturing footprint, and empowering a new cultural mindset that encouraged every team member to think and act as if the company was their own. We forged a mindset of what we call a “company of owners.” As a result, profits increased, and we moved from losses to being one of the most profitable geographies for Lenovo globally. Our market share also soared, from 9 percent to above 20 percent – leading in consumer segment and growing to #2 in commercial segment.
This also happened in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) back in 2016. We were sitting at #2—well behind the leader. Our structure at the time was four oversized mega-regions that slowed us down and made local execution uneven. So we made a bold move: We revolutionized the old setup and shifted to 16 market-level P&L units. That gave local teams the power to move fast, while our central EMEA team got sharper and more connected with a full-spectrum business management system. Five years later, Lenovo took the lead in EMEA, ranking #1 in market share in both consumer and commercial segments, and achieving industry leading profitability.
Here’s the thing. We had built a team which lay on a foundation of trust. We didn’t follow a corporate playbook. We made bold, entrepreneurial moves — quick, accountable, and driven by teams who had the freedom to act fast and own their decisions. This was Entrepreneurship 5.0
As we enter Lenovo’s fifth decade, we’re now doubling down on the principles that helped us grow from a local Chinese company into a global tech leader.
Entrepreneurship 5.0 is our way of scaling boldness— not just upward, but across and downward too. It means:
So how does that work in practice? To make this real, we’ve invested in:
These aren’t tactics. They’re the infrastructure that makes scaled entrepreneurship possible.
This way of thinking didn’t just get us where we are today. It’s essential for what comes next.
In the hybrid AI decade, leadership will come down to speed, insight, and courage. AI isn’t plug and play. It demands local insights, quick testing and experimentation, and the freedom to turn ideas into action without layers of approval.
The companies that can shift gears — that is, shift between global and local, startup and enterprise, individual and institution, will be the ones that define what’s next
As computer scientist Alan Kay rightly put it, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” I didn’t know it in 1991, but that trip to Taiwan was a blueprint.
It taught me to act without waiting for permission, to spot opportunity in discomfort, and to bet on what others overlook. And it taught me that success is often about trusting your people — even when the playbook doesn’t exist yet.
That mindset didn’t stay in the past. It’s here, now, in how we run Lenovo.
