EDITORIAL

The Power of Wisdom

- A Book Review On Me Too Is Not My Style

 

Editor-In-Chief

I have several Guest Editorials in the pipe ready to go around with a dozen more confirmed, yet I have to do a shortcut here, since I have been deeply touched by this exhaustive, refreshingly candid, experience-sharing business book in my hand - Me Too Is Not My Style, authored by Stan Shih, the Founder of Acer Group. His very first book illustrates his vivid risk-taking business experience between 1976 and 1996. I must confess I am a big fan of business books, and this one must be the best one I have ever read, since no one so far in high-tech industry is more generous than Stan on being willingness to share multi-national management know-how as well as inside stories to outsiders.

I knew Acer PC in later 80s or early 90s at trade shows while I was attending college in Beijing, later on I had two occasions that led me to know Acer is not just a PC manufacturer, one was asiwired.com it founded, a Churchill Club type networks for Asian Americans in the bay area, and the other was Acer VC located near Westin and Santa Clara Convention Center, where my colleagues and I used to visit for funding many years. As of today, Acer Group is also named ABW family, which consists of Acer Inc, BenQ Corp. and Wistron, with annual revenue as big as US$ 250 billion in 2005, imaging from a humble start of 11 people and US$ 25,000 seed fund

As the book revealed, Acer is not a family business, it possesses strong corporate culture, unique organizational structure, it initiated many paradigm shifts, and it experiences many ups and downs. How Stan and his all-superstar team have managed to maneuver in this highly risky business, and become a role model for Harvard Business School to adopt their cases on globalization, human resource management among other issues? According to my own, itĄ¯s The Power of Wisdom, and let me explain to me in detail

According to the book, AcerĄ¯s corporate culture has strong ties with StanĄ¯s personality, and Stan was heavily influenced by Chinese traditional wisdom, philosophy as well as culture.  

The magic of the Power of Wisdom applies to the AcerĄ¯s management style

On business strategy and tactic side, one can easily detect that the principles of Sun Tzu on the Art of War are adopted extensively in AcerĄ¯s daily business practice. Just to name a few,

 

Stan just retired from his Chairman and CEO position, and just completed his another fascinating book titled Millennium Transformation ¨C Change Management for New Acer, which describes his second reengineering experience between 1996 and 2004 at Acer. Actually I got that book in Chinese edition first, and then I knew this Me Too Is Not My Style book. We at System Design Frontier really appreciate StanĄ¯s support on us in extending us the rights to publish his masterpiece in series here

Dating back, the Industrial Revolution started around 150 years ago, the Computer Revolution started around 60 years, the Microprocessor Revolution started around 30 years ago, the Internet Revolution started around 15 years ago, the pace of change is significantly accelerated, I am not sure whatĄ¯s next, however, the Power of Wisdom will prevail. That is the big lesson I learned from StanĄ¯s Me Too Is Not My Style, hope you enjoy it as well