Steve Ward of IBM talks about its Chinese business. He says it’s an international team with more women than men. [He also says he keeps a list of attendees at meetings and checks people off as they talk, which, although it’s undoubtedly a good management technique, I find slightly creepy.]

Anne Mulcahy (Xerox) talks about the partnership with Fuji.

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) talks about doing business in China.

[I found little unexpected in their responses, so I zoned out. Sorry.]

Esther asks what you do about corruption? Ward says that you make clear that your company has certain beliefs, and if you’re a mega-corp, they’ll be honored.

Schwartz says that Sun left a country because it was too corrupt. He also reminds us that Enron et al. have destroyed far more value in this country than any other country’s corrupt practices have.

Mulcahy says that they no longer have a business in South Africa — they are mere distributors there — because of “reputational risk.”

Q: What’s going to happen to our Thinkpads?

Esther: How many of you have Thinkpads? [About a third of us…very different from a tech conference/]

Ward: We’re going to innovate even more! “Thinkpads will be forever.” We’re trying to decide if the branding will be “Thinkpad” or “Lenovo Thinkpad”

Doc: Will Lenovo market a linux desktop?

Ward: Lenovo ships several million linux clients today, mainly cell phones and pdas. But there’s a lot to do to get linux accepted by the mass market.

Schwartz: And we’re committed to working with Lenovo to provide a mass market, desktop linux….

Q: When will you have a woman as CEO of Fuji-Xerox in Japan?

Mulcahy: Fuji-Xerox does a good job hiring women managers, but it will be a long time before there’s a woman CEO. But Japanese companies that hire women have a competitive advantage over companies that don’t take advantage of half of the work force.

[First use of the word “synergy”: 8:15am] [Technorati tag: pcforum]

Categories: Uncategorized dw