(FORTUNE Magazine) – With a degree in pure mathematics from MIT, a Harvard MBA, and a two-year stint in New York with the investment firm First Boston under her belt, Margie Yang returned home to Hong Kong in 1978 to join her family's privately owned clothing company. She immediately saw what the process-intensive business was all about. "Hey, this is just linear programming," she said. The family "thought I was nuts." A couple of decades later she has proved she knows what she is talking about. The Esquel Group is notable for successfully incorporating high-tech methods and Western management disciplines in an industry and region where both have been scarce. For example, Yang ensures quality by running the company as a highly integrated concern: Esquel even grows its own cotton to make sure it's consistently good.

With 43,000 employees and 16 factories operating in eight countries, Esquel is one of the world's biggest makers of top-of-the-line clothes (mainly men's shirts) for the likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch. The firm expects $500 million in revenues this year, and although it won't disclose profits (it's still 100% family owned), Yang says earnings as a share of sales have doubled in the past three years.

Yang is politically well connected in China and has her finger in a lot of other pies, sitting on various MIT and Harvard advisory boards and, in 1998, becoming the first woman to sit on Gillette's board of directors. Her business heroes are Jack Welch and fellow Gillette board member Warren Buffett.

Yang is one of the freshest faces of a new Asian corporate elite. The old man autocratically calling even the smallest shots is going out of style. The future lies with leaders like Yang, who are driving high-tech standards through traditionally low-tech businesses and managing them with total transparency.

--J.R.