"When I was 20 I vowed to myself I'd be a CEO by 60," says Donald Yu, senior director of Delta Electronics Voice Division Research Center.

Eighteen years later at the age of 38, he was named president of British Telecom Taiwan. Then he went on to serve as president of Hitachi Data Systems, and then director of sales for Google Taiwan.

Last year, Yu came back to work for a Taiwanese company, running Delta Electronics' Voice Division, which had been operating for a decade with a technology transfer arrangement from MIT and internal investments, but had yet to find a viable business model.

Even though his background is in sales, Yu is now leading the technology-heavy Voice Division Research Center.

"Once he got there the whole emphasis shifted from technology-led to market-led," says Delta Electronics chief technology officer R.C. Liang, delighted at the turn of events. Yu set about facilitating cooperative arrangements with Chunghwa Telecom to use Delta's voice recognition technology in automating Chunghwa Telecom's 104/105 directory assistance system, bringing a steady US$1 million into Delta coffers annually.

Taiwan's technology manufacturers have in recent years been shifting aggressively from hardware toward software businesses, and the Voice Division is Delta's only purely software-driven business operations unit. Voice recognition is also a key technology for the developing trend of "intelligent living," which has a potential global market in excess of US$10 billion.

Yu is a natural born super-salesman. He was Microsoft Taiwan's first operations director for corporate clients and their youngest vice president, but left Microsoft before ever becoming a serious candidate for the top spot.

"I needed to prove myself," the strapping Yu says, the sharp gleam in his eyes hinting at a powerful ambition to succeed. He recalls that whenever he handed out business cards, the recipients were always polite and respectful.

"You never know if the credit belongs to you or to Microsoft. I'm sure that 99.9 percent of the time, it belongs to Microsoft," he says.

Yu decided to join British Telecom at a time it was downsizing and considering withdrawing from Taiwan. He determined to go against the flow, thinking, "If I could just prove my abilities and get the job done, then I could create a brand for myself."

Within six months BT had gone from red ink to black, and Yu was soon poached by Hitachi Data Systems, again coming aboard in a damage-control role, clearing NT$100 million in inventory tied up amidst distribution bottlenecks and tripling profit within a year. That year the entire Hitachi Data Systems staff, down to administrative clerks, received bonuses.

At the time, Hitachi Data Systems was overloading its distribution outlets with inventory in an effort to meet sales quotas set at company headquarters. Yu's answer after taking charge was not to hand all sales rights over to the distributors but to maintain diligent contact with end retailers to determine their needs. It was like the floodgates had been opened and the goods previously snarling up those floodgates had been smoothly released downstream.

Yu spent nearly 20 years in foreign firms, but it was while working as director of sales operations for Google Taiwan that he decided: "This is my last gig with a foreign company."

The reason was that with foreign firms, the scope of his responsibilities had always been limited to Taiwan's small market. He wanted to do more, but corporate headquarters would invariably ask: "How many users are in Taiwan? Do you know how many users are in China?"

"I asked myself if I should make a China play. The answer was yes, definitely, but only with a local global company. That's the real deal," Yu says of what brought him to Delta.

R.C. Liang thinks there are a lot of high-tech CEOs in the U.S. who don't necessarily have a technology background.

"Delta has now reached a turning point. Technology professionals will remain very important, but in the next stage you need professionals in marketing and other functions to carry the baton," he says.

From foreign multinationals to local corporations, Donald Yu's future direction is likely to be just as Delta CEO Yancy Hai put it: "Your world is the whole world."

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy