Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Soul of a Business – People, Culture and Brand

What is a business?  It is a question I have been pondering of late while thinking about how to apply engineering processes and tools and highly visual video game technologies to the design and operations of business systems, as well as trying to figure out the kinds of skills and education needed by future engineers and managers dealing with such technology-based business systems.

The question is relatively easy to answer when talking about the kind of small businesses we deal with in our everyday life - a favorite restaurant, the local dry cleaner, the neighborhood drugstore.  But the question is much harder to answer when it comes to global enterprises like IBM, BP, Fidelity or Colgate-Palmolive, to cite a few companies with which I work closely. 

Global companies, which generally offer a variety of products and services, seem somewhat abstract, with their employees and clients distributed all over the world.  These companies are becoming even less concrete, as once vertically integrated enterprises disaggregate into business webs, or open, virtual enterprises to do business more effectively in a highly networked world.  In fact, these trajectories are spawning a shift in the basic corporate model - from the multinational corporation, with relatively independent subsidiaries in countries around the world, to the globally integrated enterprise. 

What binds together a virtual, distributed, globally integrated business?  Wikipedia defines business as " . . . the social science of managing people to organize and maintain collective productivity toward accomplishing particular creative and productive goals, usually to generate revenue."  I like this definition because it focuses on people as the essence of a business, and it is by effectively organizing and managing people that a business develops products and services and generates revenue and profit.

An Unusual Meeting

Last week I attended SC06 - the 2006 international supercomputing conference which this year took place in Tampa.  This annual conference is one of my favorites, where I get to meet so many of the supercomputing colleagues whom I have known and worked closely with for years – people from universities and research labs, government and industry.  The conference coincides with the release of the latest TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.  I am proud to say that once more IBM is very well represented in the list with 237 of the 500 entries including 4 of the top 5 and 44 of the top 100. 

There was nothing unusual about my being at SC06 last week.  The unusual meeting I participated in while in Tampa took place in Beijing, where IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano spoke at a Town Hall event before a live audience of over 2500 IBM employees, partners and distinguished guests.  We also had audiences throughout China at seven additional locations.  They participated in the town hall via the usual video and audio feeds.  But, in addition, we had an IBM audience from many different countries join the event through the virtual world of Second Life.  I was part of that virtual world audience.

Innovation Meeting in Mexico

The Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) is a major new initiative we started in IBM two years ago to transform the way we look at innovation and strategic planning.  We decided to complement our in-house strategy efforts by sitting together with thought leaders from around the world, from business, academia, government and other key constituencies, to collectively peer into the future and identify the emerging trends, insights and opportunities that should inform our strategies.  In November of 2004 we published the results of GIO 1.0, and earlier this year we published the GIO 2.0 report.

Last week I was in Mexico where I participated in a meeting to discuss the results of the 2006 GIO 2.0 with invited guests from across Latin America, representing the private and public sectors, universities and the media.  I gave an overview of the GIO findings and recommendations, as well as of IBM's Innovation that Matters initiative. 

I also moderated a panel on The Intellectual Property Marketplace.  One of the recommendations in GIO 2.0 was that IBM should collaborate with top IP experts and develop the principles needed to underlie a smoothly functioning IP marketplace.  We did this over the summer and the results were published in a recently released report, Building a New IP Marketplace. 

A second panel on The Future of the Enterprise was moderated by Colombian economist and journalist Alejandro Santos who is Director of the magazine Semana, one of the most important publications in Colombia.  The panel touched on a number of important subjects, but a recurring theme was whether Mexico and other countries in Latin America can successfully compete in the world's increasingly global, innovation-based economy. 

Irving in (a Virtual World) Wonderland

I recently joined Second Life (SL), which describes itself as "a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents."  Another way to think about Second Life is in terms of Virtual Worlds.  Wikipedia defines a virtual world as "a computer-simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars.  This habitation usually is represented in the form of two- or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids (or other graphical or text-based avatars)."

In the last couple of years I have become increasingly interested in 3rd generation user interfaces (3GUI) inspired by advanced gaming technologies such as those found in Microsoft's XBOX 360 and Sony's PS3.  Over time I have become convinced that such highly visual, interactive interfaces will revolutionize the way people interact with IT applications of all sorts.  I have also become convinced that such virtual world capabilities will profoundly transform business and related institutions in society.   

A number of IBM colleagues from around the world, now numbering in the hundreds, have been experimenting with virtual worlds in Second Life, and they helped me get "in-world."  In SL, you pick whatever first name you want and then you can choose from a selection of last names. (You can also select a specific last name by paying a fee.)  Unlike most people in SL, I stuck with my First Life (FL) name - Irving.  Among the second names offered by SL at the time I joined, I picked Islander.  I sort of liked the sound of Irving Islander, and since I was born and grew up on an island – Cuba - Irving Islander felt just right.