Happy Halloween, Broadsheet treaters! Gloria Steinem and Lena Dunham are encouraging women to get out and vote in the midterms next Tuesday, and a 25 year-old entrepreneur just raised $10 million for her company. Read on to meet the women who keep Lenovo’s culture consistent as it goes on a spree of high-profile acquisitions. Have a great weekend!
EVERYONE'S TALKING
• The 10 best pieces of advice you need to hear. Right now. We asked power players from Fortune's Most Powerful Women community to tell us their career secrets. The result is 2 minutes and 30 seconds of seriously-great advice caught on camera. Fortune
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
• Power women rock the vote. Feminist leader Gloria Steinem shared with Cosmopolitan why she thinks the voting booth is such a powerful place. "Voting isn't the most we can do — but it is the least. Our vote is our voice," she wrote. Girls creator and star Lena Dunham posted a video on Glamour urging young women to take the midterm elections seriously and vote. Cosmopolitan
• Janet Yellen: Diversity would improve economics. The Federal Reserve Chair said that encouraging more women and minorities to study economics would help the U.S. be better prepared for future crises. “When economics is tested by future challenges, I hope that our profession will be able to say that we have done all we could to attract the best people and the best ideas,” she added. Bloomberg
• Samantha Power stands up for Ebola health workers. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN said in a speech that "these volunteers are heroes to the people they help and they are heroes to their own countries. They should be treated like heroes when they return." NBC News
• uBeam raises $10 million. Meredith Perry is just 25, and founded wireless power company uBeam while still an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. Yesterday she announced that the company has raised $10 million from venture capitalists. Tech Crunch
• MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon's VP of global advertising sales, is leaving the company to become SVP of sales, Americas at Yahoo.
BROADVIEW
Lenovo's secret M&A recipe
Within three months of being hired as chief diversity officer at Lenovo in 2007, Yolanda Conyers received some feedback that she was being disrespectful to her Chinese coworkers. Conyers, a perfectly polite woman from Port Arthur, Tex., was taken aback by the critique because she thought she had worked tirelessly to be polite to her new team.
It turns out that Conyers efforts were getting lost in translation. She thought she was being very deferential when she sent emails to her senior colleagues to “request” a meeting. But the word request translates in Mandarin to a term that executives use when asking for a meeting with someone below them. Without knowing it, Conyers was telling her new managers that she thought she was above them.
“It sounds small, but those small things can generate a lot of mistrust,” Conyers said in an interview with Fortune. “We had to go through a lot of effort to understand the different cultures within the company and the reasons people behave the way they do.”
Since 2005, when Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business, the Chinese-founded company has gone on a spree of high-profile acquisitions. Most recently, the world’s largest personal-computer maker said on Thursday that it had completed a $2.91 billion acquisition of Google's Motorola Mobility unit. The merger makes Lenovo the third-largest smartphone maker. Each time Lenovo buys an overseas company, its staff gets more diverse and its corporate structure more complicated. Today, the company has more than 60,000 employees across 60 countries.
That’s where Conyers comes in. After a slew of culture problems and missed business opportunities shortly after Lenovo acquired part of IBM, the company realized it needed to take a harder look at its strategy for combining new teams. Now serving as Lenovo’s first-ever diversity officer, Conyers’ job is to figure out how to align the company behind common goals while respecting everyone’s differences.
Click over to Fortune.com to read my full story.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
• Hacking sexism in the tech industry. My new favorite forum for conversation is The New York Times' Room for Debate page. Its latest topic is sexism in the tech industry, bringing together everyone from Google execs to leadership professors to discuss the issue. "Tech job descriptions are usually geared toward males and have long lists of skills, most of which can be learned on the job," writes diversity expert Vivek Wadwha. NYTimes
• Lessons from running a marathon. Annie Bersagel, a 31-year-old American lawyer who will compete in the New York City Marathon on Sunday, said running has made her more likely to take risks. “In competitive running, you fail all the time — and really, really publicly. I think that’s something that can really help, and maybe I think more about being risk averse and when to be bolder because I’ve had those experiences of when things go really wrong,” she said. NYTimes
• Women with more children are more productive at work. Over the course of a 30-year career, mothers outperformed women without children at almost every stage, according to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Mothers with at least two kids were the most productive overall. WaPo
ON MY RADAR
Where are all the women entrepreneurs? Gallup
The anti-Photoshopping movement's big problem Fast Company
Is Hillary Clinton doing another Vogue cover? NY Daily News
The gender chore gap WSJ
Meet the elite women running in the NYC marathon ESPN
QUOTE
Maybe very nasty animals or people?...On second thought, I’m not afraid of anything.IMF Chief Christine Lagarde's response when asked by The Washington Post what scares her.