Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Disruptive Innovations and Organizational Change

Over the last few years I have given a number of seminars on Technology-based Business Transformation.  In these seminars, I examine how companies can leverage disruptive innovations to go after new business opportunities or to significantly transform themselves.  Often, the transformations are needed because the business is in crisis, such as happened to IBM in the early 1990s or is the case with a number of media companies today. 

The seminars are generally organized into three section.  The first two focus on strategy formulation and execution respectively.  The last section deals with the organizational and cultural issues involved in going through such a major transformation.

Many companies fail to adequately embrace a disruptive innovation not because they did not develop the right strategy, but because the strategy was essentially rejected by the organization, and was thus doomed to fail from its very beginning.  The culture of the institution was not able to stretch enough to be able to implement the needed changes.  This happens even when the very survival of the organization is at stake.  It is as if a kind of institutional depression has set in.  

We sometimes forget that disruptive innovations are indeed disruptive, not only in the marketplace but also for individuals and organizations.  Much as we often talk about embracing change as a positive experience, change is in fact very difficult, even painful for many people.  You are asking them to move into unknown, perhaps even unchartered territory.  What will be the impact on their jobs?  Do they have the required skills for whatever is ahead?  How well will they personally do in the new environment?

JumpStart NYC: Talent in Transition

As we well know, many talented people have lost their jobs as a result of our ongoing Great Recession, - the worst financial crisis we have lived through since the 1930s.  The US unemployment rate has doubled from 5% in December of 2007 to 10% in December of 2009.  The number is significantly higher, about one out of every six workers, when taking into account underemployed and discouraged workers who have had no success in finding a full time position.

Hopefully, the economy will soon improve and unemployment rates will start to come down.  But in the meantime, it is very important to offer those who got laid off as a result of the deteriorating economy as much help as possible in exploring and finding job opportunities.

In New York City, the crisis hit hardest in the financial services sector.  There are now over four hundred thousand unemployed city residents, many of them as a result of layoffs on Wall Street.  About a year ago, the Bloomberg administration launched a number of programs to help recently unemployed city residents.  JumpStart NYC is one such program.

The JumpStart program was initiated by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).  Its key objective was to help people who lost their jobs on Wall street to apply their skills and abilities in opportunities beyond financial services.  Most of these people had previously worked for large firms.  A primary goal of JumpStart was to help them explore new career paths and opportunities in small and entrepreneurial firms in the New York area.

Reflections on Surviving Disruptive Innovations

Last week I wrote a post on the impact that digital technologies are having on the newspaper, entertainment and media industry in general.  It was based on the “Social Media Implications for Business” panel I moderated during my recent week as Innovator in Residence at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism.

The panelists pretty much agreed that many legacy media companies are going through a kind of near death experience as the industry transitions from analog to digital technologies.  Two forces, in particular, are wreaking havoc on the industry: cannibalization - inexpensive new products that are cutting into their existing revenues; and fragmentation - audiences being shared across the many new kinds of content and experiences now available to them.

Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC Universal, has succinctly captured what is going on in the media industry, with his widely quoted comment that the new digital business models are turning media revenues from analog dollars into digital dimes.  The key problem for legacy media companies is thus to come up with new, innovative business models that will enable them to make money and survive as their industry continues to transition from a business model based mostly on analog dollars into one based mostly on digital dimes.

Social Media Implications for Business

I spent the first week of November as Innovator in Residence at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.  As part of my activities during the week, Dean Ernest Wilson hosted a conference on Social Media: Platform of Provocation for Innovation?.  The half-day conference consisted of two panels: one on the social and technological innovation being brought about by social media, and the other on the implications of social media to business.  Each panel included experts from USC Annenberg and IBM.

The first panel covered topics on social networks, 3D virtual worlds, immersive journalism, social computing research and a number of others.  It was moderated by Henry Jenkins, who moved from MIT this Fall to join the USC faculty as Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts.  Henry, - whom I met at MIT a couple of years ago because of our mutual interest in virtual worlds, - was previously Director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and Professor of Humanities.

The full video of the first panel can be seen here.

I wouId like to focus this blog on the second panel, which I moderated.  The panel focused on the implications of social media to the communications and media industries as well as to organizations in general.  Panelists included Marc Cooper, Jonathan Taplin and David Westphal from the Annenberg School, and Melissa Cefkin and Steve Canepa from IBM.

The full video of the second panel can be seen here.

The MIT Distributed Leadership Forum

The MIT Leadership Center is one of several research groups in the MIT Sloan School of Management.  Its key focus is distributed leadership “. . . the idea that leadership today, even more than in the past, must come from every level of an organization or every part of an organizational network.”   Central to the Leadership Center is the belief that “the development of skilled, thoughtful, passionate leaders must be rooted in real world experience.”

Earlier this month, the Center sponsored a Distributed Leadership Forum, which brought together an invited group of people from industry and academia to explore the key attributes of distributed leadership required for effective 21st century organizations.  I am a member of the Leadership Center and was involved in the planning of the Forum.

Communications, Journalism and Media in the Internet Age

I spent the first week of November at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism.  USC Annenberg is one of the largest and most comprehensive schools of its kind in the world, with research and educational programs in communications, journalism, public diplomacy, public relations, media, educations and related areas.  It is thus in a unique position to analyze and influence the impact of information technologies on the world’s news, media and entertainment industries, and on organizations and institutions in general.

Last July I received an invitation from Annenberg’s Dean, Ernest Wilson to be its first Innovator in Residence.  This is part of a program Dean Wilson is launching to bring people to Annenberg from different fields, who have real-world, practical understanding of the impacts of disruptive innovations, - because they have lived through it, as I have in IBM.  His letter said:

“ . . . The communications and media sectors are in a state of great turmoil.  Over a relatively short period of time, technological progress has altered everything from the media for information delivery to the revenue sources for the news, media and public relations business.  At this moment, there is a remarkable confluence of social, economic and technological change - all of which affect vital information flows in our democracy.”

“Rather than seeing these changes as threats, I am encouraging my team to view them as unique opportunities to lead and contribute to innovative thinking and action in the communication field.  The Annenberg School is expected to play a major role in shaping this future:  we need to be able to step up to meet the expectations, offering bold and creative solutions for the communications and media industries, and a meaningful education for our students.”   

Dean Wilson’s invitation letter was very eloquent, but frankly, given my strong interest in the subject, he had me at “Dear Irving.”

Education and Services Innovation

Richard Larson is Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT.  Professor Larson is a pioneer in applying technology, science and engineering to a wide variety of problems in services industries, from technology-enabled education to urban service systems.  His interests in emergency response systems have led him to organize initiatives for applying engineering principles to planning and responding to global pandemics, such as the ongoing H1N1 flu.  He also leads MIT’s overall efforts to establish an inter-disciplinary services science initiative.

I met Dick Larson when I first joined MIT’s Engineering Systems Division as a visiting faculty member, almost four years ago.  Dick is one of the MIT faculty members I have worked closest with since then, so I am comfortable referring to him as Dick instead of Professor Larson..  He is one the best role models I know of the kind of systems oriented, market-facing engineers that we increasingly need to help us tackle the highly complex, multi-disciplinary problems we are facing in the 21st century.

One such problem is education.  Dick just published an op-ed article, Education: Our Most Important Service Sector in Service Science, a relatively new online journal focusing on state-of-the-art research and development in service sciences and related areas.

Reflections from Another Part of the World and a Different Side of My Brain

I spent the first week of September in Chile and Argentina.  Three yeas have elapsed since I last visited Santiago, and I have not been to Buenos Aires for almost four years.  It was very good to be back in these two very nice cities.

I love to travel in Spanish speaking countries, - I go to Spain and Mexico from time to time in addition to Argentina and Chile.  The reason is not just because the people are so wonderful.  After all, in my experience, the people have been very nice in just about all countries I have been to around the world.  But, being totally immersed for days on end in my native language, is a particularly pleasurable experience, and one that, as I have thought about it, is not only personally appealing but also important to my mental health.  Let me explain.

It is well accepted that a good physical exercise plan should include different kinds of workouts, some focused on aerobics to increase cardiovascular endurance, and some anaerobic in nature to strengthen our muscles.  In addition to its benefits on our physical health, a regime of exercise also improves our mental health as well as helping to reduce depression.But, advances in brain sciences have begun to show the importance of also exercising our mental faculties.  Throughout our lives, our brains need stimulation to be healthy, in the same way that our bodies need physical exercise.  A lack of mental exercise and stimulation can result in severe problems, from the time we are born to old age.

I am convinced that as we learn more about the workings of our brains, we will learn how different kinds of stimulation best help different parts of our brain, much as we have learned how to best exercise different parts of our bodies.  Furthermore, I am sure that future advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging will show that for those of us who were immersed in different languages at different times in our lives, we can best reach feelings and concepts stored in our brain by using the language were were speaking at the time we experienced and learned them.

Soft, Smart, "Pink" Power

I first learned about the concept of soft power two years ago or so.  The term was coined by Harvard Kennedy School professor Joseph Nye in his 2004 book Soft Power: the Means to Success in World Politics.  It is all about influencing behavior based on the legitimacy of your objectives without commanding it with threats or payment.  It relies on the ability to shape the preference of others through co-option, rather than coercion.

Soft power is particularly critical in our times, due to the nature of the conflicts in which we increasingly find ourselves, in particular, the global war on terrorism.  These conflicts are sometimes called the The Long War, especially within the US Military, as a way to describe our present global struggles against a variety of enemies spread around the world, which will likely last for decades.  These enemies are organized into small groups, distributed and very local - that is, living among civilian populations - but they coordinate, recruit and fund their actions around the world in a whole new set of ways.

Such conflicts have much more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures.  The main objectives of the amorphous enemies in the Long War seems to be to destroy our very way of life and impose their own.  Thus, winning the Long War is perhaps as much about winning the hearts and minds of people and nations as it is about defeating, or at least containing, an enemy that is amorphous and often hard to find.

The Smarter Planet University Jam

For several years now, IBM has used a Web 2.0 collaborative approach to exploration and problem solving called Jams.  Jams help discover new solutions to broad, complex problems by bringing together a wide variety of minds and perspectives.  They are essentially massive online discussions, where people contribute their own ideas, as well as build on each other's ideas in a kind of structured conversation, under the guidance of subject-matter experts and moderators.  A Jam typically lasts around three days, and after it is completed, extensive analysis is used to extract insights from the perceptions and comments of the Jam participants, and to develop plans to put the insights into action.

In 2003, a Values Jam involving more than 300,000 IBM employees around the world was used to redefine the core IBM values for the 21st century.  Two years later, the Government of Canada, UN-Habitat and IBM hosted Habitat Jam.  Over three days, tens of thousands of participants from over 150 countries, including urban specialists, government leaders, and residents from cities around the world, discussed issues of urban sustainability.  Their ideas shaped the agenda for the UN World Urban Forum, held in Vancouver in June of 2006.

Then in 2006, an Innovation Jam brought together more than 150,00 people from over one hundred countries, including IBM employees, clients and partners, to help identify the ten most innovative new ideas in which to invest $100 million.  IBM’s virtual worlds initiative was one of the recommendations coming out of the Jam.  So were a number of projects, including intelligent utility networks, integrated transportation systems, smart healthcare payments, and Big Green innovations that helped form the core of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative launched in November of 2008.

Hidden Wealth: Science, Technology and Services Innovation in the 21st Century

The Royal Society, - the UK’s national academy of science, - recently released a report: Hidden Wealth: the contribution of science to service sector innovation.  This excellent report represents the findings of a major study on the role of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to innovation in the services sector.  It is one of the most comprehensive investigations of the impact of services innovation in the 21st century.

The services sector is by far the largest in the global economy, comprising about 65 percent of the world’s overall GDP, and between 70 and 80 percent in countries with more advanced economies.  Most of the working population in such countries are employed in services in one way or another, - roughly two thirds of all jobs in Brazil, Japan and the European Union and around 80 percent in the UK and the US.

This new report is very important and timely, given that the creation of well paying jobs is currently among the highest priorities not only in the UK, but also in the US and many other countries around the world.  As the report says:

“Our main conclusion,  . . . is that services are very like to remain central to the new economy, not least because we are at or near a tipping point: innovations now underway seem likely to change dramatically the way we live and to generate many services (though few can be predicted in detail at present). . . .”

The Big Shift: from Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning

I have known John Seely Brown for many years and have served with him on several committees and boards.  John was Chief Scientist at Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center for almost twenty years.  Since retiring from Xerox, he has continued to be very busy as a speaker, writer, member of the boards of several public and private companies and lots of other activities.   In his website, he writes “Today, I’m Chief of Confusion, helping people ask the right questions, trying to make a difference through my work - speaking, writing, teaching.”

I have indeed learned that John is always asking just the right questions, be they about technology, business, learning or society in general.  So, when he recently sent me an e-mail, recommending that I look into his latest project and recent papers, I proceeded to do so. 

The project John referred me to is called The Big Shift.  It is being conducted at the Center for the Edge, which is part of Deloitte Consulting.  The Center is co-chaired by John Hagel, whom I have also worked with and greatly respect, and John Seely Brown.  They just published an article on their research in the July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review, co-written with Lang Davidson, Executive Director of the Center for the Edge, as well as a more extensive report explaining their ideas and methodologies in detail - Measuring the forces of long-term change: The 2009 Shift Index.

A Very Tough Balancing Act

Managing large companies has never been easy.  But, managing is particularly tough given our fast changing, global, intensely competitive market environment.  With increasing frequency, senior executives have to make major strategic decisions which could have a huge impact on the future of the company, - perhaps even its very survival.

Among the toughest decisions facing the senior management of a company is finding the proper balance between investments in their current operations, and investments made in new, promising areas for the future.  It is indeed a very delicate balance, even more so given an unpredictable future where major changes are likely to take place in technologies, markets and global economic conditions.   Often, the consequences of these strategic decisions may not be apparent for years.
 
What is the right balance between carefully managing existing operations, and investing in potentially disruptive innovations for the future?  There is clearly no set answer, as every industry has its own dynamics, and every company has a different mix of circumstances driving its decisions.  A recent article reminded me of the challenges involved in making such strategic decisions, especially in the energy industries, which are particularly tough because of the multiplicity of choices now available, the long term implications of the decisions, and the highly uncertain market and political environment in which this industry operates.

Complex Organizational Systems: Some Common Principles

Last week I attended the second Engineering Systems Symposium at MIT.  The Symposium was co-sponsored by MIT’s Engineering Systems Division and CESUN - the Council of Engineering Systems Universities.   

Chuck Vest, - former MIT president, and now head of the National Academy of Engineering, - gave an excellent keynote address.  He talked about some the grand challenges that the field of engineering faces.  Only 4.5 percent of US university graduates have degrees in engineering, he said, a number substantially lower that in other parts of the world.  Large-scale system challenges, he added, offer us the opportunity to reinvigorate engineering education and capture the imagination and intellect of the next generation of engineering leaders.

Following Vest’s keynote, I participated in a panel on Critical Issues and Grand Challenges, in which we discussed the kinds of complex and exciting societal challenges Chuck told us are needed to inject excitement into engineering.  The panel was moderated by Jim Champy, head of consulting and strategy at Perot Systems and co-author of Reingeneering the Corporation, the best-seller that launched the business process re-engineering revolution in the early 1990s.

Gender-based Differences in Behavior

In the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about the potential causes of our global financial crisis.  I have done my best to capture my thoughts in various entries in this blog as well as in seminars I recently gave at Imperial College and MIT.  While doing research on the subject, I came across a few interesting, perhaps somewhat far-out articles that took my thinking in intriguing directions.  Let me share some of them.       

Gender diversity and the financial crisis

Is testosterone to blame for the financial crisis?, asks a Scientific American Science blog, as it writes: “High levels of testosterone are correlated with riskier financial behavior, new research suggests.  Men with more of the sex hormone made riskier investments than guys with lower levels, according to a study published online yesterday in Evolution and Human Behavior.”

An article in The Guardian reports on a separate study of traders in a London bank.

Design, Innovation and Organizational Systems

I was back at Imperial College in London in the last week of February.  I gave several seminars and held a number of meetings, but the main reason for my visit was to once more participate in a STIR lecture sponsored by Design London. 

Design London is an initiative launched about two years ago between Imperial College and the Royal College of Art.  It aims to bring together the disciplines of design, engineering, technology and business to address jointly the challenges of innovation in an increasingly global, competitive economy.  As part of its many research and educational activities, Design London offers the STIR (Simulator, Teach, Incubate, Research) lectures, which cover a wide range of subjects from widely different personal experiences and points of view.

Our STIR lecture - CROSS OVER:  how a new approach to architecture is inspiring a new architecture for business - aimed to “explore not only how a radical approach to design has inspired a new genre in the built environment, but also how this approach can be applied to designing a new architecture for business.”

Services, Jobs and Related Subjects

The services sector is by far the largest in the world’s economy.  Services comprise 64 percent of GDP overall, about twice as large as the GDP of the industrial sector.  The services sector represents over 70 percent of GDP in advanced economies and close to 80 percent in the US. 

Jobs exhibit similar statistics.  According to the 2008 World Factbook, about 40 percent of all the jobs in the planet are in services.  The numbers go up significantly in the more advanced economies.  About two thirds of the jobs in Brazil, Japan and the European Union are in services.  In the US, UK and Israel the percentage of such jobs is around 80 percent.  

It is interesting that while constituting such a large portion of GDP and jobs in the world, the nature of services remains vague - a kind of hard-to-measure dark matter.  It is easier to define the services sector by what it does not include:  it is not agriculture or fishing, and it is not manufacturing, construction or mining.  Just about every other job is in services.  Perhaps the one definition everyone can agree to is one attributed to The Economist: a service is “anything sold in trade that cannot be dropped on your foot.”

A Gathering Storm We Totally Missed

I think that it is by now pretty clear that there is no simple answer to the causes of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. 

Plain, old-fashioned greed - that is, the pursuit of individual wealth, possessions and power - clearly played a major role.  So did the Wall Street's bonus system which practically encouraged its people to make risky investments so they can earn huge sums of money in a good year, without having to worry about the impact of their risky, short-term bets in subsequent years.

There is plenty of blame to go around: the management of the financial companies; the rating agencies; the regulators; the extreme anti-government ideology that prevailed in the US in the last several decades.  Our financial crisis is best seen as a systemic failure of massive proportions.

But, there is one group whose role in this systemic failure I personally find particularly troublesome: my own technical and research community.

Leadership in a Time of Crisis

Leadership is the kind of subject that invariably rises to the top in a time of crisis.  Otherwise, it is one of those topics that companies talk a lot about but otherwise don't feel the need to pay much serious attention to.  When skies are blue, the business can usually cruise along quite nicely with executives who are likely top operational managers but may or may not also have good leadership attributes.

Think about how executives typically reach senior management positions?  The key responsibilities of middle management are to deliver against their operational and functional commitments.  Those who perform well in their jobs will generally be promoted to positions of higher responsibility.  The selection process will ensure that they have very good operational skills and have experience in managing different kinds of functions in the organization - finance, sales, customer service, HR, manufacturing, logistics - or all of them in the case of good general managers.

Managing a large global organization is very tough and getting tougher given our unpredictable, fast changing, intensely competitive market environment.  Being a successful manager in such an environment is truly difficult:  you have to constantly improve your products and services to keep up with fast changing technologies and markets; you have to work hard to retain existing customers and attract new ones regardless of how ferocious the competition is; and you must achieve good financial results quarter after quarter, lest  you disappoint shareholders and financial analysts, who will then start asking for your head. 

But, in highly disruptive times, let alone in a time of crisis, being an excellent manager is not enough.  Presumably the company is in crisis because the new disruptive environment is so different from everything that came before.  The tried-and-true management disciplines are no longer working.  Something else, over and above excellent management is required, namely leadership.

Learning from Experience

This past Fall, I taught my MIT graduate seminar Technology-based Business Transformation for the second time.  The focus of the course is on how to leverage emerging, disruptive technologies to significantly transform a business or even a whole industry.  I use examples from a variety of companies and industries, but in particular, throughout the course I use the concrete lessons we learned from IBM’s e-business initiative in the second half of the 1990s, as well as my personal experiences as general manager of the Internet Division during this period.

I spend the first class talking about innovation as a key business imperative.  Every business must continuously innovate in order to survive the competitive pressures all around them.  In that first session we discuss in some depth IBM’s own near-death experience in the early 1990s.  Few companies survive this kind of experience.  IBM managed to survive and reinvent itself in the process by embracing a number of major technology, market and organizational innovations - the Internet in particular, -  that transformed the company and its culture.

In my opinion, IBM's near-death experience and successful reinvention are inexorably linked.  In business, as in life in general, cataclysmic event are great learning experiences, assuming of course you manage to get over them and keep going.  Such events open the mind to new experiences as nothing else does, totally changing our previous inflexible views of life.  This is a key concept in ancient Greek tragedy.  The tragic hero need not die, but it is important that he acknowledges his responsibility in his doomed fate, learns from his mistakes and corrects them moving forward.

Lessons from engineering

Learning from mistakes is the essence of Six Sigma, Lean Production and similar methodologies that aim to identify and remove the causes of defects and errors in manufacturing and business processes.  Root cause analysis is one of the key tools they use.  It is not enough to merely address the immediate obvious symptoms in solving a problem.  You must attempt to find, and correct the root causes of the problem in order to minimize the likelihood that the problem will recur.

Managing across Borders and Cultures

I was recently invited to join The Levin Institute as a Senior Fellow.  The Levin Institute is a new, independent institute within the State University of New York (SUNY).  It was established to train students, working professionals and organizations to live and work effectively in our emerging global environment.  Its mission is succinctly captured in its tag line: Managing across borders and cultures.

The Levin Institute is located in a newly renovated landmark townhouse on 55th Street between Park and Lexington, in the heart of New York City.  Its full name is The Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce.  It was founded by the State of New York to honor the memory of Neil David Levin, a former Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who was killed during the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. 

The Levin Institute is led by Garrick Utley, a former broadcast journalist with extensive experience in international affairs, who reported from more than 75 countries for more than 40 years.  Mr. Utley’s Presidential message describes its missions thus:  

"We are a new 21st Century academic model and enterprise that addresses key aspects and issues of globalization. We do this through developing new learning models, research and public engagement.  We prepare individuals and institutions to learn, work and communicate across borders and cultures.  As a free standing, system wide institute within the State University of New York (SUNY) we meld management school curricula with those of schools of international relations.  The successful manager of the 21st Century will be defined by the ability to operate successfully across divisions of nationality, ethnicity, religion and languages as well as political, economic, legal and regulatory environments.

“Our research projects and studies include global talent (high end knowledge workers), China as an emerging, knowledge-driven economy and society, the growing influence of global corporations, global media and the impact of globalization on American society.  Through our conferences and events, and leading-edge information and audio visual technology, we work to give new meaning to the concept of distance learning. One of our web sites, www.globalization101.org, is a leading platform for information and learning tools."

Re-inventing Management and Management Education

Through the years, I have watched with a kind of morbid fascination the number of once powerful companies that are no longer around.  It would appear that Darwinian principles apply to companies as much as to organisms.  There seems to be a kind of life cycle to a business, and beyond a certain number of years, the invisible hand of the marketplace lets you know that your time is up.  And every so often, a kind of near-mass-extinction event seems to afflict a whole industry, such as is currently happening in the financial sector around the world. 

How I came to my fatalistic view of business is not hard to understand.  IBM's near-death experience in the 1990s was very painful for me personally and for all us in the company.  Even though we managed to survive, as well as to recover and regain a position of leadership in the IT industry, the traumatic experience has definitely left its imprint and colors my views of the world.

Then there are the facts.  In her book Let Go to Grow, my IBM colleague Linda Sanford cites a number of ominous statistics.  For example, of more than 1,000 companies tracked by the Fortune 500 since 1960, less than one sixth of them are still around.

The 2008 HENAAC (Hispanic Engineer) Conference

Earlier in October I was in Houston to attend the annual Hispanic Engineer's National Achievement Award Conference (HENAAC).  HENAAC key mission is promoting science, technology, engineering and math careers in underrepresented communities, especially the US Hispanic community.  It has been doing so for twenty years now. 

The highlight of the annual HENAAC conference is the award show that recognizes the achievement of Hispanic engineers and scientists in a number of categories.  The top honorees this year were Ellen Ochoa - deputy director for NASA's Johnson Space Center and former astronaut - who was named the 2008 Hispanic Engineer of the Year, and Dan Arvizu - Director of DOE's National Energy Renewable Lab - who was inducted into the HENAAC Hall of Fame.  I was honored by HENAAC in 2001, when I was named Hispanic Engineer of the Year, and in 2004, when I was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

The conference included a variety of meetings and seminars, as well as a number of programs aimed at students, including a career fair.  Among the meetings was a panel - for which I acted as moderator, - of past Engineers of the Year and Hall of Fame inductees to explore innovative solutions to the number one issue HENAAC deals with:  how do we convince Hispanic kids and their families that the pursuit of engineering and science careers is one of the best paths to a well paying, highly stimulating job?

Trip to Portugal

I spent the past week in Portugal at the invitation of the MIT Portugal Program.  I gave a talk on Complex Engineering Systems in the Knowledge Economy, and had meetings with faculty members and government officials involved in the program.   I also spent some time with colleagues from IBM Portugal.

The MIT Portugal Program was started in 2006 as a collaboration between MIT and government, academia, and industry in Portugal.  The program aims to foster education, research and economic development in areas related to engineering systems.  It has targeted bio-engineering, sustainable energy, transportation, and engineering design and advanced manufacturing as its key focus areas.

The MIT side of the program is being coordinated by the Engineering Systems Division (ESD).  For ESD, the program is an invaluable learning experience as it explores, together with Portuguese universities, government and the private sector how to best leverage engineering systems for the benefit of society and business.   

For Portugal, the program represents a strategic commitment to science, technology and higher education.  Similar programs have been established by the Portuguese government with UT Austin - which has a focus on digital media, advanced computing and math; with CMU - whose focus is on IT, critical infrastructures, innovation and applied math; and with Harvard focusing on biomedical sciences.  These international programs are an investment in human capital, designed to make Portugal a relevant partner for future joint ventures in the emerging knowledge-based, global economy.

Nurturing a Healthy Innovation Environment

I strongly believe that top talent is the most important asset for any business that aspires to a leadership position in the knowledge economy.  Talent enables a company to better cope with, adjust to and thrive in our fast changing, unpredictable world.

But while the presence of top talent is a necessary condition for leadership, it is not sufficient.  You need to put that talent to work, not only contributing to the operational excellence of the business, but focusing on innovation, so the company can survive the onslaught of new competitors and retain its leadership position into the future, as well as be able to evolve and become a leader in important new areas

Fostering a spirit of innovation among talented people is very difficult.  Why is that?  Lots of excellent management books have been written on the subject, but I would like to offer a more personal explanation.

Lou Gerstner at MIT

Leadership was the overriding objective of the graduate seminar I taught at MIT last Fall, - Technology-based Business Transformation, - which I will be teaching again in the Fall of 2008.  I told the students at our first meeting that I hoped the course would help them develop or enhance their leadership skills, so they can better deal with the complex systems, complex markets and complex organizations they will likely encounter throughout their careers.

In the course, we used Lou Gerstner's book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance", which all students read and we discussed extensively in class.  Given my professional relationship with Lou, with whom I worked closely in his nine years at IBM, I invited him to come lecture to the class. He accepted, but due to health problems we had to postpone his visit. 

Lou’s visit to MIT took place on March 12.  While my class was not in session this semester, we scheduled a breakfast meeting with all students in Systems and Design Management (SDM), the program that most of my students belong to, a public lecture as part of the Dean's Innovative Leader Series at the Sloan School of Management, and a few smaller meetings.   

SDM is an interdisciplinary program between the School of Engineering and the Sloan School of Management, whose graduates receive a master of science in engineering and management.  To kick off our discussion, I read a paragraph from Lou's book, which I had used in the section on organizational culture in the class:

"I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.  In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.  Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management – can set you on the right path and can carry you for a while.  But no enterprise – whether in business, government, education, health care, or any area of human endeavor - will succeed over the long haul if those elements aren't part of its DNA."

Technology, Innovation and Social Action

A few months ago I received an e-mail inviting me to come talk to the Provost Council at St John's University.  St. John's "is one of America's leading Catholic universities – recognized for its superb academic programs, diverse student life, BIG EAST excitement and New York vitality."  The talk would be in their main campus in Queens, so it would be easy for me to drive there from my home.  Given that I like to visit and give talks in universities, I quickly accepted and we settled on a late February date.

They wanted me to talk on the applications of technology and innovation for social action -- in particular, how technology and innovation might be leveraged to eradicate poverty and to help those who do not have the basic needs of life.  St John's, they explained, was founded by the Vincentian Community in 1870.  The Vincentian Family is known for championing the needs of the poor.  They take their name and inspiration from St Vincent de Paul, a priest who lived during the 17th Century in France.  After learning of the hunger and the plight of the poor in the French countryside, he devoted himself to ministering to their needs.  He died in 1660 and was canonized in 1737. 

St. John's has launched a new initiative, the Vincentian Institute for Social Action (VISA).  They are reflecting on what it means to be a Vincentian institution in the 21st century.  They want to "become known worldwide for addressing issues or poverty and social justice."  They want to do so through "innovative teaching, research and service in a distinctively Vincentian approach, i.e., action and service with impact.”

As I have been repeatedly writing in this blog, I really believe that technology and innovation are now enabling us to address the most complex problems in science,  business and society.  What is more complex, - and more important, - than to consider how to best leverage technology and innovation to address the critical issues surrounding poverty and social justice?

So, I put together a talk on Social Action Innovation in the Knowledge Age.  After first discussing the new technologies and capabilities we now have at our disposal, I talked about their potential applications in four key areas that I have been writing about in this blog - lifelong learning, social business entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility and soft power.  I will focus this blog on the first area – learning, - as I have recently posted entries on the other three and drew heavily on those entries in my St John’s talk.

Applying "Lean" Thinking to Healthcare Solutions

The second Innovation Lecture Series: Engineering Systems Solutions to Real World Challenges took place on December 14 at MIT.  The series is co-sponsored by MIT's Engineering Systems Division and IBM's University Relations as part of its Skills for the 21st Century initiative.  The first lecture in the series was held in October and featured IBM's Senior Vice President Linda Sanford, discussing the IBM transformation initiatives that she leads.    

The Innovation Lecture Series are delivered by business and technical leaders, who discuss their concrete experiences in leveraging technology and engineering capabilities to address complex problems in their organizations.  This past lecture focused on healthcare and featured three top executives of the Vassar Brothers Medical Center, a regional medical center and hospital in New York State's mid-Hudson Valley: Dr. Daniel Aronzon, President and CEO; Nicholas Christiano, Vice-President and CIO; and Dr. Stephen Katz, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice-President of Medical Affairs.  A webcast of the lecture as well as additional materials are posted in the Innovation Lecture Series web site.

Informal Learning and Community Libraries

Last week I attended a fascinating lecture by John Seely Brown on "Rethinking Learning and the Community Library in the Networked Age” at the Westport (CT) Public Library.  His talk explored whether there might be a way to reinvent the community library as a new kind of complementary asset to both the school and the Internet – reinvent it in a way that deeply engages digital kids (and everyone else) and increases their passion to learn. 

I have known John for many years and have served with him on a few committees and boards.  He was Chief Scientist at Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for almost twenty years.  Since retiring from Xerox, John has continued to be very busy as a speaker, writer, member of the boards of several public and private companies and lots of other activities.  One of his main areas of interest is education, in particular how our Internet culture is introducing whole new ways of learning.