Life's getting tougher for Lenovo CEO

William J. Amelio's job as CEO of Lenovo, the world's fourth-largest computer maker, is getting tougher day by day.

The Chinese company posted a 78 percent decline in third-quarter profit this month. That followed last month's news that it planned to lay off about 50 employees by the end of the year in Morrisville, where it employs about 1,680.

Last week, several analysts slashed their estimates for worldwide PC sales. Citigroup now expects a 3 percent decline.

Lenovo moved into the Triangle when it acquired IBM's PC division in 2005. Amelio is a former Dell and IBM executive.

Amelio spoke Wednesday at N.C. State University for its College of Management's Wachovia Executive Lecture Series. Here are some of his comments:

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: "We never outsource any of our technical support centers. They're in the region where we do business. That way, when somebody communicates with our tech support people, they're talking to somebody in their native language with the same sort of dialects, in order to get to the root cause of their problems and take corrective action much more rapidly."

EMERGING MARKETS: "Fifty percent of global GDP today is now represented by the global markets....Fifty percent of global energy consumption -- rising very fast -- is in global markets.

"No doubt, China's GDP will surpass the United States' somewhere between 2020 and 2040."

CULTURAL CLASHES: "At Lenovo every day, East meets West. East clashes with West.

"Sometimes one word can affect an entire meeting." A meeting between design teams from RTP and Beijing ground to a halt when the U.S. team suggested all products should have "a common element" so they are recognized as a Lenovo product. "Unfortunately, common means pedestrian, or uninteresting, or boring in direct translation."

OPENNESS: At the end of Lenovo meetings, executives discuss "the white elephant in the room."

"They have to be comfortable that they are able to talk about things that appear to be undiscussable, even if they're not."

ACCOUNTABILITY: "One of the biggest challenges that we had is to build a culture of accountability.

"If any one of us want to propel our career forward, the most important thing is we've got to be accountable for something and demonstrate some level of accomplishment. So what we do is drive our key performance indicators down to each individual to demonstrate that they're accountable for something."