Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Transparency and Open Government

One of the first documents our new President signed within his first day in office is this memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.  It is a memo that I am personally very happy to see, not only because I agree so strongly with its content.  For the last couple of months I have been a member of the Technology, Innovation & Government Reform (TIGR) transition policy group focusing on innovation and government.  This Presidential memo covers precisely the area that we worked on.

The TIGR Group

Right after winning the November 4 election, President-elect Obama's transition team established a series of Policy Working Groups "to develop the priority policy proposals and plans from the Obama Campaign for action during the Obama-Biden Administration."  There were seven such Groups: Economy, Education, Energy & Environment, Health Care, Immigration, National Security, and Technology, Innovation & Government Reform.

The TIGR group that I was part of was charged with developing "a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country’s most pressing problems; respects the integrity of and renews our commitment to science; and catalyzes active citizenship and partnerships in shared governance with civil society institutions."  We were organized into four sub-teams: Innovation and Government, Innovation and National Priorities, Innovation and Science, and Innovation and Civil Society.  I was part of  the Innovation and Government group.

Leadership in a Time of Crisis

Leadership is the kind of subject that invariably rises to the top in a time of crisis.  Otherwise, it is one of those topics that companies talk a lot about but otherwise don't feel the need to pay much serious attention to.  When skies are blue, the business can usually cruise along quite nicely with executives who are likely top operational managers but may or may not also have good leadership attributes.

Think about how executives typically reach senior management positions?  The key responsibilities of middle management are to deliver against their operational and functional commitments.  Those who perform well in their jobs will generally be promoted to positions of higher responsibility.  The selection process will ensure that they have very good operational skills and have experience in managing different kinds of functions in the organization - finance, sales, customer service, HR, manufacturing, logistics - or all of them in the case of good general managers.

Managing a large global organization is very tough and getting tougher given our unpredictable, fast changing, intensely competitive market environment.  Being a successful manager in such an environment is truly difficult:  you have to constantly improve your products and services to keep up with fast changing technologies and markets; you have to work hard to retain existing customers and attract new ones regardless of how ferocious the competition is; and you must achieve good financial results quarter after quarter, lest  you disappoint shareholders and financial analysts, who will then start asking for your head. 

But, in highly disruptive times, let alone in a time of crisis, being an excellent manager is not enough.  Presumably the company is in crisis because the new disruptive environment is so different from everything that came before.  The tried-and-true management disciplines are no longer working.  Something else, over and above excellent management is required, namely leadership.

Learning from Experience

This past Fall, I taught my MIT graduate seminar Technology-based Business Transformation for the second time.  The focus of the course is on how to leverage emerging, disruptive technologies to significantly transform a business or even a whole industry.  I use examples from a variety of companies and industries, but in particular, throughout the course I use the concrete lessons we learned from IBM’s e-business initiative in the second half of the 1990s, as well as my personal experiences as general manager of the Internet Division during this period.

I spend the first class talking about innovation as a key business imperative.  Every business must continuously innovate in order to survive the competitive pressures all around them.  In that first session we discuss in some depth IBM’s own near-death experience in the early 1990s.  Few companies survive this kind of experience.  IBM managed to survive and reinvent itself in the process by embracing a number of major technology, market and organizational innovations - the Internet in particular, -  that transformed the company and its culture.

In my opinion, IBM's near-death experience and successful reinvention are inexorably linked.  In business, as in life in general, cataclysmic event are great learning experiences, assuming of course you manage to get over them and keep going.  Such events open the mind to new experiences as nothing else does, totally changing our previous inflexible views of life.  This is a key concept in ancient Greek tragedy.  The tragic hero need not die, but it is important that he acknowledges his responsibility in his doomed fate, learns from his mistakes and corrects them moving forward.

Lessons from engineering

Learning from mistakes is the essence of Six Sigma, Lean Production and similar methodologies that aim to identify and remove the causes of defects and errors in manufacturing and business processes.  Root cause analysis is one of the key tools they use.  It is not enough to merely address the immediate obvious symptoms in solving a problem.  You must attempt to find, and correct the root causes of the problem in order to minimize the likelihood that the problem will recur.

Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

On December 31, 1958 we were celebrating New Year's Eve in the home of a friend, about a block from our apartment on Calle 4 in Miramar, a nice, middle class section of Havana.  I was thirteen, in the second year of high school of our more European-like educational system, which consisted of six years of grammar school, followed by five years of high school.

The previous year, I had spent New Year's Eve gallivanting around Havana with friends, but by December of 1958 the political situation was very fragile.  The battle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship was in full force.  Havana was the scene of frequent bombings, shootings, and police roundups.  We could no longer venture around town to celebrate New Year's Eve.

The following morning, January 1, 1959, we all woke up to the news that Batista along with many high officials in his government had fled Cuba overnight.  Fidel Castro the leader of the Cuban Revolution that had been fighting the Batista regime for the last several years came to power, along with his brother Raul. 

They have ruled Cuba ever since, celebrating their 50th anniversary in power on January 1, 2009.

Life was never the same for me and my family.  Within a few months of taking power, the Castro government started its turn toward communism, nationalizing all private property, from large plantations and industries owned by wealthy Cuban families and foreign companies, to businesses of all sorts owned by middle class families, like my parents’ store.