Lawrence Tu: A Leader for Change
Dell Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence Tu began tackling challenges at the age of five. That was when his first-generation Chinese parents moved from New York City to Taiwan, where Tu began school.
"I barely spoke Chinese, but my parents had the attitude that I was going to have to sink or swim," he says.
Tu adopted this "sink or swim" attitude as his own, and since then he has lived his life by jumping into the deep water and rising to the top. When he was 11, Tu's family moved back to the U.S., and he had to relearn English. Facing these early hurdles showed Tu that, through hard work, he could accomplish anything. The result: a track record that includes a Rhodes Scholarship, Harvard Law School, and clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
"My two years at Oxford were very challenging intellectually," Tu said. "They really forced me to improve my reading, writing, and oratorical skills. There was an emphasis on original thinking, and it was extremely rigorous."
After Harvard Law, Tu embarked on what he called the "most intense working experience of my career"—the one-year clerkship at the Supreme Court with Justice Thurgood Marshall, beginning in the fall of 1982. "It was basically 24/7 and both exciting and humbling," he says.
Each justice has four clerks, whose job is to review and analyze briefs, as well as prepare drafts of opinions, Tu says. The latter was done after a meeting with the Justice, who would outline his position for the clerk.
"All the clerks interacted," Tu said. "And you would debate with your co-clerks and then give the draft to the Justice to review. This process went back and forth, sometimes endlessly, until you got it right."
With the Supreme Court clerkship behind him, Tu was ready to begin his law practice. He started as an attorney for the U.S. State Department, where he drafted the first U.S. Free Trade Agreement (with Israel). Tu then joined O'Melveny & Myers' DC office and became a corporate partner in 1990. After a one-year assignment as general counsel of the Asia-Pacific region for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, he rejoined O'Melveny in 1995 to open and manage its Hong Kong office. From there he joined NBC Universal, where, as executive vice president and general counsel, he oversaw the legal department for all business units as well as its government affairs office in Washington, DC for three years. During that period, he successfully completed a series of acquisitions valued at over $20 billion.
In today's global business climate, Tu believes that a diverse staff is crucial to a corporation's success.
"As every aspect of life becomes more global, it puts an enormous premium on having people with perspectives that are as broad as possible," he says. "If you have a team with varied experiences and backgrounds, then you're getting the best vantage point for tackling every problem."
Tu faces new challenges with Dell, and he is looking forward to working with their "first-rate legal team."
"I've had the good fortune of working for two great companies. GE is one of the most admired companies in the world, and I left many good friends behind, and Dell is a terrific company with a tremendous future," he said. "My goal now is to learn from my new colleagues and be the best I can be. Dell is becoming more global by the day and our collective challenge is to keep up with its growing demands."
Tom Calarco is a freelance writer from Schenectady, N.Y. He is the author of The Underground Railroad Conductor, which is available for purchase online at www.travelsthruhistory.com/books.htm, and the newly-published “The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region”.
From the November/December 2004 issue of Diversity & The Bar®