Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Re-inventing the Corporate Research Lab

Last month, my colleague Paul Horn announced his retirement from IBM.  He had been the leader of IBM Research since 1996, a position that John Kelly has now assumed.

I have worked closely with Paul for many years.  His accomplishments are impressive.  Under his leadership, IBM Research developed the Deep Blue supercomputer, which in May of 1997 defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a six day match.  A few years later, the Blue Gene initiative was launched, a family of highly parallel supercomputers aimed at solving some of the most complex problems in science and industry.  Since 2004 Blue Gene has been number one in the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

In technology, the Research division pioneered a number of semiconductor breakthroughs, such as the use of copper wiring to help build faster microprocessors and the use of self assembly, - inspired by biological mechanisms, -  in semiconductor manufacturing. 

Beyond individual products and technologies, Paul led in the creation of entire new disciplines, most famously Services Sciences, which is aimed at helping us better understand the nature of services,  - by far the largest sector in the economy of most countries, - in order to improve their productivity and quality through the use of technology, science and management principles. 

Paul played a major role in the launch of the Autonomic Computing initiative, aimed at making complex IT systems increasingly self-managing.  In 2001 he published the Autonomic Computing Manifesto, a challenge to the IT industry, and the research community in particular, to deal with the growing complexity of IT systems - the largest obstacle standing in the way of continuing progress. 

But, impressive as these accomplishments are, I believe that the key legacy from Paul Horn's tenure as director of IBM Research is his leadership role in transforming the very culture of the institution, and in the process laying the foundation for the corporate R&D lab of the 21st century.

A Kind of Cambrian Explosion

Over the last few years, the complex engineering systems community has been turning to biology as a source of new ideas for dealing with the kinds of systems that we are now increasingly able to develop.  As digital components continue to become ever more powerful, inexpensive and standardized, these complex systems are growing in breadth and capabilities at a dramatic rate.  Moreover, the kinds of problems we are now able to address are significantly different from what they were in the past.

IT systems are "going up the stack."  They are increasingly being used for businesses and societal applications that need to be able to change and adapt to whatever is going on in the marketplace, and those changes are coming at a very rapid pace.  These market-facing, people-oriented complex systems need to be flexible and adaptable.  Biological systems clearly exhibit these kinds of properties - flexible, adaptable, highly complex and continuously evolving, - which is why biology has become such a source of inspiration for the study of dynamic, complex engineered systems.

Looking at biology as a metaphor, - and begging forgiveness for any poetic license I might have taken in a subject that I am far from an expert - one can very roughly speaking identify an era where the cell was perfected and single cell organisms made their appearance several billion years ago.  This was followed by  multi-cell organisms a billion years ago or so.  Then, around half a billion years ago another dramatic change took place, which is known as the Cambrian Explosion.  Evolution essentially took off, accelerating by an order of magnitude, ushering in a highly diverse set of organisms that were far larger and more complicated than anything that existed before.

The IT industry has been going through a similar process.  If we think of digital components as playing the role of cells in biology, for the first several decades of the industry our focus was to improve and perfect these components - microprocessors, memory chips, disks and so on.  We were building computer systems that were mostly based on a relatively small number of processors.  The lack of standards made it difficult to cluster or network large numbers of such processors into an integrated system.

Leadership and Management Skills in the Knowledge Economy

I am getting ready to teach a new graduate seminar at MIT this fall - Technology-based Business Transformation.  In this course, I will examine how to leverage emerging, disruptive technologies to significantly transform a business or even a whole industry.  Since the Internet is arguably the quintessential example of such a major transformative technology, I will illustrate our discussions in the seminar with the concrete lessons we learned from IBM’s e-business initiative in the second half of the 1990s, and in particular, with my personal experiences as general manager of the Internet Division during this period.

The course will cover in detail the key areas involved in bringing complex technologies like the Internet to market,  including strategy formulation and execution as well as organizational and cultural issues.  But in addition, I want to spend considerable time discussing technical and management leadership questions.  What kinds of skills do we want engineers and managers to have in order to not only develop new products and services in the lab, but ensure that the proper strategies and organizations are in place to make them successful in the marketplace?  How do they learn the kinds of leadership skills needed to rally the whole company behind a major new initiative, - top management as well as employees across the organization, -  without whose support it would be practically impossible to succeed in executing a sophisticated, disruptive market strategy?

So it was with great interest that I read about a report, - How relevant is the MBA?  Assessing the alignment of MBA curricula and managerial competencies,  by Robert Rubin and Erich Dierdorff of DePaul University, - which was presented at this year's Academy of Management meeting.  Their study analyzed data from surveys with more than 8,600 managers conducted by the US Department of Labor and identified six main areas of management competencies.  Some are so-called soft or people-oriented in nature - human capital, decision making and strategy and innovation, -  and some are  hard or quantitative - administration and control, logistics and technology, and task environment.

Rubin and Dierdorff concluded that there was a significant gap between the skills that businesses are looking for, and the skills being taught in business schools.  What companies generally want from MBA programs are graduates with people-oriented skills who are good at leadership, communication and innovation.  However, students frequently complain that such soft skills will not get them the kinds of jobs they want, and so they pressure the business schools to offer them courses that are functional, analytical or technical in nature.  While the authors' study focused primarily on MBA programs, I am sure that similar such skill gaps can be found in graduate programs in engineering and other disciplines.

"Killer Apps" and Virtual Worlds

Last week I went back to the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit.  It was a very stimulating event, both because of the talks and panels as well as the people that this conference attracts.  I participated in a panel on How Real is the Virtual Web?, which was moderated by Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in Virtual Reality and currently Scholar-in-Residence at UC Berkeley.  The panel included Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Interactive; Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer at Sun Microsystems; and Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Second Life, who also gave a short talk - A Brief Look at Second Life just prior to the panel.

We discussed a wide range of subjects, including the use of virtual worlds for serious applications beyond online games and related social environments.  When will virtual worlds become a real business?, our moderator asked.

I expressed my opinion that meetings and learning and training may very well be the killer apps of virtual worlds, that is, those applications that turn out to be unexpectedly useful and help propel the success of a new product or service in the marketplace.  For example, there is general agreement that spreadsheet applications had a lot to do with the initial adoption of personal computers in business.

Some panel members agreed with me, while others thought that it would be a pity if the reason business adopts virtual worlds is for something as mundane as conducting virtual meetings.  But remember, spreadsheet applications were successful not because they were exciting.  The reason that spreadsheets and word processing are viewed as killer apps is because they helped validate that PCs were becoming a tool for real work and would improve personal productivity.

Similarly, I think that virtual meetings and virtual learning and training are helping drive the adoption of virtual worlds in business based on my impressions of how they are already being used by thousands within IBM and in other companies we are working with.  I also see quite a number of universities experimenting with the use of virtual worlds for online courses.