Meeker’s work is a call to action that should not be ignored. But, what to do? It strikes me that the United States today bears a strong resemblance to IBM in 1993, when the once-mighty company nearly failed, and that IBM’s turnaround offers insights that could help the country get out of this jam.

IBM survived and now thrives again because it radically changed the way it operates. The new IBM has strong financial discipline, invests for the long term and welcomes collaboration with its clients and even with its competitors. It sees globalization as an opportunity, not a threat. It makes decisions based on facts, not emotions. It’s willing to change everything about itself except its core beliefs. And it’s committed to engaging in a continuous process of renewal. If you will, it’s becoming a smarter organization.

In the early 1990s, IBM had a near-death experience. This was a stunning moment in business history because the company had dominated the computer industry practically ever since there was a computer industry. IBM nearly collapsed because its leaders failed to recognize that the mainframe computing model the company had pursued for 40 years was out of date, they were inattentive to clients’ needs and they spent a lot of energy competing amongst themselves.

The parallels with the US today are obvious. The country rose to world dominance based on post-World War II economic advantages, a wealth of natural resources, tremendous military power and a dynamic entrepreneurial spirit. Today, its military and economic strategies are out of date, its natural resources have been depleted, the government isn’t meeting the needs of citizens for jobs and economic opportunities, and many elected leaders are focused primarily on defeating their rivals in elections rather than creating innovative solutions to solve the country’s deep and complex problems.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how people and organizations and countries screw up. It’s much harder to be smart when you’re trying to figure out the present. Still, the lessons from IBM’s turnaround seem to be spot-on relevant to the potential turnaround of the United States.

I explored the lessons from IBM’s history in my role as co-author of the company’s centennial book, Making the World Work Better, which was published in June. In this short blog post, I can’t detail the long list factors that contributed to IBM’s turnaround. Indeed, some don’t require explanation. The merits of financial discipline and fact-based decision making are abundantly obvious—even though they’re too often honored in the breach rather than in observance. So I want to focus on two of them:

View globalization as an opportunity. Since the 1920s, IBM has been a pioneer in each phase of corporate globalization. Now it’s leading the transition to what we call the globally integrated enterprise. Under the multinational model, companies operate mini versions of themselves in every country where they operate, with all the related overhead. In contrast, IBM now performs work on behalf of clients at the places in the world were it can be done most effectively and efficiently. That includes research, product development, manufacturing, and a whole array of centrally coordinated services performed both for IBM itself and its clients.

IBM embarked on this journey in response to the threat of the fast-emerging Indian tech services outfits, which offered roughly comparable services to IBM and other Western tech services companies at much lower prices. IBM had to respond–or risk suffering another near-death experience. It began hiring aggressively in Indian and other low-cost labor markets. But IBM didn’t stop there. Its idea of being truly global is much more expansive than simply capturing the benefits of labor cost arbitrage. India, China, Brazil and other fast-developing economies are IBM’s new growth markets. And IBM understands that it needs to tap the best minds of those countries to succeed there.

The US has not been effective in defending itself against the backwash of globalization. Its immigration policies are self-defeating. When the US blocks highly skilled immigrants from coming and working here, for instance, it weakens the domestic talent pool, and, therefore, US companies. At the same time, compared to other countries, the federal government does little to retain vital industries here—or to foster the development of new ones. Like IBM half a decade ago, the United States needs to wake up to the realities of globalization and develop a strategy for becoming much more competitive. Otherwise, its days as the dominant global economic power are numbered.

Be willing to change everything except your core beliefs: In 1962, Thomas Watson Jr., then IBM’s chief executive, told a university audience that to be successful for many years, an organization has to establish a core set of beliefs upon which it bases its day-to-day actions. Further, he said, it has to adhere to those beliefs, and it has to be willing to change everything except those beliefs in response to a changing environment. That approach to business was the basis of Watson’s decision to risk everything and reinvent the company in the 1960s, with phenomenally successful results.

A decade ago, IBM revised its set of beliefs—similar to the old ones but fine-tuned to today’s realities. They are: “Dedication to every client’s success,” “Innovation that matters, for IBM and the world,” and “Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.” Perhaps the most important aspect of the new beliefs is that they were created through an online “jam” to which every employee was invited.

Those beliefs undergird the transformation journey that IBM has been on ever since.

IBM’s leaders believe that organizations must continuously transform themselves to survive and thrive for the long term. In fact, they have to anticipate changes that are coming and act decisively to get out ahead of them.

Over the past 15 years, IBM has transformed itself from a company whose fortunes were too closely tied to computer hardware to one focused on software, services and other higher-margin parts of the computer business. At the same time, it reshaped itself into a truly global company capable of serving its clients as they adapt to changes in the economy, markets, technology, competition and governmental policies. As expressed in the company’s Smarter Planet agenda, IBM’s mission is simple yet incredibly challenging: making the world work better.

Like IBM of the 1990s, many of the organizations and institutions that grew up in previous centuries are today in need of an overhaul. And, like IBM, the most forward-thinking of them have learned that it’s not enough to successfully complete an organization-saving turnaround. You have to keep the revolution revolving.

For more than two centuries, the United States was driven by a strong aspiration: to make progress, for individuals and society as a whole. Today, some fear change and seek to hold it at bay. They dream of the past, not of the future. Based on analysis of IBM’s experiences, that’s a deeply flawed strategy.

The country’s core values still work. As laid out in the Constitution, they are: “To form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” Yet the mission is not accomplished.

During our research for the centennial book, one of my co-authors, Jeffrey O’Brien, identified a simple but profound truth: change comes easily; it happens by itself; but progress is difficult; it must be won, and won again.

It’s not too late for the United States to rededicate itself to making progress.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Kleiner Perkins, Mary Meeker

The book, published in June in the United States and more recently in seven other languages, is Making the World Work  Better: The Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company.

To do the research and writing, IBM commissioned three journalists, Kevin Maney, Jeffrey O’Brien and myself. Mike Wing, IBM’s speech writer extraordinaire, was the editor. I believe that all four of us would tell you that making this book was one of the more interesting and intellectually challenging experiences in our careers.

Now we’d like to share the experience with you via the Making the World Work Better book club on Goodreads. From Nov. 28 to Dec. 9, we’ll be responding to questions from readers. The club is open to all IBMers, alumni and the general public. So please join us–and don’t worry if you haven’t finished the book yet.

How to join the club:

• Register for a free account on Goodreads.com or log in using your Facebook, Twitter or Google account information.
• On Goodreads.com, join the Making the World Work Better author Q&A group.
  (note: if you are not logged in you may see the message “membership is restricted”)

Once you’ve joined, make the most of your experience:

• Discuss the book with other readers or add new questions for the authors.
• Invite others to join the group.
• Use the hashtag #IBM100book when you tweet about the book.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Making the World Work Better

This quest would be plenty challenging. Computer Scientists have been developing theories about quantum computing ever since physicist Richard Feynman first proposed the concept of computing based on quantum mechanical phenomena in 1982. Nearly 30 years later, there are no quantum computers.

Another proposition came in a close second, with 277 votes: “fight global warming.” (This one got my vote.)

Other suggestions ranged from the earnest, such as “take healthcare to the next level,” with 18 votes; to the ridiculous, “time travel,” with 97 votes.

We’ll pass along the top suggestions to the folks at IBM Research.

To read what it’s all about, see two previous posts, this one by IBM researcher Dario Gil about the effort to create learning systems, and this one, the live blogging stream from IBM Research’s colloquium, the Frontiers of IT.

Technorati Tags: IBM

When IBM’s Watson defeated two past champions on TV’s Jeopardy! game show last February, it awoke many people to the awesome power of computing. Watson demonstrates that computers are at last becoming learning systems–capable of consuming vast amounts of information about the world, learning from it and drawing conclusions that can help humans make better decisions.

At IBM Research, we believe that learning systems will shape the future of information science and the IT industry, and that Watson represents a very significant step on that journey.

But every innovator needs a target to aim for, so, after the Jeopardy! challenge,  we’re searching for the next “grand challenge” to will drive the next advances in Information Technology. To help shape our thinking, we’re engaging in a conversation about the future of computing with scientists and business leaders at an IBM Research Colloquium on Friday at the lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The questions we’re asking are straightforward: What should the next grand challenge be? How should we design it? How should we pursue it?

We want to throw a wider net, as well. The Jeopardy! contest inspired a team of IBM and university researchers to create a system that could beat the best Jeopardy! champions. What “grand challenge” would you choose?  Hopefully, the colloquium and follow-up conversations will help us set an audacious goal.

( To follow live blogging from the colloquium from 10 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. on Friday, bookmark here and come back when the event is live.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

The colloquium is part of an IBM centennial program designed to convene thought leaders – including leading scientists, academics, leaders of industries, public policy makers and IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the world. In addition to addressing learning systems, there will be guest lectures at the colloquium about emerging, disruptive technologies that will change the computing landscape and help enable learning systems in the future — biologically inspired nanosystems, exascale-level processing and the analysis of massive quantities of data from multiple sources.

The decision to focus on learning systems for this particular lab event emerged out of a year-long project that was connected to the IBM centennial. The leaders of IBM Research asked a group of us to look out decades into the future and identify the most important trend in computing that we believe will be a major focus of interest over that long time span. After much deliberating, we chose learning systems.

We picked this topic, in part, because of our belief that for all that computing does for us today, it doesn’t yet do nearly enough.  We need new systems that can become our partners in expanding the horizon of human cognition to help us navigate the increasing complexity of our globally interconnected world. Until now, most electronic computers have been based on the “calculating” paradigm. Our expanding technology frontiers are providing us with the opportunity to build a new class of systems that can learn from both structured and unstructured data, find important correlations, create hypotheses for these correlations, and suggest and measure actions to enable better outcomes for users. Systems with these capabilities will transform our view of computers from “calculators” to “machines that learn”, a shift that will radically alter our expectations of what computing is and the nature of problems it should help us solve. These systems will impact virtually every sector of the economy, enabling applications and services that will range from preventing fraud and providing better security, to helping launch new products, to improving medical diagnosis.

Achieving this level of performance will require advances (and sometimes breakthroughs) in learning algorithms and architectures, expanded data input and output modalities (e.g. the ability to process text, graphs, images, video, sound, and other sensory information) and novel device technologies that will exploit the latest semiconductor and nanotechnology advances (as an example, researchers at IBM are actively working on employing phase-change-memory crossbar arrays to mimic neuronal synapses, paving the way for a new class of biologically inspired neuromorphic computation).
We believe that there will be three phases in the learning systems revolution.

The first phase will be driven by “static” learning systems.  The Watson system that was built to play Jeopardy! is a good illustration of a state-of-the-art “static” learning system.  The term “static” is connected to the fact that researchers had to feed information to Watson, teach it how to play the Jeopardy! game and tweak the programming when they spotted flaws in Watson’s game play.

In a second phase, which we call “dynamic,” the systems will constantly mine information on their own from multiple domains via multiple sources, including text, video and audio. They’ll engage in deeper reasoning, taking advantage the ability to performer higher levels of semantic abstraction to better understand how pieces of information relate to one another.

The third phase would involve “autonomous” learning systems.  In this phase, the systems would achieve understanding of natural language, image, voice, emotion, and other sensory information; be able to self-formulate hypotheses and generate questions across arbitrary domains; and utilize the selection of multiple algorithms to learn autonomously.

At IBM, we believe that exponential growth in our industry has been achieved by a combination of continual improvement and disruptive innovation. Today, it’s time for a huge disruption–learning systems. What are your ideas? What grand challenge should we choose?

Technorati Tags: IBM Research

Source: Agência Brasil

Brazil has a tremendous amount of positive momentum these days. It’s fast emerging as one of the world’s important economies and has a huge wealth of oil, minerals, water, timber and agricultural land. Yet in this world of looming resource constraints, Brazil’s leaders are acutely conscious of the need to make the most of their abundance–while addressing the negative impacts on the environment.

IBM Research – Brazil, which was established last year as the company’s first research lab in the Southern Hemisphere, has aligned its research agenda with Brazil’s national priorities. It’s focusing on natural resources management, complex human systems such as the  World Cup and Olympics events coming up in Brazil, low-complexity microelectronics of the type used in appliances and cars, and quality improvements in services–another area where Brazil is intent on expanding.

Natural resources management is the subject of the IBM Research – Brazil Colloquium, where IBM researchers and scientists from other organizations will speak about the potential and challenges they face. The colloquium is part of an IBM Centennial program designed to convene thought leaders – including leading researchers and scientists, academics, leaders of industries, public policy makers and key IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the world.

The Brazil colloquium is not only intended to foster knowledge and collaboration. “We want to be provocative,” says Fabio Gandour, the Chief Scientist at the Brazil lab, who is in charge of organizing the event.

Well, not too provocative. But Gandour does aim to raise potentially controversial questions before Brazilian government, academic and business leaders. A session on genomics and agriculture will urge farmers to seriously consider the consequences of genetically-modified seeds before planting.  Speakers will urge education leaders to aggressively expand university programs in computational chemistry, biology and physics. Another session, on coupled human and natural systems, an emergent field of inquiry called CHANS,  will caution about the potentially negative consequences on humans of massive industrial or agricultural changes.

Gandour gives an example: Widespread conversion of woodlands to farming has chased a Brazilian relative of the cockatoo from the countryside into cities, where the birds perch on television antennas and the like. It’s great for bird watchers, but the problem is that the birds can be carriers of bacteria that is potentially deadly to humans. The lesson: Be conscious of the unintended consequences of your actions and figure out how to deal with them.

While the provocations should make for lively question-and-answer sessions and conversations during breaks, the heart and soul of the colloquium will be about the potential for science to help make the world work better.

That’s where Ulisses Mello comes in. He’s the program director of the Smarter Natural Resources area in the Brazil lab, and will be one of the key speakers at the colloquium. A specialist in computational geosciences, he worked in research for Petrobras, Brazil’s largest oil company, before he joined IBM in 1994. Mello is on a mission: to help overhaul the world’s natural resource-based industries. “We want to use technology to transform what is traditionally not a knowledge-based industry into one that will manage natural resources to have a better social and economic impact–not only for Brazil but globally,” he says.

As a result of two massive oil discoveries in the ocean off the Atlantic coast of Brazil recently, an oil rush is on. Petrobras has pledged to invest $224 billion in exploration, well drilling and oil extraction over the next five years. Yet due to the the extreme depth of the water and the makeup of the rocks in the area of the findings, discovery and extraction will be risky and, potentially, very expensive.

Mello and his research team are working on new imaging and analysis techniques that will help oil companies find new resources more efficiently and manage them more productively and sustainably. He believes that these approaches could make it possible for the oil outfits to remove up to 70% of the oil from the new fields–compared to a global industry average of just 30%. One promising technique, called full-wave inversion, produces clearer images of underground reservoirs. Also, computer models that analyze the gradual transformation of the earth’s geology over millions of hears help oil companies determine whether a find contains oil, gas or water. This kind of analysis, conducted with supercomputers, is vitally important because of the cost of drilling a new well in deep ocean can be frightfully expensive–up to $250 million per  well in some places–and, in some scenarios, only 10% of wells strike oil.

As a  Brazilian, Mello is highly motivated to help the country become more economically productive, improve the quality of life and do it in a way that’s sustainable. On the colloquium: “This is the beginning of a dialogue with the Brazilian scientific community,” he says. “We’ll be part of the ecosystem. We’re here to stay. That’s the message.”

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM

The crowds of New Yorkers and tourists who frequent the area around New York’s Lincoln Center may be wondering what’s going on near the corner of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. A driveway ramp lined with a 123-foot electronic data visualization wall leads down to an underground parking garage that has been converted into the THINK exhibit. (Believe me; it’s a lot cooler than it sounds.)

The exhibit was created by IBM in connection with its centennial celebrations. The data wall depicts visualizations of several of New York City’s challenges including water leakage, air pollution, traffic and credit card fraud, along with the potential for harvesting solar energy from rooftops. The media experience in the enclosed space at the bottom of the ramp includes a video, experienced on 40 interactive media columns, laying out the potential for making progress. These large vertical interactive touch screens then allow visitors to learn more about topics including smarter transportation systems, improved food production and the promise of personalized medicine. The quality of the displays is amazing–engaging not only your brain but your emotions. For me, the experience was nothing less than mind blowing.

The goal is to inspire people who visit with the message that the world can be made better if people know what’s really going on, understand the potential to improve things, and make smart decisions about how to do it. The exhibit is organized around an idea spelled out by Jeffrey O’Brien, one of my co-authors of IBM’s centennial book, Making the World Work Better, which posits that large-scale progress and innovation tends to follow a common development path: seeing, mapping, understanding, believing and acting. In a city known for its many museums and exhibits, this one stands out because its not just an enriching and educational experience; it’s also a call to action.

The hope is that people who visit, which includes the public and 700 attendees of IBM’s two-day gathering of global leaders, THINK: A Forum on the Future of Leadership, will be motivated to pitch in and help improve everything from the quality of life in their city or town to the sustainability of the natural environment. Lee Green, the IBM vice president who was in charge of making the exhibit happen, says, “We want to show people how progress comes about when you take a systematic approach to solving problems.” Ralph Appelbaum, the famed exhibit designer who was one of the masterminds of the THINK exhibit, said early on in the planning process that he hoped the people who visited the space would become “ambassadors to the future.”

A tip of the hat to the four firms that created the exhibit: SYPartners for the concept design, content development and creative direction, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Inc. for planning and design, Mirada for the direction, design and production of film, interactives and data visualization, and George P. Johnson for the general management of the exhibit production and fabrication. Susana Rodriguez de Tembleque, executive creative director at SYPartners, says, “The design of the experience was deliberately immersive to make the idea of progress palpable and visceral.”

The exhibit brings to the public some of the key themes of THINK Forum, and, indeed, IBM’s centennial celebration. Progress doesn’t happen on its own. It requires bold leadership, taking the long view and developing a strong and cultivating a values-based culture. Organizations need to harness science, innovation and the power of collaboration t”o make the world work better.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Ralph Applebaum, THINK

To learn more about the event, click here. To interact via Twitter, use #Think or #IBM100.

Update: Here’s a video that sums up the ideas and conversations of the THINK Forum:

Click here to view the embedded video.

8;15 a.m. The new president of the Philippines, Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III, talks about his view of the future of leadership. He notes the upheaval in the Middle East, financial trauma in Europe and political friction in the United States—and observes that change comes more quickly now then it did at the time of the democratization of the Philippines.

“Governments need to be nimble and adaptable to respond to challenges as quickly as they emerge.”

He says he’s a pragmatic leader. “Labels are not important to me. We’re trying to create a better living environment four our people.” Some of his policies have been called socialist by others ultra-conservative.

His mother, Corazon Aquino, the country’s first president after the overthrow of the Marcos regime, said “we must institutionalize people power.” That’s what he aims to do.

In this era of ubiquitous information, and they deal with a repressive government, “the people will find a way to reach out to each other and connect.”

“A leader is one who lets his people shape their own future.”

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8:35 a.m. Panel: The Importance of Systems Thinking. A conversation with: Pascal Lamy, Director-General, World Trade Organization; Andrew N. Liveris, CEO, The Dow Chemical Co.; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, professor of global management, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; and Peter Voser, CEO, Royal Dutch Shell. Moderated by Thomas L. Friedman, Foreign Affairs Columnist, The New York Times.

Voser points out that the world now has a population of 7 billion people now, moving to 9 billion by 2050. “We have to produce energy in a more sustainable way, which means with a lower C02 footprint.” Shell is also confronting the looming shortage of water.

“What we need as an industry is a price for CO2. Otherwise we can’t drive to the right solutions.”

But, he says,  “We won’t wait until policies are opened up. We’ll move. We’ll take the risk. As a leader you have to take more risks. Otherwise you won’t be able to bring the changes the world needs over the next 30 to 40 years.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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8:45 a.m. Tyson, of Berkeley, ticks through the characteristics of strong leadership–and cites a couple of IBM’s competitors, Indian software services powerhouses Infosys and Wipro.

A clear vision.

A willingness to create something out of nothing

A willingness to rely on the very best talent.

A reward structure that rewards risk and innovation.

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8:50 a.m. Liveris, of Dow, posits that “ there is no such thing as a free market. You may not have tariffs, but countries are competing like companies, and cities and competing like countries.”  They expect companies to help them create jobs.

His advice to countries and cities: “You don’t pick winners and losers within sectors. You pick sectors.” He says, a country or a city has to pick sectors and have a portfolio of industries.

This connects back to the speech by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday. Since 2001, when he was elected, the city has become much more economically diverse, with the rise of the film and fashion industries, among others.

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9:00 a.m. Pascal Lamy of the WTO: “As the director of the WTO, you don’t lead. You can’t herd cats.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

9:15 a.m. Friedman asks the panelists: “What if politics if fundamentally broken, if nothing can get done?”

Voser, of Shell: “The time is over to wait. We have to move, as corporations. We invest. We have a carbon price at Shell. We just move ahead.”

Tyson, of Berkeley: “Let’s face it. Business is not held in high regard by member sof  society in the United States.  Business people are viewed as part of the problem; not part of the solution.”

She points out that businesses are not influencing by speaking out on policy issues but by funding elections. “We do need serious business leadership in the United States. They have to show how their activity is providing value for society, and they should be open, as opposed to funding campaigns.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Liveris, of Dow: “We’ve lost our way in the United States. Business is not the bad guy. Big business makes small business successful. It’s time to stop letting Hollywood define us. We must define us.”

Lamy, of the WTO: He says most country leaders think they’re trading with one country and making trade relationships with one country at a time. But they’re wrong. Because of the global supply chains, components of products come from everywhere. “IBM ought to have a label on its products that says ‘Made in the World by IBM.”

The crowd applauds enthusiastically.

–

9:45 a.m. Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, talks about his new book, That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

The book is about “the sense that America’s best days are behind it, and China’s best days are ahead of it.” He says it doesn’t have to be; calls himself and his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum, “frustrated optimists.”

The book is about American domestic politics, but it’s really global Because of America’s power and influence, “America, its fate, is the big foreign policy issue in the world.”

The causes of America’s malaise: It’s not the financial collapse of 2008. Its roots go back 20 years. When the Soviet Empire collapsed we declared victory and stopped competing vigorously as a nation. Then, in the past decade, we erred by pursuing “the losers of globalization, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, instead of keeping our eye on the winners, China and India.”

He focuses in on education.
“If you’re below average there is nothing for you that will sustain a middle class lifestyle. We need to bring the bottom to the average and we need to bring the average to the top.”

His advice to parents: “Get your kids to think like new immigrants.”

“We’re all new immigrants to the hyper-connected world.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Context:

Here’s a link to a video of Friedman talking to Prof. Orville Schell. at the Asia Society about the themes of his new book, That Used to be Us.

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10:05 p.m. Rajan Mittal, Vice chairman of India’s Bharti Enterprises, who manages the company’s retailing venture with Walmart, talks about the shifting aspirations of Indian people. “The world is hyper-connected. People can communicate with each other and with their leaders, and leaders must respond.”

There’s a large photo of Mahatma Gandhi on a screen behind him as he speaks.

“People call India a chaotic democracy. That’s so, but if you can learn to drive in India you can drive anywhere in the world. That’s why we’re doing so much in Africa.”

He points out that there are 4 million Chinese in Africa, yet the United States isn’t much of a presence there.

“Africa is the future,”  he says, because that’s where population growth is and where hundreds of millions of people will be entering the middle class.

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11:00 a.m. Carmen Medina, former director, Center for the Study of Intelligence, US Central Intelligence Agency, talks about her early days at the CIA when she was part of what she calls “the rebel alliance.”

“I’m a heretic. I want to offer you some advice. You all have heretics. They’re not your enemy. They’re trying to help you. They’re probably part of your solution.”

She recalls the time in 2005, when two of her people came to her with the idea of creating a Wikipedia clone for sharing information. Ultimately, that idea grew up into Telepedia, which helped the analyst get out of their silos, be more collaborative, and change the production model of the analysis in the agency, away from a single analyst preparing a thick report that was hard to share.

The talks about “sensemaking,” using data and analysis to find out what’s happening in the world. So Telepedia is a sensemaking tool for the CIA. But, she adds, “No matter how great your sensemaking tools are they won’t make you squat—a CIA term—if you don’t have the right theories.”

Lesson 1 about sensemaking: Our ability to understand the world around us is a direct function of the technologies we have to see in the world

Lesson 2: The best way to understand the future is to observe the present very, very carefully. That’s what you’re getting with sensemaking an analytic tools.

Lesson 3: Every great achievement in human knowledge involves breaking through a problem everybody else believed couldn’t be solved.

“My challenge to you is what unsolvable problem are you going to tackle next?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Context:

In this video, Medina talks in this video about being a “different thinker” at the CIA, anti-bureaucracy, pro-collaboration. And says: “Optimism is the greatest act of rebellion.”

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11:15 a.m. During a short introduction, John Kelly, IBM’s director of research, talks about the limitations of intuition in decision making. Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, who is about to moderate a panel, takes issue with that. He says the right kind of intuition can be very useful. At times of inflection, like now, he says, the old rules of how things work are no longer holding, so you can’t make sound decisions based on the data that supports those rules. You have to be open to new possibilities that are not yet supported by data. And that’s where intuition comes in.

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11:30 p.m. Next up is a panel discussion, Bringing Science to Leadership, a conversation with Dave Ferrucci, Fellow, Research, IBM; Thomas W. Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management; and Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc. The moderator is Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab.

Ferrucci, of IBM, makes the point that IBM’s Watson, the AI machine that beat the grand champions of TV’s Jeopardy!, provides a guide for leadership. “We can’t give in to our bias or our limited expertise. We have to use technology to cast a wide net and gather a lot of information, and to bring it together in way that makes sense out of it. That’s what we did with Watson.”

Malone, of MIT, talks about how he and colleagues have posited that groups of people possess a “collective intelligence” that, if used well, can make organizations much more effectively.

Collective intelligence is based on three factors:

1) Group members’ ability to read other’s expressions.
2) Evenness of conversational participation. If one person dominates, it’s not good.
3) Greater proportion of women in the group.

His conclusion: “What really matters is not the individual intelligence of people but the collective intelligence of groups.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Schmitz, of Mars, talks about the collaboration of Mars, IBM and the US Government to sequence the cocoa gene–to make the plant and the chocolate industry more sustainable. Contrary to Mars’ traditional way of doing business, they open sourced the project and put the entire genome in the public domain. “To get the smartest capable people in the world to work on this, we couldn’t hold it in Mars.”

He says Mars is testing the concept of “unstructured collaboration” in a big way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ito, of the MIT Media Lab, says he doesn’t see the “old fashioned leader” in any of their models. He asks how leadership is changing.

Malone: “We talk about distributed leadership. It has to come from the top, bottom and everything in between.”

“It’s a profound change in our whole society that’s enabled by information technology.”

Schmitz: “We’re entering an era where the scientific method is the way to find the truth. Leaders need to use the scientific method.”

–

The Context:

David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow and head of the Watson artificial intelligence project, talks about how today’s leaders have to operate a bit like Watson did when it took on the Jeopardy! champions and won: They have to gather a tremendous amount of diverse information, analyze it, and consider many possibilities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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12:00 p.m. In a short speech, Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media lab, talks about some new models of leadership—which he calls “emergent leadership.” They include the Mozilla organization, which oversees the Firefox Internet browser, and Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia, and Creative Commons, which coordinates open source licensing.

He talks about his approach to life:

“I don’t believe in plans. That’s why I only focus on short term things. That’s why I dropped out of some of the best colleges in America.”

His kind of learning experience:

At Foo Camp, where software programmers and other technologists gather to share ideas, people show up, pitch tents, and decide what the agenda will be when they get there.

“You can’t have serendipity, you can’t have luck, if you plan everything.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The Context:

Here’s an intriguing Q&A interview with Ito via News.com. He talks about managing networks: “It’s not like one big connection, but in a highly contextual way, like synapses in a brain. It’s not about power or influence. It’s about exactly the right connections that have exactly the right effect.”

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1:50 p.m. A panel discussion, The Transformational Role of the Corporation, with Bruno Di Leo, General Manager, Growth Markets, IBM;  Chanda Kochhar, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, ICICI Bank Limited; and Ellen Kullman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, DuPont. The panel is moderated by Charlie Rose, Executive Editor and Anchor, Charlie Rose.

Rose asks, what are the new requirements for leading today?

Kochhar, of ICICI, says you have to get the best out of your people. “Most things about a business are getting more and more commoditized. So you have to do better at managing what you have. And people are what makes the difference.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Di Leo, of IBM, says to succeed in emerging market you have to change business models. It changes leadership, too. In IBM’s case it addressed the emerging markets by creating the Growth Markets Unit, which is run with a organizational models and go-to-market strategies that wouldn’t make sense in mature markets. “You have to change the leadership mindset.”

Kullman, of DuPont, says when you’re 109 years old, which DuPont is, “it’s important to be able to figure out which things to keep in your culture and which things to throw out.”

Rose asks about the concept of shared value—the idea of corporations contributing socially.

Di Leo talks about the Corporate Service Corps, a program for leadership development and social engagement that IBM has been running for more than 3 years. It’s a key part of IBM’s approach to doing business in Africa. Small teams of IBMers from around the world spend a month in an emerging market helping improve government, business practices and the economy. He says: “You make yourself relevant, and you learn.”

Kullman talks about the stresses on the world today, population growth, poverty, malnutrition and conflicts between nations. “How are we as companies helping to solve these problems? You have to be a leader. We have focused for the past 10 years on agriculture. How can you produce much more in an acre than you could before? Farmers are very advanced in the US, but, in India, we have a long way to go. One of the things we have to do it to get technology adopted as quickly as possible.”

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The Context:

Kullman talks in this video about the importance of collaboration across the boundaries of government, business and academia to solve the world’s problem—in particular hunger and energy shortages.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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2:20 p.m. Next up: H.E. Laura Chinchilla-Miranda, President, Republic of Costa Rica. She talks about the survival lessons for any person, company or country. In Costa Rica, she has a lot to be proud of. The country has the most successful economy in Central America; its life expectancy is equal to that of the United States, thanks in part to a universal health care coverage system; and a large percent of its land has been set off limits from commercial development. One other distinction, she says: “In 1948 to decide we’d be the one country in the world not to have an army. We decided not to squander one cent fighting wars and instead to invest in educating our children.”

Today, Costa Rica invests more than 7% of its GDP in education, but she aims to keep improving the system at all levels. They’re accentuating languages, and have set a goal of having 100% of all high school students being multilingual, so they can succeed in an increasingly globalized world economy.

“We want to embrace change in order to preserve what’s best about ourselves.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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3:10 p.m. Next: Chris Meledandri, producer, founder and CEO, Illumination Entertainment, a computer animation company that created the popular films Ice Age and  Despicable Me. He was formerly the head of Fox Blue Sky. He quit to build his own company. “I decided to build a new model for the world we were heading towards, rather than the one we were leaving behind.”

The principles:

–Make animated films for $175 million or less without loss of quality.
–Globally diverse leadership for movies aimed at a global market.
–Create culturally-agnostic characters.
–Tap global talent. Take the jobs to the talent. HQ is in Paris, because that culture creates great artists.
–Not only entertain but aspire to make the world a better place. Next film up is based on The Lorax, Dr. Seuss’s book about the destructiveness of greed.
–Leaders have great expertise, but have a passion for innovation; They have an unrelenting drive for excellence and efficiency. They’re self-critical, as is the entire organization. They thrive during times of volatility. They share values—the glue that holds the global organization together: authenticity, empathy, vulnerability, curiosity and good humor.

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3:45 p.m. The final panel: 100 Years Forward, a conversation with  David Jones, Global Chief Executive Officer, Euro RSCG Worldwide; Tina Ju, Founding and Managing Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, China; and Chris Meledandri, CEO of Illumination Entertainment. The focus is on how leadership will change over the coming decades.

Jones, of Euro RSCG, talks about his project, One Young World, a platform for people who are under 25 to help them affect social change.

He advises corporate leaders to give empower young people—and listen to them. “If you’re not having people who are 31 talking to your CEOs, you’re probably making a mistake.”

Ju, of KPCB, talks about how quickly Internet startups pop up in China, and how quickly some of them drop off the map. She estimates that there are 50 million micro-entrepreneurs in China, tiny outfits without funding; five millions SMBs and about 50,000 companies that have funding from the 8000 plus venture capital and growth-capital firms in China. “It makes it very difficult for us. We have to do a lot of grassroots work.”

Meledandri, of Illumination Entertainment, talks about the challenges of running a global company. “The mistakes I’ve made are when I don’t apply the necessary diligence to communicating directly and appearing physically. If I take the short cut of just using email, things deteriorate very quickly.”

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The Context:

Chris Meledandri Discusses Innovative Leadership With Errol Morris.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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4:00 p.m. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano wraps it up, recalling some of the stick-with-you comments from the speakers.

He quotes from Benigno Aquino, the president of Philippines: “Ideology and labels aren’t important. Leaders will be judged based on results not on vision.”

Palmisano: “As a leader, you’re not the brand. IBM is the brand. The brand is your company, country and your city. You’re not the brand.”

He quotes from Tom Friedman: “You need to be an immigrant.”

Palmisano: “I grew up in an immigrant family. There was no entitlement. You were going to be educated. You were going to have great grades. No excuses.”

“What does Tom mean? I think he means invest in yourself! Get trained! Skill up!”

Palmisano recalls that 50 years ago, Tom Watson Jr., then the IBM CEO, told an audience at Columbia University: “I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world it must be prepared to change everything about itself but its core beliefs.”

He recalls IBM’s near failure in the 1990s, and how he was one of the top executives when Lou Gerstner come in to turn around the company—and he thought he was a goner. But he got the chance to help rebuild the company and eventually become its leader.

He last words of advice: “As a leader, define your self as the temporary caretaker of an exemplary institution and leave it better than it was when you found it.”

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Documentary maker Errol Morris interviews IBM CEO Sam Palmisano about today’s leadership challenges.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, THINK Forum

By Mauricio Godoy
and Chris Andrews
IBM Communications

Gary Barnett, an analyst at The Bathwick Group, an IT market research group, talks about how rapid and radical change in the business environment will force radical changes in leadership.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Carmen Medina, former director of information at the CIA. talks about how she was inspired earlier in the day by Philippines President Aquino, who talked about a leader being led by the will of his people.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Calline Sanchez, director, data protection and retention, IBM Systems & Technology Group, talks about how she’s learning to develop and depend on her team, rather than trying to do too much herself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here’s Brian Puffer of BP talking about the most intriguing idea he has heard so far this morning at the THINK Forum:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow and head of the Watson artificial intelligence project, talks about how today’s leaders have to operate a bit like Watson did when it took on the Jeopardy! champions and won: They have to gather a tremendous amount of diverse information, analyze it, and consider many possibilities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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At IBM’s THINK Forum, Inhi Cho Suh, vice president of product management at IBM, discusses the challenges facing toway’s leaders involving dealing with massive amounts of data.

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Dharmendra Modha, manager, cognitive computing, IBM Research, talks about the challenges of managing a major science discovery project, cognitive chips.

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Technorati Tags: IBM, THINK Forum

To learn more about the event, click here. To interact via Twitter, use #Think or #IBM100.

At IBM’s THINK Forum in New York City, Errol Morris talks to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano about ethical leadership challenges. Palmisano explains that to be a successful leader, leadership values are critical and the leader must think beyond just his own job and look at the business, the enterprise and society when making decisions

Click here to view the embedded video.

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1:45 p.m. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano kicks of the session off, talking about what IBM has learned from studying its history in this, it’s centennial year. He believes that the lessons from IBM are useful not just for IBMers but for leaders of other organizations.

“The most obvious and most underestimated lesson in the history of IBMis you must keep moving to the future. It’s easier said than done. It’ s much easier to stick to the things that made your company successful. But one of the great responsibilities of leadership is recognizing when to change. And it’s also important to recognize what shouldn’t change, what must endure.”

He’s talking about culture. That’s the thread that has held IBM together in its good times and bad.

He adds that the “people part” is perhaps most difficult to deal with.

“The hardest thing to change in the world is a person, and that includes myself.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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2:05 p.m. Palmisano acknowledges the economic and political tumult in the world today. “It seems like this new world is getting the best of our leaders.”

But he says if you look deeper you’ll see that a lot of innovation is going on in companies, NGOs and even governments.

“I’m not saying that government is broken and all the innovation is coming from the private sector.”

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2:10 p.m. Palmisano points out that some people despair about the situation in the world.

“I disagree. There’s something to be done.” He forsees “a golden age of innovation.”

Earlier this week, he told a group of future IBM leaders that it’s the difficult times that demand leadership and invites young leaders to emerge.

“You don’t have to live in a lousy world. A leader will do something about it and change it.”

Here’s what he says at the keys to success in the 21^st century

1)      Take advantage of the new technology capabilities that exist—in instrumentation, interconnection and analysis.

2)       See yourself not only as a fierce competitor but as a broad collaborator with clients, business partners and even competitors.

3)      Manage for the long term. A lot of people talk about doing this but don’t really do it. Build a strong management team and a intentional culture.

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2:20 p.m. Panel on the Future of Leadership.

Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corporation, disagrees with Palmisano’s remarks, a bit. He’s thinking about the long term but he has to solve short-term problems right now, and he’s not alone.

“Yes, you should think about the long term, but we’re in a real time short term crisis. People are terrified about the short term. The president took the long view when he came on. In the short term this country must solve some short term problems that are very dangerous.”

He says government leaders have to propose solutions to the critical problems, and to rally their citizens around them. .”The failure of today’s leaders is the failure to create a feeling of optimism.”

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2:30 p.m. Panelist Joshua Cooper Ramo, Managing Director, Kissinger Associates, a New York City-based international consulting firm run by Henry Kissinger, talks about globalization and culture. He now lives in China. He said before he went somebody gave him a bit of vital advice. “It’s as important to be multi-cultural as to be multi-lingual.” In China, he says, it’s about the power of relationships. In the West, it’s about following the rules.

“We’re living in an age where the rules-based culture doesn’t work. You have to rely on your relationships to get through.”

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2:55 p.m. Ramo concludes: “When you’re going though a period of unprecedented change, the winners are the ones that are willing to take the big risks.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Context

Ramo, recently published a book in 2010 about today’s global tumult,  The Age of the Unthinkable. Here’s a video where he explains his themes in the book, including this insight: “What’s unthinkable about our era is we’re trying to manage constant newness with ideas that are ceaselessly failing.” And yet he believes there’s also the potential for “spectacular invention and innovation”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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3:25 p.m. A Speech by Royal Majesty Abdullah II Bin ~l Hussein, King of Jordan. He talks about how important information technology is for Jordan. The country has a $2.2 billion tech industry, and while only 1% of the population is employed in the industry, it contributes 14% of GDP. He calls Jordan’s partnership with IBM over the years evidence of a powerful reality of the modern age. “Connectivity is a given. We all have an interest in working together. Yet with all the wonders that tech can do, here’s what it can’t do: It can’t make our decisions for us, confront hard realities or collaborate with others to solve problems.”

He talks about the Arab Spring, and the pressures on leaders in the region to reform. He points out that Jordan began democratic and economic reforms long ago, and is still transforming. “People want freedom and opportunity. Jordan is listening.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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5:00 p.m. Panel: Leading in Times of Deep Structural Change, a conversation with Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Victor Fung, Group Chairman, Li & Fung Limited; and Jim McNerney, CEO of The Boeing Company. Moderator:  Fareed Zakaria, journalist and CNN host.

This panel produces a wide ranging conversation about the global economy.

Dimon is surprisingly optimistic about the future of the US economy. He says things have stabilized, and he’s even hopeful about the housing market. There has  been little developing of new housing and a lot of demolition of old housing. “Housing will come back because all of our kids came home. They don’t like it and we don’t like it.”

They have a quick exchange about the changing dynamics in the global supply chain.

Fung predicts that China will shift from concentrating totally on exports to boosting domestic consumption and imports.

McNerney: “You’ll produce and sell everywhere.”

Zakaria: “Will all the production keep going to cheaper and cheaper labor markets? Is it more complicated than that?”

Fung says no: “You need to respond quickly to demand, so perhaps you’ll pull production back closer to the demand in some cases.”

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5:20 p.m. McNerny talks about what Boeing learned from its problems with the 878 Dreamliner, which will finally come to market in the near future. He says its a great design and a great innovation model and sales are very good, but implementation and execution problems causes serious delays in delivery. The big lesson: “The bigger the innovation, the more failure you can tolerate in implementation.”

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5:25 p.m. Fung’s parting insight: “You have to think of your company as a part of a network.” And you can’t be content to just transform your own company. You have to help other organizations in your network transform themselves, too.

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5:40 p.m.Fareed Zakaria, CNN Host and author, gives  his view on the current global financial crisis. He goes back historically and talks about the financial shocks globally since the early 1990s. He argues that the response from governments saved the world economy. I could have been much worse. He says: “When the cost of capital collapses, people do stupid things.” No amount of regulation can prevent it.

Political leaders are good at crisis management, he says. A crisis raises the stakes. They must act. US political leaders passed TARP in two weeks. They worked together. They saved the banking system. It was so successful that the government will turn a profit. “We not so good at handling long term problems. We’re good at dealing with heart attacks. We’re not good at dealing with cancer.”

If we’re going to get through this we have to focus on innovation and education. “You have to be willing to accept short term gain for long term gain.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Context:

Here’s a video of Zakaria’s speech at the University of Minnesota in May. He talked about the Arab Spring and the “spillover effect.”  It’s a tremendously insightful lecture—once you get past the long and funny introductory anecdote about Muammar Gaddafi. He says: “We are witnessing a kind of Arab awakening we have not seen in centuries. They’re trying to achieve a sovereignty and independence they haven’t achieved for 1000 years.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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5:55 p.m. In his speech, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, President of Mexico, recalls the financial crises in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, when the governments spent far beyond their means, and their external debt exploded. “We lost more than 10 years paying off our debt. It was a very painful process for our countries.”

The lessons that could apply today?

You need to allocate the cost of the problem among the actors and the responsible people, he says. The taxpayers, students and retirees alone shouldn’t pay the price. The people and enterprises who took the risk should also pay a price.

You shouldn’t peg your currency to other currencies. You should be able to take action and adjust your economy through your currency.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Context:

Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, President of Mexico, has a lot on his plate. Not only is he dealing with a struggling economy and a war with drug lords, he’s also a leading spokesman for global environmental sustainability. Here’s a video made in connection with the Champions of the Earth Award, which he received in May. He champions the “green economy” and says there’s a false dilemma when people say we can’t promote economic development and safeguard the environment at the same time: “We can close the gap between nature and man and at the same time we can close the gap between the rich and the poor.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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6:30 p.m. Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States, has just come from a meeting with President Obama and 40 other heads of state—where they committed to solve the problems of the world through open and collaborative innovation. The role of government, he says, should be that of “impatient convener.”

The focus of innovation for the Obama administration are health, education and energy.

He talks about Data.gov, which is a platform for making public vast data sets from all areas of government and opening them up to outsiders to create applications for exploring the data.

He says the platform is expanding, and, in fact, the US will now collaborate with the government of India to co-develop an even more powerful data access platform.

“Open innovation is the real magic.”

Technorati Tags: IBM, THINK Forum

By Mauricio Godoy and Chris Andrews
IBM Communications

Sara Arildsson, director of IBM’s Software Group in Sweden, talks about how global economic uncertainty and cost pressures actually present an opportunity to companies and their clients. They can share what they learn about dealing with adversity and help each other solve their problems

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Ziaad Suleman, based in South Africa, is the chief attorney for IBM in sub-Saharan Africa. He talks about the challenges of leading in Africa.

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Paul Ahlstrom, managing director of Alta Ventures in Mexico, talks about the importance of making bold leadership moves and taking risks at times like this.

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Christian Bruckner, COO of Banca Comerciala Romana, in Romania, talks about today’s leadership challenges.

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Cameron Brooks, director, IBM Government Healthcare Segment, talks about how leaders must emerge in the US healthcare system and create collaborations that cut across the industry to improve the performance of the system.

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Rashmy Chatterjee, vice president, general business, IBM Software Group, growth markets, talks about the challenging in managing today’s young employees.

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Gonzalo Miranda, venture capitalist at Austral Capital, talks about the need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurs in Latin America.

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Activate Managing Director Anil Dash talks about the challenge of getting people motivated to take on big complex problems that take a long time to resolve and aren’t sexy.

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Bevin Maguire, vice president, marketing, IBM Global Business Services, talks about the importance of creative leadership.

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Hundreds of future leaders are milling around in the atrium  of Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center, getting ready to file into the hall for the start of THINK Forum. We’re pulling attendees aside and capturing their views on leadership.

Here’s a very personal and moving bit of testimony from Jeanne Mechler, a distinguished engineer and chip designer in IBM’s Systems & Technology division. She talks about how advice from her father, a longtime IBMer himself, guides her approach to problem solving.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, THINK Forum