Corporations

Yang Yuanqing

Chairman and CEO, Lenovo | China

For showing how cross-border acquisitions are done.

In today’s age of cyber-snooping and the paranoia it has engendered, what Yang Yuanqing previously accomplished would now be unthinkable. After he took the helm of Beijing-based tech company Lenovo in 2001, Yang set his sights on one of the industry’s crown jewels: the personal computing division of U.S. giant IBM. On Dec. 7, 2004, he got his wish. The ensuing marriage between Lenovo and the iconic ThinkPad brand, now going into its 11th year, has been happily uneventful.