Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Golden Rule

General Peter Pace is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, - America's highest ranking military position.  A few weeks ago, General Pace said in a discussion with editors and reporters of the Chicago Tribune:  "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.  I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.” 

He further added:  "As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not.  We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior."  His moral views about homosexuality are based on his upbringing, he also said in the interview. 

I first heard news reports of General Pace's comments while driving in my car.  I was incredulous and felt that this must be a misunderstanding that will quickly get cleared up.  Just about anyone who knows and meets General Pace mentions what a caring human being he is, as well as being a great leader.  Furthermore, someone in his position, given all his extensive dealings with the press and all the media training he must have received through his career, would not express such beliefs publicly, even if he happened to hold them. 

But the day after his Chicago Tribune interview, General Pace issued a statement that said:  "In expressing my support for the current [don't ask, don't tell] policy, I also offered some personal opinions about moral conduct.  I should have focused more on my support of the policy and less on my personal moral views."  Senior staff members further added that he was expressing his personal opinion and had no intention of apologizing.

General Pace is obviously entitled to his opinions, but I suspect that he wishes that he had not publicly said something so hurtful to so many.  I immediately thought of the impact of such remarks on my gay and lesbian friends, as well as those who have children who are gay or lesbian.  I thought of my IBM colleagues who are working so hard in our Global Workforce Diversity programs, whose aim it is to create a culture of diversity and inclusion across the company so we can attract and retain the best possible talent.  I wonder how the many thousands in our armed forces who are gay or lesbian felt upon hearing their leader say that their feelings and actions are immoral.  My feelings went out to the families of the men and women who have been killed or seriously injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, and happen to be homosexual.

GIO 3.0 - The 2007 Global Innovation Outlook

A couple of weeks ago we kicked off GIO 3.0 with back-to-back meetings in New York City, one of which I was the host for.  The Global Innovation Outlook is an experiment that we started in 2004 to help us better surface new and unforeseen opportunities for business and societal innovation.  In the "old days" we explored such future strategic directions mostly with our own experts in IBM, complemented by a few outside consultants.  However, in an increasingly open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary, global, - and unpredictable world, this is clearly no longer enough. 

The GIO brings together IBM executives with thought leaders from business, the public sector, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other influential constituencies around the world to peer collectively into the future and identify major trends, insights and opportunities.

I have been involved with our GIO initiative from its inception and participated in GIO 1.0 and GIO 2.0.  But over the last several months, my appreciation for the GIO process and its potential has become deeper and sharper.  In my introduction to the GIO meeting I hosted, I mentioned that my view of the GIO has been strongly influenced by an excellent book I recently read and wrote about in my blog -  Innovation - the Missing Dimension, written by MIT professors Richard Lester and Michael Piore.

Professors Lester and Piore describe two kinds of innovation, which they call analysis and interpretation.  The first kind of innovation - analysis - is essentially rational decision making and problem solving.  It is the standard approach underlying management and engineering practice, and works quite well when you are looking for a solution to a relatively well defined problem.

But where do the problems come from in the first place?  How do you decide what problems to work on and try to solve?    This second kind of innovation - interpretation - is very different in nature from analysis.  You are not solving a problem but looking for a new insight about customers and the marketplace, a new idea for a product or services, a new approach to producing and delivering them, a new business model.  Their research showed that interpretive innovation takes place through a process of conversations among people and organizations with different backgrounds and perspectives.  This is what the Global Innovation Outlook is all about.

Beyond the Ivory Tower

The March 3rd issue of The Economist has an excellent article, “The Rise and Fall of Corporate R&D - Out of the Dusty Labs” on the evolution of corporate R&D since the end of the Second World War.  The article starts by describing the vision laid out by presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush in his 1945 seminal report, Science The Endless Frontier.   "New knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research" conducted in universities and research labs, which is then applied to develop new products by the private sector and new and improved weapons by the defense sector, he said in the report. 

Vannevar Bush's report was truly influential, and served as the blueprint for R&D in post-war America.  "The Government should accept new responsibilities for promoting the flow of new scientific knowledge and the development of scientific talent in our youth," he further added.  This led to the creation of the National Science Foundation a few years later.  Large enterprises also embraced his recommendations, and organized corporate research labs, such as Xerox PARC and IBM Research. 

But today the picture is very different.  "Technology firms have left the big corporate R&D laboratory behind, shifting the emphasis from research to development," the article says and proceeds to then pose the key question "Does it matter?"

Reflections on Global Integration

Globalization is one of the key forces of our times, whether we are talking about living in an increasingly integrated, flat world or transitioning from multinational corporations to globally integrated enterprises.  I think most would agree that one of the key reasons globalization is now so prominent is a result of the wide adoption of the Internet and World Wide Web starting around the mid-1990s.  As has been widely discussed, the Web makes it almost as easy to reach out to people, information and processes across the world as across the office, and thus enables the global integration of business and other institutions to an unprecedented degree. 

But this is still all so new that I think it is worthwhile every now and then to take a step back and reflect on what we mean by global integration.  Is there such a thing as bad integration?  Does it depend on what is being helped by the integration, and what is being hurt?  What about the impact of integration on people?  How can we make it a positive force for as many as possible, while ameliorating the pain on those that are hurt by it?

These are questions I have been thinking a lot about, and they can be approached from various different angles.  I’d like to start by discussing how global integration applies to enterprises, and follow up with other dimensions in future posts.  To begin with, what are some of the major pitfalls that enterprises should be sensitive to so they implement the good kind of integration and avoid the bad?  How should a business best start on the path to becoming a globally integrated enterprise? 

Personally, I strongly associate global integration with the rise of the Internet and advances in information technologies, and in particular, with our new-found ability to apply systems and engineering thinking to a whole new class of complex problems - including globally integrated economies, industries and enterprises.