Founding Trend Micro:A Literary Style of Management

If you flip open Founding Trend Micro and turn to the preface, you might well think that the book is a novel with an entrepreneurial setting, because the preface describes how the “free-spirited and impetuous” Steve ­Chang met the “straight-arrow good student” Jenny Chen and taught her how to think outside the box and travel the world.

In fact, in her earliest conception of the book, Jenny wanted to celebrate Trend Micro’s 25th anniversary and leave a record of the firm’s history through a third-person novel. But her editor urged her to take a different tack, persuading her that readers wanted to know the real story behind how Steve and Jenny Chang, along with Jenny’s sister Eva Chen, founded Trend Micro.

We don’t do “me too”

If not for Steve Chang, who had always desired to be an entrepreneur, Jenny would have become a writer or editor; but because she was so much in love with Steve, when he went to the United States for graduate studies, she went with him. Steve had studied applied mathematics as an undergraduate and was studying computer science at grad school, whereas Jenny did an academic 180º to study information science, a choice that forced her to brush up on differential calculus.

Differential calculus led Jenny to a realm that, unlike literature, was clear-cut and utterly lacking in ambiguity. Later she would tell students of literature: “Because we love literature so much, we often unintentionally suppress our other sides. But in reality people can develop themselves in a more balanced way.”

In 1988, Steve and she founded Trend Micro. From the start they decided it would be a transnational firm seeking markets around the world. It wouldn’t work as an OEM, and it wouldn’t do “me too.” But one night before bed, she was perusing Network Computing. She read and read, and suddenly something went off in her head: “Why am I reading this? Is it a beautiful work of literature?” She asked herself. Tears were an expression of a regret she would not voice. But she had no other option: Without bolstering her knowledge where it was lacking she wouldn’t match up with the competition.

Jenny explains the sudden success of Trend Micro thus: “We picked the right field and then rode the wave, making the right move each time.”

World’s second-largest computer security firm

At the end of the 1980s, Steve Chang took a look at the Internet­ world and determined that “more and more hackers would be writing viruses.” Predicting that this would create a niche market, he founded Trend Micro, an anti-virus company that “didn’t need a factory, or machinery, or a lot of capital investment, but only human brainpower and a computer.”

Jenny Chang reckons that a key to Trend Micro’s success was that it designs its own software and directly interfaces with users. “Software is all about solving people’s problems. With feedback from users, you come to know both your product’s shortcomings and what users really want, and it becomes much easier to come up with technical innovations.”

Today Trend Micro is the world’s second-largest anti-malware software company with a market value of US$5 billion. It has branches in 38 nations, seven global centers and more than 6000 employees. Two-thirds of its employees are skilled engineers and high-level data specialists. Consequently, Jenny says she can’t help but feel “a little proud” when she visits branch offices.

Jenny is responsible for managing personnel around the world, and the “multinational management culture” she has fostered has been cited as a successful case study in research conducted at Harvard Business School. Perhaps Harvard has discovered a big secret: In Taiwan managers that studied Chinese literature have fared better than those who studied business administration.

The first reason for that is that academic training gained from the study of literature gives executives a more self-reflective perspective with which to operate the business. “That’s because literature is all about self-reflection and exploration of one’s inner world,” says Jenny.

The second reason, in Jenny’s estimation, is that Eastern philosophy, based on harmony and tolerance, is very well suited to managing people. “If you want to bring out the best in people, motivating them works a lot better than trying to control them.”

Unfinished literary dreams

Yet ultimately she wasn’t able to quell her inner thirst to write, and she published @ Trend Micro in 1999, The Irrepressible Trend Micro in 2003 and finally Founding Trend Micro in 2013.

This series of three books tells the story of how Trend Micro established itself in the field of computer security. But the most important chapter in that history was also a major turning point in the careers of founders Steve and Jenny ­Chang: In 2005 they turned over the reins of the company to Eva Chen. The ­Changs began second lives, with Steve focusing more on social enterprises and cloud computing and with Jenny gradually moving back into literary endeavors.

However different their temperaments, now that they are in retirement after great career success, they can spend more time pursuing their shared interests in art films and Jungian psychology. Both interests push them toward self-reflection and deeper exploration of their inner selves, at both conscious and subconscious levels.

Spending so much time traveling over the last 25 years, Jenny Chang has accumulated a boatload of unique experience and stories. But journeys end with a return home. In the preface to Founding Trend Micro, she announces that she intends to return to literature, do more for literature and write a book that is more literary in nature.