Last week I attended one of my favorite events of the year, IBM's annual Corporate Technology Recognition Event (CTRE). At the CTRE we recognize and reward individuals and teams who made significant technical contributions to IBM and to the world of science and technology. We also announce our newest IBM Fellows, the company's most prestigious technical honor.
Given my imminent retirement, this year's CTRE took on a particularly nostalgic feeling. It is interesting for me to think about the arc my professional career has taken, much of it spent among members of our technical community, like those being honored at the CTRE. I like to think back to decisions I made at various forks in the road and how they turned out, as well as on the impact of circumstances that were beyond my control. After a while, amidst the various zigs and zags, a definite pattern started to emerge in my career, a pattern that I could not have anticipated but had to discover as I went along.
I attended the University of Chicago, a very academic school indeed, where I got a Ph.D in physics. The next step in the career that a Chicago physics education prepared you for was to go on to a post-doctoral position, so you can better hone your academic research skills. I was all set to go on to a physics post-doc at the Harvard College Observatory, but at the last minute the funding for the position fell through.
It seemed that the fates were sending me a message. When I entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, I met Professor Clemens Roothaan, one of the pioneers in the use of computers in physics and chemistry. I worked closely with him, first at the supercomputing center he founded in the early 1960s, and later as his graduate student while doing my Ph.D research.
Professor Roothan was also a consultant to IBM at the time, and through him I met a number of people from IBM, who encouraged me to come interview for a job in the computer sciences department at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. I did so after the post-doc position had fallen through. The way things worked out, I ended up joining IBM Research in June of 1970, after making the decision to switch from physics to computer sciences.
During my first several years at IBM, I continued to do fairly academic work, now in computer sciences. I was frankly struggling a bit to find my bearings in my new discipline. Then, in 1976, I almost went to MIT on a sabbatical, but at the last minute a colleague encouraged me to explore sabbatical opportunities in other parts of IBM to learn more about the company.
I ended up spending my sabbatical year in the unit responsible for sales to the Far East, Latin America and Canada. I was talked into accepting the position by the manager who interviewed me, who simply said that if I went to MIT I would likely continue to do academic work similar to what I had been doing in IBM Research. But if I had the courage to try an entirely different job and learn about the real world of computers and business, I should come work for him. Something in me could not resist his challenge.
This turned out to be a very significant step in my career. To my amazement, I loved the very concrete, practical parts of the job, including dealing with clients and understanding their problems, as well as learning in depth about IBM's products and how they stacked up against those of the competition.
I returned to Research in 1977 after my sabbatical, having discovered something new about myself. I still very much enjoyed working on technical matters, but I also loved the challenges involved in bringing new technologies to the marketplace. This became the dominant theme of my career from then on.
Upon my return to Research, I became involved in the new technology transfer initiatives we were starting to move innovations from our research labs to the product divisions. As part of this work I joined a project that was investigating what it would take to design future large computer systems, twenty times faster than our then-fastest machines. I also worked very closely with our people in the product development labs, to understand their challenges better and see how our work in Research could help them. Over the next several years I held a number of different research management positions, and in 1984 I was named director of computer sciences in IBM Research, a very nice job that I thought I would hold for awhile.
But a year later I was offered the position of strategy leader in our large systems division. I was essentially asked to come over to the other side of the fence and lead the implementation of many of the new research ideas that we had been urging the product units to embrace. While I frankly would have preferred to stay longer than one year as director of computer sciences in Research I felt that realistically there was no way I could decline their job offer without having it appear that I only liked to tell other people what to do, but was too afraid to go do it himself.
Since then I have held a number of different positions across the company. A couple of those jobs were line of business operations with a fairly large number of people reporting directly to me. But for the most part, the jobs I have held involved building the strategy and organization to bring emerging technologies to market working closely with people across IBM as well as outside the company, including supercomputing, the Internet and Linux. They all followed the pattern established earlier in my career of having one foot grounded in the technology and the other in the marketplace.
I like talking to young people in the early stages of their careers, sharing with them whatever advice I can based on my own personal experiences. I generally tell them to consider their careers as a kind of professional journey, in which they should be willing to try out different kinds of positions, and be open to new experiences. It takes a while to find yourself, and as I personally learned, you never know what it is that you will most enjoy doing.
Irving,
A BIG thank you from all of us at IBM for enriching our lives with your insights, mentoring and leadership. Great luck!!!
Posted by: Anant Jhingran | June 02, 2007 at 01:12 AM
I can honestly say that during the time that I had the honor to work for Irving he helped me tremendously in shaping my own career. Based on his gentle persuasion I changed career paths and have been extremely glad that I did so. Anyone that has the opportunity to work with or work for Irving is very lucky.
Posted by: Jose Iglesias | June 22, 2007 at 03:39 PM