We Need More CEOs Like Lenovo’s Yang Yuanqing

Lenovo just had its best-ever fiscal year ending in March. For that, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing got a $5.2 million bonus. This past weekend, he did something that high-powered executives don’t often do when they get million-dollar bonuses: he gave a lot of it away. Here’s CNN with the details of what happened:

Yang Yuanqing distributed $3 million from his bonus among 10,000 junior-level employees, the China-based technology company confirmed Thursday. The employees, such as receptionists, production-line workers and assistants, each received an average bonus of 2,000 yuan, which is $314, in the name of their CEO.

This is awesome, and it’s also pretty unexpected in an era when even the heads of companies that have utterly failed (cough, investment banks) seem to feel they’re personally entitled to massive bonuses as their lower-level workers get screwed. Lenovo, on the other hand, is experiencing unprecedented success, and it’s telling that Yang has chosen to pass much of his own bonus on to the junior-level employees his company would be nothing without. It’s great to see Yang acknowledging that Lenovo’s success is the result of everyone’s hard work and that by extension everyone should get to enjoy some of the reward.

A cynic might point out that Yang also kept $2.2 million for himself, and that the whole thing seems a bit like a publicity stunt. To that I respond: who cares? If tech CEOs start believing that the best way to get positive publicity for themselves and their companies is by giving bonuses to lower-level employees, is that something we want to discourage? Even if Yang conceived of this gift as an entirely self-serving publicity stunt, I could not care less. I’m pretty sure the junior-level employees getting the bonuses don’t care much either.

And yes, Yang could certainly have been more generous (and other CEOs have taken this even farther), but complaining that he only gave away $3 million is a bit like looking a gift horse in the mouth. Shut up about the teeth, you idiot, that horse is worth $3 million!

The reason I’m so enamored with Yang’s generosity is that China specifically (and more generally the world) needs displays like this to remind people that success is a team sport. It is easy, I think, to get to the top and then convince oneself retroactively that you got there without help. But you didn’t. I don’t care who you are or what your story is, nobody is successful in anything without at least a little help from others. In tech, especially, we tend to credit a company’s successes or failings to the machinations of its executives and forget that policy decisions aren’t the only things that matter. All the clever strategizing in the world can’t save a product that’s shoddily assembled, and even the most successful companies wouldn’t get very far without someone there to answer the phones and direct calls to the right places.

So here’s to Yang Yuanqing, whose $3 million gift will hopefully inspire other CEOs to remember that they succeed only with the help and the hard work of all those working with them.

[Image via CNN]