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Zhou Qunfei (wikipedia.org)
124 points by apsec112 on Aug 24, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



FWIW, the NYT had (IMO, not knowing anything else about her) an outstanding profile of Zhou last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/business/international/how...

Good enough that as soon as I saw her name in the OP, I immediately remembered it, which is more than I can say for most articles I've read more than a year ago. It almost reads like a fairy tale for engineers:

> Zhou Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made woman. Ms. Zhou, the founder of Lens Technology, owns a $27 million estate in Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and Seoul, South Korea, to court executives at Apple and Samsung, her two biggest customers. She has played host to President Xi Jinping of China, when he visited her company’s headquarters.

> But she seems most at home pacing the floor of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering.

> She’ll dip her hands into a tray of water, to determine whether the temperature is just right. She can explain the intricacies of heating glass in a potassium ion bath. When she passes a grinding machine, she is apt to ask technicians to step aside so she can take their place for a while.

> Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For years, she labored in a factory, the best job she could get having grown up in an impoverished village in central China.

> “She’ll sometimes sit down and work as an operator to see if there’s anything wrong with the process,” said James Zhao, a general manager at Lens Technology. “That will put me in a very awkward position. If there’s a problem, she’d say, ‘Why didn’t you see that?’”


Won't dipping her hand in water contaminate it? Seems like a meddler.


It's probably mythology. The only way a billionaire in China could keep their fortunes is to portray the image of lucky worker that she's projecting.


It reads a lot like a North Korean account of Kim Jong-Il visiting a factory, doesn't it?

“Kim will sometimes sit down and work as an operator to see if there’s anything wrong with the process,” said Lee Jongsoo, a general manager at Revolutionary Lens Technology. “That will put me in a very awkward position. If there’s a problem, Kim would say, ‘Why didn’t you see that?’”


How would Kim be expected to detect the problem?


According to official biographies, he was a child prodigy who mastered everything he ever came in contact with. He was also known to correct underlings who were domain experts, to demonstrate his superior understanding of all the issues -- rather like this Chinese CEO.


I am to code as Kim Jong-Un is to process improvement. Always Be Refactoring.


So cynical. Perhaps all the intuition and mastery from decades of work could be the explanation.


Maybe not if the water itself isn't integral to whatever chemical process was at hand? I think the difference is that, according to her chroniclers, is that she's actually done that kind of engineering work and would probably know if she was tainting the process. It's on a different level than, say, when, Steve Jobs directed his programmers on how/what to code [0].

[0] one of the funnier examples, IMO http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Black_Wednesday.t...


The faster one realizes this is a narrative, the faster one can make their own way in the world.




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