Cameron also acknowledged CHA’s Roger Bushell and former Ingram Micro chief, Steve Rust (who was another previous boss from his Toshiba days) as distributors that had given him good advice over the years. In vendor land, he tipped his hat to David Henderson, Bruce Lakin and Mark Whittard.
“David and Mark are among the best marketers I’ve ever seen and Bruce was a real driver of the business who was very good in front of clients,” he said. “You learn different things from different people along the way.”
Taking the reins
Cameron got the top Lenovo job locally in April this year when previous managing director, Alan Munro, was promoted overseas to run its UK business. One of the key ongoing challenges is to make the Lenovo brand more relevant to a broader user base without diluting the prestigious reputation of the ThinkPad notebook and ThinkCentre desktop monikers it inherited from IBM.
“The strategy globally has been our sponsorship of the Olympics and Formula One. The Olympics showed how we could essentially turn on what was essentially a Fortune 500 company within a two-week period. There was obviously months of work that went into that but we installed 30,000 pieces of equipment and had 700 engineers; the message was that if we can do it for the Olympics, we can do it for your company.
“At the same time, TV advertising around the Olympics has tripled our brand awareness in Australia during the past three or four months. It has been fantastic.”
Looking ahead, Lenovo is also about to mount a challenge in the ultra-competitive x86 server market and Cameron has no fear of competition.
“It’s a highly competitive space but we’re used to that in the PC business,” he said. “We’re moving up the pyramid and that will help us become more important to our customers and partners. We entered the workstation market a couple of quarters ago and there are other moves we’ll be announcing.”
Out to pasture
Away from work, Cameron is a family man with a wife who is studying law and a couple of boys that are sports mad, which isn’t very surprising given their father’s history. He competed in triathlons for more than a decade and represented Australia in the World Championships for his age group in Manchester during 1993 as well as the World Durathlon Championships in Hobart the following year.
