Connections eMagazine

Nick Donofrio

Because I will be retiring from IBM soon, I was asked to write about a career of technical advances. That makes sense; I am a technical guy. I have worked on many of the great technical advances of the last four decades. But I really did not want to write about technology. Technical advances are not what the last 44 years were really about. They are not what the future is about. And they are not what IBM is about.

When I started as an intern in September 1964, IBM had just announced the System/360. That sounds like a technical advance doesn’t it? And of course, it was. But even more important, it was technology driven by innovation.

The late Thomas Watson Jr. had many qualities, but by his own admission he was not particularly technology savvy. He did, however, know innovation when he saw it. Before the System/360, each new computer model was designed independently. The System/360 was the first system designed as a family of machines, all sharing the same instruction set. That meant businesses could use it for different tasks and even upgrade it. The System/360 began the modern age of computing.

Watson invested $5 billion (roughly $33 billion in today’s dollars) in the System/360. At the time the outlay was compared to the then-unimaginable placement of an astronaut on the moon, and Fortune magazine called it “IBM’s $5 billion gamble.” But we know that investment paid off and where it led.

On June 9, IBM announced Roadrunner — the world’s first petaflop computer; a machine that can handle 1015 — 1,000,000,000,000,000 – operations each second. The fastest computer in the world. That’s a huge step from the technology world in which I started, when the tools of the trade were slide rules, vacuum tubes and ferrite cores. But the world has come to expect us to make those kinds of steps.

For more on the world’s fastest supercomputer mentioned by Nick Donofrio:
Computer science reaches historic breakthrough (IBM report)
Military supercomputer sets record (NY Times)
Supercomputer performs 1,000 trillion calculations a second (USA Today)

Of course, IBM’s business is based on technology. We continued to deliver more and more for less and less. But in the 21st century, innovation is what captures the migration of value, of change. Today, success has less to do with invention, creation and discovery and more to do with innovation.

Technology will always be important to IBM and to the world. But IBMers should be especially proud that innovation is something we have come to understand. Innovation is not what I learned in school; it is clearly what I learned in life. I suspect you have had the same experience.

My late father — a first-generation Italian-American who never got further than the 10th grade and often worked three jobs to support his family — had an expression: “If nothing changes; nothing changes.” By that, he meant that personal, workplace or societal, circumstances will not change unless you alter something in their equation. IBM’s success has been determined by its capacity to recognize, embrace and drive change.

Today, we stand at one of those rare inflection points that will forever change the way we work, the way opportunities come about and how we extract value from our endeavors. Technologically, for example, we are standing on the shore of an uncharted sea called nano-technology. Like any sea, it may bring huge advantages and new materials, but it can also bring storms. We will just have to find out. More certain is the uniquely 21st- century phenomenon of collaborative innovation.

Innovation today is different from how the System/360 came to be born. Today, innovation is global, multi-disciplinary, collaborative and open. And that brings me to another non-technical aspect of the last 44 years: people and relationships. We are about to harvest a bumper crop of new ideas because technology has not only created new ways of doing things, it has helped bring people closer and has enabled collaboration in ways undreamed of when I started at IBM.

Look at the Global Innovation Outlook. The GIO is a very analog process. It involves people in a room talking about problems and opportunities. GIO participants are not necessarily looking for answers; they are looking for a deeper understanding of problems; for opportunities to innovate. Everyone has the capacity to innovate. Not everyone can be an inventor, a creator or a discoverer, but anyone can be an innovator.

If nothing changes; nothing changes.

Technology changes; it has changed a lot since I got into the business. Everything is going to continue to change, except the values IBMers demonstrate every day. And yet we have to keep changing the way we think about things. The capacity for change is the most essential attribute of leadership. So, if all you strive for is the status quo, then you won't get anything more out of life than that. And, by the way, you will be missing out on a whole lot of fun.