Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

When Irving speaks, I listen

And so with that, I recommend reading this:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2159092,00.asp 

A teaser from the article:

A lot of people view you as a visionary. What is it that gives you that? Where do you get the vision from?

The answer is easy: Find where the smart people are and hang out with them. I’m serious. The smart people have a lot of ideas and in IBM I have been really lucky. First of all IBM has some very smart people in our research and development labs. And then I’ve been really working a lot with people in universities and outside research labs. And I’ve been in committees in Washington.

And what I’ve been good at is talking to lots of smart people and being able to discern a pattern for when something comes up again and again in different conversations. Maybe they’re approaching it from different angles. But the way I looked at it a new idea was whether it was something we should do, and then how we should do it in IBM. Because just because it’s something we should do, doesn’t mean we have to do it like everybody else is doing. In fact, it could even be that it’s something somebody should do, but not us.

So it’s more almost like finding out what the smart people are thinking, extract it, look for the patterns and then eventually something clicks. Then you look at how we bring it to the marketplace.