As globally-integrated firms like IBM are discovering, the roles of formal authority and hierarchy are declining in the workplace. What remains, however, is the core purpose they served – the need to influence others, to make a difference in other people’s actions and the thoughts and feelings that drive those actions.

Thus, the key challenge for IBM and others is this: if authority and hierarchy are waning, what are now the primary tools of influence available to those responsible for the performance of others? How, for example, can IBM’s Global Enablement Teams of senior leaders from mature economies best influence and develop the skills of local managers in emerging economies?

In this new world, we believe there are three key tools of influence, which we call the three imperatives of leadership:

Manage Yourself: Your ability to influence others begins with you and who you are as a person, and the most important feature here is whether people trust you. Are they confident you will do the right thing? Effective leaders now build relationships based on trust, not authority or social ties like friendship. And they do that by earning people’s confidence in their competence and character, the key components of trust. People trust someone who knows what to do and how to do it (competence) and who intends to do the right thing (character). Trust is the foundation of all influence other than coercion.

Manage Your Network: Interdependence has always been a hallmark of all organizations – no person or group works in isolation. But as organizations become more amorphous and fluid, as they spread around the world and embrace diverse cultures, this ability to connect and collaborate with those you don’t control grows even more crucial. It’s the only way to wield broad influence in the political environment that exists in all organizations.

Manage Your Team: Whether a group formally works for you or you assembled its members voluntarily for a specific reason, you must convert this group into a true team whose members are mutually committed to a common purpose – a group with such strong interpersonal ties that they believe “we” will succeed or fail together. When a team “clicks” in this way around a common purpose, its members are more committed, work harder, and are more productive and innovative because no member wants to let the others down. No leader can make a group into a team by decree. She can only foster the conditions that create a team and then manage the team through the social ties that bind members around a common purpose.

This strategic approach to management and leadership offers clear advantages:

The imperatives don’t depend on authority or hierarchy. They apply whether your responsibility for a group is assigned by an organization, conferred by members of the group itself, or assumed by you as you voluntarily step up to leadership.

The three imperatives are a better way to think about management and leadership than the hodge-podge of generic activities that traditionally defined those roles. Instead of performing 10-15 activities – motivating, controlling, communicating, and so on – you can focus on three key strategies that provide a simple but powerful framework for all your work. There’s no need to ask, “When do I apply the imperatives?” because the answer is, “Always – everything you do is an opportunity to apply and pursue them.”

The three imperatives are unlikely to change because they work across generations and cultures, all of which value trust, collaborative relationships, and commitment to a valued mutual purpose.

Finally, the imperatives are a guide to personal growth. They are the key areas that you must master on your years-long journey as a leader, guideposts you can use to assess your progress every day.

Linda A. Hill is Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and chair of the school’s Leadership Initiative.  Kent Lineback, now a coach and writer, was a manager and executive for nearly 30 years. They are co-authors of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011)  www.beingtheboss.com

Here’s another point of view from the NextGen Leaders series, from Wharton’s Mike Useem.

Technorati Tags: emerging markets, Global, globalization, Harvard, Harvard Business School, Leadership, skills

by Michael Useem, Professor of Management and Director of the Leadership Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

A checklist is only as good as its underlying foundation, and the foundation is only as solid as the materials and engineering that go into it.  That also applies to effective leadership, which I believe can be distilled into a set of core principles that help leaders navigate complex challenges around the world.

To build a Leader’s Checklist, I have tapped not only my own experience but also that of an array of investigators, researchers, thinkers, and managers.  I have concluded that management experience points to a core of just 15 mission-critical leadership principles that vary surprisingly little among companies or countries:

1. Articulate a Vision: Formulate a clear and persuasive vision and communicate it to all members of the enterprise.

2. Think and Act Strategically: Set forth a pragmatic strategy for achieving that vision both short- and long-term, and ensure that it is widely understood; consider all the players, and anticipate reactions and resistance before they are manifest.

3. Honor the Room: Frequently express your confidence in and support for those who work with and for you.

4. Take Charge: Embrace a bias for action, of taking responsibility even if it is not formally delegated, particularly if you are well positioned to make a difference.

5. Act Decisively: Make good and timely decisions, and ensure that they are executed.

6. Communicate Persuasively: Communicate in ways that people will not forget; simplicity and clarity of expression help, as do elements ranging from personal actions to grand events.

7. Motivate the Troops: Appreciate the distinctive intentions that people bring, and then build on those diverse motives to draw the best from each.

8. Embrace the Front Lines: Delegate authority except for strategic decisions, and stay close to those most directly engaged with the work of the enterprise.

9. Build Leadership in Others: Develop leadership throughout the organization.

10. Manage Relations: Build enduring personal ties with those who look to you, and work to harness the feelings and passions of the workplace.

11. Identify Personal Implications: Help everybody appreciate the impact that the vision and strategy are likely to have on their own work and future with the firm.

12. Convey Your Character: Through gesture, commentary, and accounts, ensure that others appreciate that you are a person of integrity.

13. Dampen Over-Optimism. Counter the hubris of success, focus attention on latent threats and unresolved problems, and protect against the tendency for managers to engage in unwarranted risk.

14. Build a Diverse Top Team: Leaders need to take final responsibility, but leadership is also a team sport best played with an able roster of those collectively capable of resolving all the key challenges.

15. Place Common Interest First. In setting strategy, communicating vision, and reaching decisions, common purpose comes first, personal self-interest last.

To illustrate just one of the principles, consider the last, placing common mission ahead of personal interest, especially when its seems least natural to do so.  This precept is well captured in a U.S. Marine Corps dictum:  “The officer eats last.”  In business, it appears in author Jim Collins’ appraisal as one of the defining qualities of those who lead their companies from “good to great.”

And it emerged as a vital theme when I interviewed Samuel Palmisano this past January.  He said that if you don’t put yourself first, then leadership decisions become easier.

“Because if you’re worrying about your reputation or your legacy or whatever – you put something first beyond the institution – then it’s hard because your reasoning is clouded,” he explained.  It is best to look at your leadership decisions and say, “No, it’s not about me.  It’s about the future of the IBM company. How does IBM stay sustainable for the next 100 years?”

List adapted from The Leader’s Checklist by Michael Useem.

Editor’s note: This post is the first in an occasional series, NextGen Leaders, which presents expert points of view on what it takes to lead in today’s global economy.

Technorati Tags: business, IBM, Leadership, MBA, strategy, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton

When I played football at the University of Notre Dame and for the San Diego Chargers, broadcast television and radio were the primary ways fans enjoyed the game. There was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, the Internet was only known by DARPA scientists and social media didn’t exist.

Gosh, I sound pretty old. But in just 30 years the media and sports industries have been completely transformed by technology.  Today, fans are not only Tweeting about their favorite players and teams, but just last week at the Pro Bowl athletes were participating in the virtual conversation on the field at Twitter stations.

This week, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) are conducting an analysis of social media trends related to Super Bowl Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning.  By analyzing hundreds of thousands of public tweets they’ll determine the fans’ sentimental favorite – the people’s champion if you will.

Like previous analyses on movies, retailing and baseball, analytics makes it possible to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments of social media commentary, distinguish irony, and even apply machine learning to figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.  So we can now break down the Big Show’s compelling story lines in a way that traditional media never could.

Take the eternal New York/Boston sports rivalry. Is this a grudge match for the Patriots who had their perfect season ruined by the Giants four years ago?  Will Tom Brady be the first quarterback to win four Super Bowls since Joe Montana?  With his second Super Bowl in four years, has the Giants’ Eli Manning earned elite status and taken up his brother Peyton’s mantle as arch-rival of Tom Brady?   How will the family dynamic affect Eli Manning who will play on his brother’s turf in Indianapolis during Super Bowl XLVI?

Talk radio and sports columns are full of pundits and prognosticators discussing these topics ad nauseam. Coaches and players are focused on playbooks and game strategy. Organizations running commercials are waiting anxiously for consumer reaction. In this context, fans today have an opportunity to both share and learn from others instantly; and they’re providing researchers with an unfiltered voice that is ripe for analysis.

But this is about so much more than analyzing which QB fans are rooting for in Super Bowl XLVI.  Uncovering hidden insights from public Twitter comments can help a slew of people, from marketers to the NFL franchise owners, better understand opinions toward players, teams and products.  These opinions can no longer go unnoticed, which is why the NFL has wisely established a Super Bowl Social Media Command Center.

We can see from the work that IBM and USC are doing that this notion of shared community engagement continues to expand exponentially thanks to other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. In this context, sentiment analysis can be applied to learning how consumers perceive brands, reputations of companies and organizations, and new television shows and movies – just to name a few.

So which quarterback will be the social MVP of Super Bowl XLVI?  We’ll find out later this week.

In the meantime, the data that IBM and USC are gathering affirms what I’ve known since my playing days — statistics are an important part of sports.  And today gathering social media data can be a powerful tool that impacts the bottom lines for businesses of all sizes in all industries.

• Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, data, Education, IBM, IBM Research, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, Watson

See Also:

IBM and San Jose State University Collaborate to Advance Social Business Skills

Schulich School of Business Students Graduate to the IBM SmartCloud

Picture Story: Social Business at Work

Picture Story: How IBMers Work

Technorati Tags: curriculum, social business, social media, the great mind challenge

As the systems that run the way we work and live become smarter, the way people connect and communicate, find and share information, and perform everyday business tasks is changing in dramatic and dynamic ways.

Everywhere you look, new devices combined with social collaboration tools are transforming how work is done today — how information is shared, relationships are built, and decisions are made.

Thanks to clever social software tools that make collaboration happen easily and naturally, new delivery models such as cloud and mobile computing, and new ways of finding and sharing information, businesses are becoming social businesses — ones that are connected in a variety of ways, both inwardly and out.

    Creative Connections

For example, instead of simply pushing messages and offers out to the market, social businesses are creating back-and-forth dialogues with their customers through social tools, and are able to target the right content to the right customers using profile data from the Web and analytics.

This could enable a retail buyer to use seemingly unrelated purchases events to find an emerging trend in a product line; an automated electronics assembly process to pull in the best parts, suppliers, and assemble expertise without disruption as market needs continuously change; and an insurance firm to connect its independent agents and underwriters, helping them to reduce policy turnaround time from weeks to days.

The Social Enabler

Mobile devices equipped with new social networking software are becoming the great enablers of a social business, and vital business tools that allow workers to be more productive in more places because they can access mail, calendar, contacts, employee records and to-do lists anywhere in the world.

And as organizations struggle to find ways to more accurately gather, share and gain insight through smart devices, IBM is there to help with new software and services designed to bring a new level of intelligence to the mobile enterprise marketplace.

Connecting and Empowering People

As the rapid growth of social networking and mobility erases some of the boundaries that separated individuals in the past, people increasingly use their relationships with other people to discover and use information to accomplish innumerable tasks.

Gone are the days when a person had to be tied to a desk and chair in the office to get his or her work done, or when innovation was a guarded secret, with all of the novel ideas created in isolation.

We’re in a new era now, in which any person, any object, any process or service and any organization — large or small — can become digitally aware, connected and smart.

And now savvy organizations around the world are transforming their workplaces, not only by connecting and collaborating in new ways, but by unleashing the genius and creativity of the workforce itself.

 See also:

Picture Story: How IBMers Work

Technorati Tags: animations, mobile, picture stories, smarter collaboration, social analytics, social business, social commerce

Click on the image for a larger view:

Click on the image below for the full series:

The IBM Curiosity Shop on Flickr
The IBM Curiosity Shop on YouTube

Technorati Tags: animations, connect, lotus, picture stories, smarter collaboration, social business

The iPad 2 and Kindle Fire will top many holiday wish lists this year. But not only can you play Angry Birds on these devices; tablets can be used at work, too.

Increasingly, employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the IT department accommodate them.

For years, companies have issued mobile devices to busy executives and sales representatives who depend on their company-issued devices to get the job done. However this thinking is antiquated. In today’s increasingly mobile culture, accessing critical business applications via mobile devices is a must-have for all employees.

In response, many organizations worldwide are adopting a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach.  Approximately 72 percent of firms surveyed by Aberdeen Group say they allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets for work. And a recent IDC survey said that 95 percent of workers have used technology they purchased for themselves for work. I recently met with a CEO of large and fairly conservative company in Germany who purchased 1,000 iPad devices for their employees.

However, this increasingly popular practice comes with a host of potential security issues.Moreover, managing the growing alphabet soup of interconnected devices can be a headache for IT departments. IT must now manage the new social, virtual, and mobile employee – not to mention all the applications they access.

In November, IBM announced a major advance to help organizations better secure smartphones and tablet devices in the workplace: IBM’s Hosted Mobile Device Security Management service includes a security application for smartphones and tablets, along with managed services including policy management and user compliance monitoring. IBM is providing security controls and ongoing monitoring for individual devices as a managed service, allowing IT departments to support a broad range of personal devices and capitalize on the cost savings that BYOD can offer.

For example, Cummins Inc., the largest independent maker of diesel engines, is empowering its 40,000 employees in 190 countries with a BYOD program. The ability to collaborate from a smart, mobile device enables employees from this Fortune 500 company to be more productive in more places because they can access mail, calendar, contacts, and to do lists anywhere in the world. In the future, the promise of mobile computing will help Cummins employees perform diagnostic tests while working on top of large engines to taking parts inventory and finalizing parts distribution logistics to having instant access to comprehensive business analytics that reflect a business unit’s growth in a key market segment.

Cummins’ executives say that its workers have benefited from the use of IBM Traveler collaboration software and its functions have been well integrated into its model of how they work and help to increase the productivity of their workforce.

IBM is embracing the BYOD model internally, too. IBM encourages employees to use their own devices, including iPad, iPhone’s and Android smartphones and even Android tablets, and we are moving towards providing access to critical IBM business apps on both personal and corporate-issued mobile devices.

It’s clear: the time is right for organizations to implement a BYOD program in the work place. So, when opening that iPad 2 or Kindle Fire this year, don’t forget the power it holds for work as well as play.

If you’re going that route, here’s information about seven new mobile social networking and collaboration apps recent made available by IBM that are designed for enterprise computing. The new software is available for download from the most popular app stores.

Technorati Tags: BYOD, IBM

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

Here’s Sam Palmisano’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————————

The Start:

2:20 p.m.      Welcome by Ricardo Pelegrini, General Manager, IBM Brazil

Two years ago, IBM started talking about a smarter plant. “Today, it’s an urgent necessity for cities to be smarter.”

Around one million people worldwide migrate to cities every week. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities. This urbanization represents great economic opportunities and also important social and environment challenges.

Nowadays, cities consume 75% of the world’s energy, release 80% of polluting gases and waste 20% of their water due to leaks and inefficiencies in the infrastructure. “The good news is we can change our cities to make them more sustainable, and achieve growth and progress at the same time.”

Technology is available that can be used to enhance urban security, decrease traffic jams and avoid the waste of energy and water.

In the next two days, let’s analyze how cities are modernizing their systems and their infrastructure to encourage economic development, generate innovation and improve the education of the population.

—————

2:55 p.m.   SmarterCities: Crucibles of Global Progress, Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM

We have come to Rio because it is a compelling example of a new kind of actor that has appeared on the world stage – the smarter global city.

We face many challenges today. “It can seem as if the world is getting the better of our leaders.” But we see that progress is still happening and it’s being driven by forward-thinking mayors and other innovators in business, universities and non-governmental organizations in cities.

How is it that mayors are getting things done, while other leaders seem stuck?

–“These city leaders are non-ideological. They get things done.”

–Smarter city leaders think in terms of systems. An example is Rio’s intelligent operations center, which  coordinates information from more than 20 city departments.

–Smarter city leaders think – and manage – for the long term.

Amidst all the tumult in the world today, there is another model taking shape. This new generation of leaders is seizing upon the vast quantities of data their cities generate to drive growth and sustainability. “The flip side of every crisis is a vast new opportunity for progress.”

I believe future historians will look back on this moment as the dawn of a new golden age of innovation, widely shared economic growth and global citizenship.

So, let’s use the next two days to think together about what this new urban age could be and then roll up our sleeves for a collaborative work session on how to build it.

—————-

3:20 p.m.   Special Address: The SmarterCities Agenda: The Transformation of Rio de Janeiro, by Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio

“People talk about the triumph of the city, because it’s the place where people can fulfill their destinies.”

Cities start with services that meet people’s needs. Smarter cities provide a better way to organize and interact in positive ways. Technology progress allows use to got to places we never could go before.

The creative class gathers in cities, and promotes its development.

But there are huge challenges, such as violence and environmental impacts. We face many challenges. We in Rio see these problems on a large scale.

We have prioritized the improvement of services, so we have focused on investments in technology. I monitor the progress of the city with technology every day.

I don’t know how earlier mayors were able to manage their cities without the help of these technologies.

We have been able to increase the collection of taxes without having to increase taxes, for instance.

In future days we’ll reach even higher steps.

Our intelligent operations center allows us to integrate many of the operations of the city so we can provide better services. We have been able to organize ourselves in the face of chaos—when big storms come.

For 400 years public authorities weren’t able to respond to floods and landslides. But now we can mitigate these catastrophies. We can manage risks. We can coordinate better.

We simulated heavy rains and flooding. The control center connects the mayor’s house. I had to wake up at 5 a.m. and participate in the simulation. It was sunny, but we simulated a storm. This is the kind of capability we’ll have.

We have weather information coming in. We have 400 video cameras around the city, and more are coming. IBM scientists created a high tech tool for modeling weather in the city and predict where the rains will fall, so we can react.

Thanks to the control center, we now can have constant awareness and monitoring of what’s going on in the city.

We leaders can sleep because the control center never sleeps. “It’s driving change for the way we manage the city.”

All the departments are connected up 24/7 and they’re aware of what’s going on, and they coordinating their activities. It shows that humans do need to work together.

Rio had a brain drain for a while, but now it has the capacity to attract back and retain these talents. It’s no longer just a tourist spot. Now foreigners are leaving places where there’s a crisis and coming here for opportunities.

We’re developing public-private partnerships.

Rio’s doors are open.

We hope that Rio will be one of the smart cities of the world.

———————–

3:45 p.m. Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio, talks with Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM and Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

Paes:

“Every city needs to decide what it wants to be. After Rio lost the capital of the country it spent 40 years about what we weren’t any more.”

“Cities are where the world is run.”

Every city has its own assets. In Rio, the environment is key. People decide to move here or invest here based on it.

“For a while, it was very popular to be a gang leader in some of our communities. They felt they were robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.” The situation got very bad.

Now we drive the criminals out of the favelas, one after another. Then we bring in the police and social services. We can transform society.

20 years ago people would say don’t touch the favelas at all. These days, we have a different situation. We can’t have more favelas. We can provide housing for the people. We have to provide transportation so they can get to work faster. Today, it might take 3 hours for poor people to get to work.

We have 600 favelas, They won’t go away. We’ll leave people where they are and bring them public safety, public works and social work.

In 2020, we’ll have all the favelas urbanized.

Palmisano:

You’re going to create a modern transportation system. I encourage you to think of it end to end, coordinate the different modes of transportation, so people can make connections and save time.

“This is systemic thinking. It’s a total system, not just a collection of separate elements.”

Predictability is key. People need that.

——————

Here’s a video of the panel discussion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————-

Here’s a look at how IBM worked with the Rio to set up an intelligent operations center:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nearly a year since inaugurating its city operations center, Rio is working with IBM to add new capabilities to city’s emergency response system by giving citizens information that will help them better manage their daily lives.

The new automated alert system will notify city officials and emergency personnel when changes occur in the flood and landslide forecast for the city. Under the previous system, notifications were manually relayed. The new alert system is expected to drastically reduce the reaction times to emergency situations by using instantaneous mobile communications, including automated email notifications and instant messaging, to reach emergency personnel and citizens.

The new alert system, developed by IBM’s Software Labs, can track the receipt of messages to ensure response is immediate and effective. Because responses to each emergency are tracked from start to finish, the alert system also provides a wealth of data available for analysis after the fact.

Another benefit Rio citizens can enjoy today is access to daily data feeds from the Rio Operations Center. The Center’s profile on Facebook and Twitter provide frequent updates on weather and traffic, as well as recommended alternative routes around the city on days of special events including concerts, soccer matches and festivals.

Citizens can follow the Rio Operations Center updates on Twitter @OperacoesRio and Facebook at Centro de Operações Rio.

————————–

4:50 p.m. Special Address: The Transformation of Mega Cities, by  Johnny Araya Monge, mayor, San Jose City, Costa Rica.

The world’s urban population is already larger than the rural population. By 2050 it will be more than 70%.

Our big challenge will be to design a new urban paradigm. We want cities that are more democratic, more sustainable and more competitive. In the knowledge-based society, this means smarter cities. So we need smarter administration of the world’s cities.

We’re talking about the transformation of mega cities. ‘Mega cities are now a mega problem.”

All of the cities with 12 and 15 million inhabitants are in the Third World, or emerging nations. Poverty and social inclusion are part of the mix. This makes city administration very difficult.

We have the capacity to avoid such large cities being developed. We need a new paradigm for cities. We need to break down the definition of what is city and what is countryside, and what environments are protected.

It seems smart to encourage development of second-tier cities. Ideally countries should have a network of intermediate size cities and towns that are interconnected.

“Think of cities as a habitat, a space shared with plants and animals.” There should be agricultural areas, ecological protected areas and urban areas blended together.

In Costa Rica, we’re trying to reverse some of our old ideas about urbanism. Many cities were created around the idea of the freeways. These cities are spread out—they’re inefficient.  They also lead to social segregation. “A city must be a shared territory for all.”

We’re promoting growth in high-density ways, so the city is more compact. “The compact cities are always the most successful ones in the world.”

We’re using a lot of renewable energy sources, and we’re aiming to be carbon neutral as a nation.

We’re repopulating and transforming the downtown part of the city. It was abandoned. It was taken by gangs and drug leaders. We’re now rebuilding the social tissue of the downtown. We’re also promoting urban forests, using native trees along streets and avenues.

We’re putting in a tramway, and creating pedestrian streets. We’re rehabilitating the area where gangs and drug dealers were. “Thousands of people are walking downtown and it’s booming.”

The context:

Here’s Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla talking about establishing a responsible country:

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————

Update:

6:00 p.m. Special Address: At the Intersection of Globalization and Urbanization, by Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

I want to paint the broader picture for you. At the end of the day it’s all about improving the living standards of people around the world—giving people access to the American Dream or the Brazilian Dream.

Growing up in India, I was fascinated about the wealth, the opportunity, the dynamism of America. That’s what attracted most people to America. Behind it was the freedom and rule of law and the constitution.

Today in the US you see a lot of pessimism. But the American Dream is alive and well in Rio, in Shanghai. This is where the optimists are.

You’re seen a switch from closed systems to open systems, from isolation to engagement. These changes unleashed political stability and a reduction in warfare; economic convergence—globalization and the adoption of best economic and business practices; and technological connectivity—the information revolution.

It unleashes enormous opportunities. Brazil has been able to take advantage of these changes and plug into the global economy and play.

The challenge for the future is this extraordinary opportunity. Everybody is moving through this at the same time. A lot of people in Asia and Latin America prospered. Governments just had to do simple things, and they got economic growth.

Now you have reached some degree of saturation of the easy path to rising per capital GDP. We’re entering a more challenging phase.

“This is the final phase of industrialization. Everything in your society has to be modernized. Everything has to be smart.”

It’s a lot more than supply and demand. You have to straighten out your infrastructure, your legal system. You have to improve productivity growth.

You have to deal with traffic and pollution. You can only deal with that with improved labor productivity. That’s increasingly difficult to do it because you live in a competitive world. “You’re in a competitive race with other cities around the world.”

To see where real growth is happening, don’t look at the mega cities of the world. There are a few exceptions, like New York and London, because of the financial industry. The real growth is in the 600 middle-tier cities underneath them. They may form themselves into clusters, tapping new transportation and communications infrastructures.

In the US, American companies like IBM are doing extraordinarily well in this global world. They master the shifts in technology. But the average American worker, the American city—they’re struggling.

People in the United States will have to adapt like hell. I’m optimistic, though.

Look at all the things happening around the world. It’s easy to get gloomy. But the pressures of globalization are forcing innovation, productivity gains and better governance.

“Ultimately this is going to have a beneficial effect.”

“This is all about unleashing human talent in away that we’ve never seen before and on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

——

Here’s Fareed’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

———-

Here are wrap-up comments by Bruno Di Leo, IBM’s general manager for the growth markets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

Update:

Teams of three students from MIT/Sloan and HBS take on IBM’s Watson. (This is only the second contest matching Watson against collegians. In the previous contest, Watson beat teams from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt came in second, much to the chagrin of rival CMU!)

Harvard wins the first question, with “What is Belize?” Answering: countries in central America, ending with “e”

But then Watson takes over, running the category.

The machine picks “Who’s Your Daddy Company?” as the next category, eliciting a huge hook of laughter from the audience.

They finished the Jeopardy! round, with Watson, $8600; Harvard, $5200  ; and MIT,  $-200 .

(I got disconnected from HBS’s Wi-Fi at a crucial moment, destroying the coverage of the second round. Grrrrr)

Final Jeopardy!

Clue: Finding the spot for this memorial caused its creator to say “Americans will march across that skyline.”

The question: Mt. Rushmore.

Harvard and Watson answer correctly. MIT does not.

Final score: Watson, $53,601; Harvard, $42,399; MIT, $100.

!!!!!

—————-

The Start:

9:45 a.m.

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, kicks off by talking about a concern these days about technology and its role in society. Some people are saying that innovation has been stagnating, and that’s contributing to the slowness of the economic recovery.

“The issue isn’t that technology is stagnating, but that we haven’t been keeping up with technology. Societies, institutions and structures haven’t advanced rapidly enough to keep up with the advances. We’re creating a lot of wealth through technology, but the benefits aren’t going to regular people in the middle of the income distribution.”

This has been a great decade for productivity growth, even better the 1990s. It has contributed to income growth per capita. Yet median income growth has not improved much. “A lot of wealth has been created that goes to the people at the very top of the income brackets.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The context: Here’s the new book by Erik and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine.

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10 a.m.

IBM Fellow David Ferrucci talks about the making of Watson, IBM’s question-and-answer machine, which in February beat the top past champions on the TV game show Jeopardy! (He’s speaking again this afternoon, so I’m going to go into detail on that.) For now, here’s another IBM Fellow, Bernard Meyerson, talking about the importance of Watson.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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10:40 a.m.

Question to IBM’s David Ferrucci about Watson: How long until Watson can program itself?

Ferrucci:

It already does that, but will do so more in the future.

“I can imagine a situation where you’re searching for different models, different weights to answers, and it automatically programs itself to do that.”

He wouldn’t predict when.

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10:45 a.m. Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question: Why are we seeing these astonishing advances now?

Afred Spector of Google: The Web makes it possible to combine a lot of information and access it via the Web. We also have a huge amount of feedback from users. And we have a large amount of software components. We can combine things and piece things together. “We’re solving a collection of problems which are acceptably probabilistic.”

Rod Brooks, an AI and robotics expert at MIT and entrepreneur: We have enough computer power to solve bigger and more complex problems. “Using machine learning and statistics we’ve managed to come up with algorithms which learn things acceptably well.”

David Ferrucci of IBM: “What’s exciting is the ability to generation hypothesis using induction and then track them back and evaluate evidence during an inductive process.”

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11 a.m. Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question: Why can’t computers do things that a two year old child can do?

Rod Brooks, AI and robotics entrepreneur “There is progress but it’s in narrow subfields. But it can do great things. Google cars are an example: They don’t do a lot of things but they do a few things very well.”

Afred Spector of Google:  Google Translate is another example. We’re up to 69 languages. We’re working on quality. “We want to get to the languages that are less spoken so all those populations will have access to the Web. We want to make the knowledge available to everybody.”

Another project: Making it possible so the machine automatically understands things so well that we can translate an image into a text description, or visa versa.

Brooks: He talks about the problem with manufacturing in the US. We keep going to high tech manufacturing, but that makes us too narrow. Not enough jobs created. He says we need to develop manufacturing that can employ a lot of people, by automating the low value pieces more but produce a wide variety of products.  “The answer is in the masses–creating robots that people can interact with and use.”

David Ferrucci of IBM: “I see a future where computers can act as intelligent mediators that enable informed collaboration, for instance, between you and your healthcare team, so you can make better decisions about your treatment.”

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Here’s McAfee talking about the coming capabilities of machines and their impact on jobs and job creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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11:20  a.m.

Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question:  What would accelerate your work the most: data, computing power, or smart researchers?

Rod Brooks, MIT professor, and AI and robotics entrepreneur : We have enough computing power and data. “I have a bunch of smart PhDs, but you have to direct them in the right direction. You need the right reward structure for research.”

“We’d be better off if universities were smaller, had fewer people working form them, and focused on deep fundamental research. Let organizations like IBM do the applied research.”

Afred Spector of Google: “When we go to universities we’re surprised and disappointed that the faculties aren’t doing more high-risk research.”

Google sees a need for vastly more computing power. We need to do “deep learning.” It’s a new level of machine learning. Google has 5,000 PhD’s in computer science. “We need even more talent.”

“We need all three to get better.”

David Ferrucci of IBM:  “Researchers, data and machines, in that order.”

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12:20 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, asks: What does technology mean for technology and jobs?

David Autor, economics professor at MIT:  There’s a long running debate. Does technology eliminate jobs? The stock answer is to call people who ask it Luddites.

We’ve seen incredibly rapid technology change over the past century and it eliminated a lot of farm jobs, but it created jobs elsewhere. “We’ve seen rising employment rates; and it raises productivity and incomes.”

However, there’s another side to this. Technology increases our efficiency but it can compete with workers and their skills. “Technology changes much faster than people can adapt.”

Middle-education and middle-skilled jobs are the vulnerable ones. That’s manufacturing jobs and administrative jobs.

“This creates real challenges. We should be worried. The set of opportunities are far more bifurcated than then used to be.”

“It’s leading to even more unequal distribution of wealth.”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer:  He says he has been focusing on technology based innovation in the service economy. So many of the new jobs are in services. About 80% of the service jobs are information-based jobs. Technology will be used more and more in this area. So these jobs will increasingly come under pressure, too.

This is another period of creative destruction.

New industries will be created that will create the mid-skilled and mid-education jobs. “I don’t know the answer”

“The top-down approaches to job creation aren’t working. We have to rely more on bottoms-up approaches—entrepreneurialism.”

Frank Levy, a labor economist at MIT: Keeps things in perspective. Everything we see today is colored by the recession. It doesn’t have a lot to do with technology—but with the collapse of the housing bubble.

At the same time, the middle-skill job problem is very real.

“Because of the recession, it’s going to be hard to get kids to get advanced education at the same time that the jobs that will come will require advanced educations.”

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12:45 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, asks: How do we create new jobs for mid-skilled people?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer: Cloud computing and other technologies can help entrepreneurs get started and build companies and hire people. So a lot of small companies will spring up—not the high tech companies but companies that take advantage of technology.

David Autor, economics professor at MIT: That’s good, but it won’t produce a lot of jobs. “Most people want to be employed. They want to work for somebody. If they have a choice, that’s what they do.”

Frank Levy, MIT: He calls for apprenticeships and case-based education to bring up the skills.

Wladawky-Berger: Germany has done a better job at creating the mid-skilled jobs.

Autor: The Germans have adapted more quickly than other developed economies. They brought up the skills and reduced wages for mid-skilled people, which made the people and the country more competitive.

There are decent middle-skilled job in health care, repairs, the trades. But all require post-high schools investments in skills. “But you can’t go to the Harvard of plumbing.”

Wladawsky-Berger: Can’t community colleges help fill the void.

Autor: “They’d like to, but their funding is being cut by states and communities.”

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1 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Question from the audience: “I’m worried about how we communicate about the new capabilities of machines and their impact on jobs. Will people react against it?”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer: There’s a consensus that just as we transitioned from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and literacy and education went up, in today’s world you need the next level of education. You need information-based literacy, and teamwork literacy. People who learn to use these tools can make a good living. If we can communicate that we’ll be okay.

Frank Levy, MIT: We should be clear about what machines can do and what they can’t do, and not talk a lot about the “singularity”—the point in the future when machines will be able to truly think.

“Just tell it straight in terms of what we know now. Don’t try to scare people.”

Here’s Wladawsky-Berger talking about the future of job creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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1:25 p.m. Remarks from Martin Fleming, chief economist at IBM:

There have been five waves of technological change over the past three centuries. With each wave, the new technologies fundamentally altered the way business—and work—was done. “The business changes because the technology makes it possible to do so.”

With IBM’s Watson, for example, you enable the democratization of clinical decision making. The practice of healthcare can be fundamentally changed. Evidence-based medicine is made possible.

Each wave was also accompanied by an economic crash, typically at the time when the new technology is impacting the old ways of doing things but has not yet produced all of the productivity gains that are coming on a mass scale.

We’re now entering into a period where the economy is beginning to open up opportunities for the deployment of significant new innovations. “Radical new technologies will be deployed. New industries will be created.”

“This is about the transformation of the economy.”

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At Harvard Business School now…

3:30 p.m. David Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, talks about how Watson came to  be and where the technology is going.

Watson was a grand challenge aimed at driving important scientific advances. It gets people to think about the implications of technology–where is it today and where might it go.

Watson beat former grand champions at TV’s Jeopardy! quiz show.

He points out how much more difficult it is for a computer to have a conversation with a person than it is to play chess–a previous grand challenge that IBM took on in the 1990s when one of its machines beat the best chess player in the world. That’s because, in conversation, “context defines meaning.”

It’s a very difficult problem. Computers can’t relate words to experience.

“Jeopardy! helped us push the kind of technology that interprets natural language to determine meaning.”

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4:00 p.m. David Ferrucci, the father of Watson, talks about how the technology came about and where it’s going.

We did 8000 experiments to develop Watson’s capability. There were lots of growing pains. Example: New York Times Headlines: An exclamation point was warranted for the “end of” this” in 1918. Watson’s answer: “a sentence.”

The project took 4 years.

Originally, running on a single PC, it took two hours for Watson to answer a single question. “The producers insisted that that would make for a boring game.” So they scaled the machine up to a 2880-core computing system.

The important thing about Watson is that it collects evidence and builds confidence in an ansers. when we think about applying it to medicine or law, we don’t think it’s providing the answer but providing useful suggestions–based on an evidence profile.

We’ll give a human decision maker the top answers to a question and the evidence and analysis that led Watson to those answers. This is about empowering the decision maker.

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Here’s Ferrucci talking about how the software program can help transform the healthcare industry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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