Superman for our Times

Ever wonder, when you were in school, for example, why some people seem to coast effortlessly by on very little sleep, accomplish an amazing amount of work, excel at pratically everything and do it without breaking a sweat? And why other people struggle just to get up in the morning and make coffee?

Count me as one of the latter, and count many people in the technology world as among the former. (No surprise: the overachievers tend to be richer.) Our most recent addition to this august circle: Qi Lu, the new president of Microsoft’s online services division. A veteran of the internet search warshe led Yahoo’s search battle against Google for a decade before stepping down last year, he’s now taking aim at Google yet again, this time to help Microsoft’s flagging search efforts.

The New York Times profiles Qi today (see here), but here’s a quick takeaway of this new luminary in Redmond’s firmament:

– He held nightly meetings with managers (at 9:30) to find ways to take on Google.

– He grew up in China, raised by grandparents in a village with no electricity or running water

– He gets by on three or four hours of sleep per night, and likes to be in the office by 5 or 6 a.m. to prepare for the day without other people around him.

– He often works past midnight.

– On his last day of work at Yahoo, he stayed late to fix a problem, only leaving when his network access was automatically canceled at midnight.

– He still manages to have a family life, with two children (more of a weekend family, apparently).

Sounds he fits in quite well in Redmond.

(We also ran a short piece on Qi Lu and the launch of Bing in our August issue).