Companies

A natural at networking

By CHENG YINGQI (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-01 13:20

Microsoft exec has simple wish to make more Chinese friends

BEIJING - In the year 1987, 17-year-old Pan Zhenglei took her parents' advice to see the world outside China and got on a plane.

Pan Zhenglei is the highest-ranking female Microsoft executive born in China. [PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY]

In Seattle, Washington, Pan was impressed by all the overpasses, expressways and supermarkets that were rare in China in the 1980s. But one thing she did not like was the feeling of loneliness in a crowd of people from different countries.

"I wanted to make more Chinese friends, because we had mutual interests," Pan said.

Two decades later, Pan's simple wish of making Chinese friends has turned into a networking group with more than 2,500 members.

Pan, the highest-ranking female Microsoft executive born in China, founded a Chinese employee group along with a few others in 1992, the same year she joined Microsoft. The name of the group is Chinese Employees at Microsoft (CHIME).

It is now one of the largest social groups at Microsoft. Although Pan doesn't run CHIME directly, she keeps her hand in by acting as an adviser.

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"It was fulfilling to watch CHIME grow and see how Chinese people take part at Microsoft, which has become increasingly diverse," she said.

Pan joined Microsoft as a software developer of Office. Today, she leads a production team with 200 members in the United States and another 100 engineers in Shanghai.

"There are not many general managers with a Chinese background at Microsoft, because very few Chinese students were able to study in the US until the late 1990s. The number of Chinese executives will certainly increase in the next few years," she said.