In 2005, Lu's life was turned upside down: the stock exchange placed her company's shares under restricted trading, her father suffered a stroke, her mother had a car accident.... At the time, Lu told herself, "I'd be willing to go to jail if it meant saving PQI."

If she could erase the memory of March 15, 2005, the career of the young accountant from Hualien who now runs a company with an annual turnover of more than NT$27 billion would have been a story of unadulterated success with a perfect ending. Unfortunately, that is not how the story unfolded, and that day is forever branded in her memory.

Special investigators from the Taiwan High Court's Public Prosecutor's Office raided PQI's Chungho head office looking for evidence. The following day, PQI shares were placed under restricted trading, and CEO and Board Chair Jance Lu was indicted on financial fraud charges.

In what was widely said to be the most unusual case of securities misconduct to have hit Taiwan in 30 years, PQI came under the scrutiny of the Financial Supervisory Commission on suspicion of falsifying financial statements. All hell broke loose when "stock vulture" investors started buying up PQI stock. Jance Lu's financial mistakes brought the "child" she had devoted 20 years of her life to build to the brink of an early grave.

Fast forward to early 2007. In 2006 PQI posted a turnover of NT$27 billion and earnings per share of NT$1.4--14 times more than in 2005. Evidently, the child has not only survived but is thriving. To save PQI, Lu had to surrender the chairmanship to an outsider, but by mid-2005 the company had achieved a turnaround. Lu is pleased with PQI's most recent share price of NT$25, four times its lowest level.

What character traits did this female entrepreneur need to prevail in the male-dominated world of high-tech and build PQI's annual turnover from NT$1 million to today's NT$27 billion? How much strength did it take to snatch PQI from the jaws of death and put it back firmly on its feet after so many trials?

Steeled by early poverty

Jance Lu was born in Chi-an, a small Hualien township that is rich in marble and is well known for its carvings. Memories of poverty are common to most families from the 1960s, but in the farming community of Chi-an, Lu's father was one of the poorest of the poor. With 11 mouths to feed, every child had to help with farm work and household chores.

Jance was in fifth grade when she began cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the whole family. She also fed the pigs and raised ducks. Growing up poor and having to juggle house and school work taught her to endure all sorts of hardship.

Years later, with NT$200,000 worth of equipment a friend had given them to repay a debt, Lu and her husband founded CT Master Trading Co. In the 1980s, CT made motherboard components on a subcontract basis. Riding the rising wave of the IT peripherals industry, in 1997 Lu founded PQI. Then, in 2005, came a series of devastating blows. Having experienced so many ups and downs in her career, Lu tells herself that looking reality square in the face and solving each crisis as it occurs is more important than trying to predict ultimate success or failure.

"I do have to show greater resilience and confidence than my staff," admits Lu. During the company's bleakest hours in 2005, she wept bitter tears at night, but there was no one else around to share the burden, so she had no alternative but to grit her teeth and carry on without complaint.

Fred Lin, who had just become special assistant to the CEO and PQI spokesman when the indictment came down, says Lu is one of very few female CEOs he has met whose face never betrays her emotions. Although the company was in big trouble in 2005, she remained levelheaded and wore a smile throughout the crisis. To this day, says Lin, he has never seen her lose her temper in the office. These leadership qualities enabled Lu to quickly settle her troops and help PQI rise from the ashes.

Playing the price game

In addition to having a big memory capacity, a successful CEO's brain also needs plenty of processing power. In the high-tech industry, the boss of a memory module manufacturing company often has to "overclock" that brain to get results.

DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips generally account for 70% of the cost of a memory module, but DRAM prices are highly volatile. Thus memory module manufacturers have to respond quickly to sudden fluctuations in DRAM prices. Competition is fast and furious, and speed determines winners and losers. The company that can best predict where DRAM prices are going is king of the hill.

Fred Lin says that at the end of last year, the price of one 512MB DRAM module was US$6, but within four months it had fallen to US$2. During that period every decision was a life-and-death gamble. Based on 20 years of experience in the business, when Lu hears upstream DRAM module makers tell her "we have inventory pressure," she suspects that prices are about to drop and tries to be the first to lower her own prices to unload inventory and cut her losses to a minimum. In addition, every morning at 6:30 she scours specialized technology websites in North America and Europe to "train her nose" to be sensitive to price fluctuations. She is often closer to the mark than the top male professionals.

Dealing with male executives

"We all know how to make ourselves heard," says PQI's deputy PR director Chen Pang-yu. Lu's is not the only voice heard at PQI executive meetings: five or six male executives can usually be heard arguing over a particular point. Lu always listens attentively to the cacophony of voices and then decides in favor of the proposal she deems most likely to succeed.

Lu's conference room is her workshop for dealing with male managers, who still comprise over 80% of all top managers.

"Male managers are good at charging ahead. As long as I give them a platform to do their thing, I can step back and just check that they're doing their job. If you give them a task they actually want to take on, they can get the job done without supervision," says Lu frankly. "But they have to show results. If they don't, the boss has to be firm," says Lin, adding that Jance Lu may be all smiles, but whenever her tone cools a few degrees and she tells a male subordinate, "I'm not very satisfied with your performance," he knows he's in trouble and needs to shape up or ship out.

Although she has to run the company with the carrot and the stick, Jance Lu's maternal qualities are actually the main reason her employees have been willing to stick together through thick and thin.

When I visited PQI, Fred Lin had just returned from a business trip to Japan and was pleasantly surprised when Lu personally gave him a present for his 43rd birthday. Although Lu works more than ten hours a day and is forever visiting DRAM suppliers and PC manufacturers, she not only remembers her subordinates' birthdays but also knows all of the almost 400 workers in PQI's Taipei factory. At the year-end dinner, she personally gives each employee a hug and the traditional red envelope stuffed with "good luck" money.

Work-life balance

During the painful experience of 2005, Jance Lu cried many quiet tears at night, but the ordeal also enabled PQI to "grow up." Had it not been for this crisis, PQI might never have had the opportunity to thoroughly transform itself, but once the company crossed its Rubicon it was able to take a real step into the international arena.

PQI started out with five employees, but grew so fast that Lu could not keep up and ended up making a number of errors in financial, legal, and personnel areas, opening the way for stock vultures to mount an attack. Now that PQI is back on track, Lu has tested into National Chengchi University's EMBA program, which she hopes will not only be rewarding, but will also help her avoid repeating past mistakes.

Running a company that is rising from the ashes and going to graduate school at the same time is enough to keep anyone's hands full. Where does that leave Lu's son?

"I'll be the first to admit that juggling family and career is a very tough challenge for a mother," says Lu, her eyes welling up.

"My son once told me, you're nicer to your company than to me," says Lu with a sigh. "If you ask me: did I have feelings of guilt and regret? You bet I did. I wasn't able to do what most mothers take for granted: to be there waiting when my child gets home from school and to ask him morning and night how things are going."

To be able to devote herself heart and soul to the company, for years Lu entrusted her young son to the care of her younger sister in Hualien. But now that PQI is going from strength to strength and her son is starting high school, she has decided to bring him up to Taipei to live with her. She still doesn't have much time to share meals and have heart-to-heart chats with him, but having him by her side makes her even more determined to succeed, and also gives her more reasons to smile.