Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Trust and Responsibility in an Increasingly Integrated World

An interesting article - "The Globally Integrated Enterprise", authored by IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano was just published in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.  The key theme of the article is the emergence of a relatively new institution in society - the globally integrated enterprise.  The piece discusses its characteristics, opportunities and challenges.

Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, which describes it as “the international forum of choice for the most important new ideas, analysis, and debate on the most significant issues in the world.”  The fact that this article appears in such a publication instead of one devoted to business, e.g., the Harvard Business Review, is testament to the importance of globalization beyond the world of business – especially to public policy issues like economic development and trade relationships. 

The Business Leadership Forum: A Variety of Innovation Styles

Earlier in April I participated in IBM's 2006 Business Leadership Forum (BLF).  The forum included several hundred leaders of industry, government and academia from over 50 countries who gathered in Rome for two days of discussions about the challenges and opportunities facing business in the 21st century.  This is the fourth such forum we have held and the first global one.  In 2003, our first BLF in San Francisco began a dialogue on the proper business strategies to pursue in the wake of the dot-com implosion.  In 2004 and 2005, we held regional forums in Paris and Shanghai respectively.  Having learned from these earlier forums that business issues in each region are not dramatically different, we decided that for 2006 the BLF would include participants from around the world. 

I found the presentations and panels over the two days of the Rome BLF fascinating.  It was not just the content; it was also the different leadership styles and approaches to innovation represented by the speakers.  Let me talk about a few of them.

The IBM Global CEO Study 2006

Over the last ten years I have been the "leader" in IBM of a number of important initiatives like the Internet, Linux and On Demand – initiatives that spanned the whole company and proved to be transformative in nature.  I put quotes around "leader" not out of false modesty -- frankly I am very proud of what we have accomplished and of my own contributions to these efforts.  I use quotation marks because in all honesty I could not possibly have done these jobs at all, let alone have achieved any kind of positive results, if these initiatives had not been personally driven by our CEOs during that period, first Lou Gerstner then Sam Palmisano. 

While innovative ideas almost always emerge "bottoms up," from people within the business or from external communities in the wider marketplace, it has been my experience that their successful implementation requires top-down support, and the more disruptive and transformative the ideas, as was the case with the Internet, Linux and On Demand, the higher up in the organization must the support originate – up to and including the CEO.

I was thus happy to see that a key finding of the IBM Global CEO Study 2006, released last month by our Business Consulting Services organization, was that CEOs increasingly recognize that innovation cannot be treated as a marketing initiative and delegated down in the organization. To be successful, innovation requires orchestration from the top.   

A Stimulating Lunch at Oxford University

During my trip to the UK two weeks ago I visited Oxford University and had lunch with a number of faculty members at Keble College.  In particular, I sat next to Professor Sir Michael Brady with whom I had a fascinating conversation. 

Professor Brady is BP Professor of Information Engineering in the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford.  He has a broad range of research interests.  In his words, ". . . the themes that characterise Information Engineering, and that have characterised my research in Oxford, irrespective of the domain of application, are:

• it is rooted in real problems, that have varied from mobile robots for application in manufacturing to systems to help diagnose breast cancer;
• it mobilises and develops ideas from Computing Science, particularly the ideas of representation and distributed computer architecture. This is particularly evident in my work on mobile robotics, but also in that on teleconferencing and medical image analysis. A particular theme is the application of Artificial Intelligence, in the quest to make systems 'smart';
• it builds on a solid mathematical foundation. This permeates all of my work, whether it is a differential geometrical analysis of image surfaces, a model for x-ray image formation, infrared image analysis, or a model of defocussing blur in an image; and
• the work is intrinsically inter-disciplinary: at Oxford I have worked with radiologists, clinical neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, as well as with people from a range of industries."