Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

« Previous Entries
Next Page »

The Technology Committee

February 2, 2010

San Jose Mercury News (CA)

December 23, 2001
Section: Business
Edition: Morning Final
Page: 1F

VC LEGEND LEADS CHARGE FOR HP-COMPAQ
WITH TIES TO BOTH COMPANIES, PERKINS HAS UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE
MATT MARSHALL, Mercury News

Thirty-six stories above the placid blue waters framing Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, Thomas Perkins fidgets in his chair. If conversation lulls, his thumbs twiddle impatiently. He is a man driven by ambition. Perkins, 69, has turned his Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, into the most successful VC firm in the world. Kleiner Perkins has returned around $20 billion to investors over its 30-year history. But Perkins‘ impatience comes from his latest, unexpected challenge: the bitter battle over the proposed merger of Compaq Computer with Hewlett-Packard. As a board member of Compaq — and former executive at HP, the Palo Alto computer firm where he cut his teeth more than four decades ago — he has become one of the most outspoken backers of the merger. But some HP heirs — sons and daughters of founders William Hewlett and David Packard — have signaled their intent to vote down the deal, saying a merger doesn’t make economic sense. They also say the layoffs likely in a merger threaten to ruin HP’s vaunted tradition, the so-called HP Way, which they say emphasizes company loyalty…

…A merger will create a mammoth company that can take on giant IBM — and beat it. HP and Compaq, he explains, have better ties with Microsoft and Intel — two other key protagonists in the computer industry drama. Together, he says, the foursome create an industry standard that can easily outdo IBM. ”Microsoft will be the software department, Intel will be the hardware department, and HP-Compaq will be the marketing-customer delivery department,” he says. ”Wouldn’t you go for it?” In part, Perkins is fighting for Compaq. But he also is fighting for his right to interpret the legacy that Packard and Hewlett left for Silicon Valley..

I remember opening the paper a couple of days before Christmas, 20001 and feeling like I had just been kicked in the stomach.  It was not the best time to be an officer of HP. Bill Hewlett’s son and HP board member, Walter, had come out swinging against the HP-Compaq merger, and Carly Fiorina, my boss, was under incredible pressure to sell the deal despite howls from the local press, the Hewlett and Packard families, an active message board for HP employees, and now a fractious board of directors. And there it was in black and white in the morning paper:   Tom Perkins, a Compaq board member and a driving force behind the merger had a plan to turn HP — the company whose logo said “invent” — into the marketing department for Intel and Microsoft.  I had to think hard about how I was going to face my own Technology Council and reassure HP’s 12,000 engineers that — despite what Perkins said in the  interview –  the company was not backing away from its commitment to innovation.

Earlier in the month, Carly had invited us to her house for a very low-key holiday celebration — much more subdued and informal than the elegant holidays parties that were the custom when the company was doing better.  Carly had paid for much of it out of her own pocket.  It  turned out to be a  tense and not not very festive evening.  Carly was running on a few hours of sleep, and the rest of us were trying to tie down the ship’s rigging in the middle of a storm. There was an air of uncertainty. We sat around smaller tables with our spouses as dinner was served.  Carly and her husband Frank were at an adjacent table.   As much to break the tension as anything, the discussion at our table turned into a silly  guessing game over which actors would be cast to play which of us when the HP-Compaq Merger Movie was made (West Wing star Allison Janney was the consensus choice to play Carly).   We must have been loud, because I could see Carly stiffen.  Carly didn’t know who on her own staff she could trust, and it must have sounded like we were tossing off the seriously difficult times that would be coming for HP and its employees.  We weren’t.

I spent virtually all of my time that winter keeping our major technology initiatives on track, promoting strategic product directions with customers, and talking to our engineering teams around the world.  The outcome of the proxy fight was uncertain and there would have been antitrust repercussions if HP and Compaq had gotten too cozy, so Webb McKinney, who was in charge of HP’s side of the integration team and the clean room that allowed the companies to begin planning merger details without violating antitrust laws, kept most of us with day-to-day management  responsibilities in the dark about post-merger plans for technology and products.

Once shareholders approved — by a hair’s breadth — the merger, Perkins was named to the board of the new HP.  Compaq’s  Shane Robison was named to a new position that combined my old CTO role and a Chief Strategy Officer position that had not existed before. I was still concerned about the Perkins comments from his December interview.  My first encounters with the Compaq technologists were not encouraging. I got into a shouting match with one of Robison’s staff members about how much HP should be investing in security for its products.  This was less than a year after the 9/11 attacks, and I had been working closely with CTO’s of other Silicon Valley companies and federal agencies to forge a comprehensive strategy for information and communications security.  The official Compaq position was that this was a problem for Microsoft, not HP, and I was told to keep quiet about it.

Imagine my surprise when Perkins and Robison led an effort to form a Technology Committee for the HP board to oversee and track R&D the same way that Audit, Governance, and Compensation Committees oversee financial  and operational matters.  I didn’t always agree with the direction it took, but it seemed to breathe new life into a technology governance process that had been stalled for many months.  Prior to that, HP — like most companies — did not place much visible  faith in its board to integrate technology into corporate governance.   There were a few public boards that had technology committees. They had been prominently featured in the  magazines for directors that wrote about best board practices, but those articles were disappointing:  most existing technology committees were for  informal oversight of technology spending by CIO’s.  What Perkins was  proposing was something different — and so at odds with his public statements about the value of a merged HP and Compaq that it took me a little while to catch on.   The HP Technology Committee would not only monitor  technology developments, it would help educate the board about new trends and directions that would impact board-level decisions and provide informed advice on the technology implications of financial and personnel decisions, including how to maintain a workforce advantage.

A committee like this would have been helpful years before, because HP had a history of plunging into technology investments and acquisitions that, to most technology observers, made little sense.  HP’s  decision in 2000  to purchase a middleware/software company called Bluestone was one such decision.  A distant fourth in a crowded and fragmented marketplace, the idea behind the Bluestone acquisition was based on a faulty reading of HP’s current capabilities in the space, the ability of any small entrant to alter the dynamics of the marketplace and the needs of HP-UX customers who felt themselves always last to the trough when third-party software developers released new products.  After two years of chaos and the dismantling of HP’s web services organizations, Bluestone was dumped at a $400 million  loss.

HP’s decision to sell its considerable VLSI design assets to Intel was also  made for financial reasons, although it was widely known in HP’s technology community  that the success of its 32 and  64 bit  processors, including  Itanium,  depended on custom chipsets that HP had invested  in for many years.  The original architects of Itanium were on my staff,  and it was hard to peel them off the ceiling when the announcement was made, especially since they had virtually no voice in the decision-making process.

Officers were invited to sit in on the  entire HP  board meeting, except for the closing executive sessions.  Even so,  it took me awhile to realize how rare technology discussions actually were. After a particularly fiery Industry Analysts’ Meeting, during which I made a slash-and-burn  presentation on our competitive advantages over Sun Microsystems –  that made the analysts smile but our marketing folks queasy — Carly asked me to reprise the talk for the board.  Patty Dunn (who would later take over as Chairman  in a controversial  tenure after Carly’s dismissal in 2005) and others approached me to say how much they appreciated the competitive information and the willingness to be combative in defense of HP product strategy.  They claimed, incredibly, that it was the first time they had heard this kind of presentation.

The Perkins proposal would have given the board a lens to look at issues like these — necessary in  a company where financial forecasts are only as good as the underlying technology.  HP was not only one  moving in this direction.  Motorola and other technology companies  had — at about the same time — formed Perkins-style Technology Committees.  Ram Charan’s book  Boards That Deliver helps explain why technology companies need to take the Technology Committee seriously, more importantly, how they can help  a board move beyond the role of compliance to a deeper assessment of health and prospects:

Financial health, operating performance and risk each require separate attention.  A company can show good operating performance while financial health…is in decline. Dot-com companies, for example, were notorious for delighting their customers with fantastic (or fantasy) products and services while bleeding cash.  Similarly financial health can appear to be sound when in fact the guts of the business have been severely compromised.  Any risk can be underestimated, especially when it is assessed piecemeal, rather than in totality.

The reason that the Technology Committee is a good idea for  public technology companies is that the worlds of innovation and execution are going to collide, and a board cannot deliver value by simply checking off a box on a governance worksheet.   What do you know, for example, about the real performance of key technology executives  without a deep insight into how they would be evaluated by their peers  and competitors?  How do you know that an acquisition based on a couple of good financial quarters and self-congratulatory product  press releases has no market advantage over an in-house solution?   That’s not the kind of question that due diligence is going to ask. After I left the company, I watched the downsizing of research and heard often from former friends and colleagues who thought one decision or another was wrong-headed, and I often  wondered about how effectiveness the committee actually was.  And then I would see something preserved that made no short-term financial sense, although everyone knew how important the technology would be some day.

When I joined the board of RSA Security, I was definite about my plans.  “Look,” I told CEO Art Coviello, “RSA’s performance is a three-legged stool, and the board needs to be as informed about the technology and markets as it is about finance and operations.” Ram Charan would have said the three legs are Finance, Operating Performance and Risk. I said the risks are Technology, Markets and Organization. Both Art and Chairman Jim Simms were on board, but it was not an easy proposition to sell to the rest of  RSA’s board, although I did.  The RSA Technology Committee had a big impact on board dynamics and ultimately on the long-term health of the company.  It is one of the WWC success stories that I will tell in more detail in a later post.

I can’t think of any reason that the board of directors of  a public company — especially a technology company — needs seven CFO’s, but that is the profile of far too many companies.  Even  on boards where the majority of the non-management directors are CEO’s, financial expertise overwhelms all other skills, and it is not healthy.  It’s hard to find a technology company that has failed in recent years where the  roots of failure were not widely known on that other planet outside the boardroom.  I emphasize public companies only because they are great targets.  Later stage privately held companies would also be wise to pay attention to board dynamics and find some way get a handle on the company’s technology.

Once I got over the stomach ache that Tom Perkins gave me, I realized why technology had a seat at the table of his boards.   Kleiner-Perkins got to be the world’s greatest venture capital firm by delving deeply into the  technology implications of business decisions.  Engineers have the impression that board rooms are filled with accountants who know very little about the details of the  business but are not shy when it comes to talking about it.  Enter the Technology Committee.

I always liked the scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen character,   is getting more and more annoyed by a guy standing behind him in a movie theater line who is carrying on about Marshall McCluhan, trying to impress his date:

Man in Theatre Line: It just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media and Culture.” So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Alvy Singer: Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me… [pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]… Come over here for a second… tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work!…How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Alvy Singer: Boy, if life were only like this!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , ,

The “dy” Logo

January 18, 2010

I enjoyed reading  the new book about innovation at Hewlett-Packard  that Chuck House and Raymond Price just published[1]. It’s quirky and curiously researched, but, most of all, I was happy to read their account of Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO at HP.  History was in need of some fact-based revision.   If ever worlds collided, it was at HP when Carleton S.  Fiorina took over the reins after a stunning rise through the executive ranks at ATT/Lucent.  Chuck  points out that, although Carly was not well-liked by her employees (even her direct reports, many  of whom  ultimately undermined her), she sowed the seeds for Mark Hurd’s success.

The executive suite at HP Headquarters on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto was in those days a row of large cubicles, and, in keeping with  the HP culture, there were no doors and no outer offices.   Everyone’s office  – including Carly’s — was really just a cubicle. Carly insisted that I have two offices: one in HP Labs adjacent to the museum-like offices of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard — these were not cubicles but were real offices,  impeccably maintained in their original 1960’s orange-and-brown Madmen decor —   and the other next to hers overlooking  a Japanese garden.    Carly’s executive council met nearly every week in a nearby conference room whose glass wall looked out over the same garden.

Several   council members had offices elsewhere, but those of us who had direct access were within a thirty-foot radius of her office.  These were the Gold Badge days at HP when a favored few retirees were granted the privilege of unrestricted, lifetime access to any building and any office suite in the company. The daily comings and goings telegraphed events that would not be visible outside the CEO’s office for days or weeks, even among business heads who had broad authority over multi-billion dollar enterprises.  This turned out to be an important vantage point from which to view sand being  thrown in the gears during HP’s acquisition of Compaq, but I will save these stories for later posts.

Chuck House had been gone from HP for some time when Carly arrived, so his account is based on interviews with a relatively narrow slice of insiders who were his colleagues — an impressive number of people, to be sure, but in a company with 80,000 employees not enough for a definitive portrait.  But House has never been shy about charging ahead when the terrain looks interesting, a personality trait that once earned him a medal from Dave Packard for “Extraordinary Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Call of Duty.”  It was awarded to commemorate a mutinous tour of customer sites to demonstrate a new display monitor after HP management in Colorado Springs had decided to shut it down.   Nevertheless, House’s account gets many things right.  One of the things he misses was what Fiorina brought to HP:  a WWC focus on the customer that was foreign to HP’s engineering culture before her arrival.

House and Price defer to old-guard HP employees in characterizing Carly as a marketer, a fiction that was rooted more in style than in substance.  Fiorina was unnervingly accurate in her assessment of general  market trends,  like the importance of the internet to HP’s mainline businesses,  but, in fact, she was a consummate saleswoman.   What she brought to the table was not the “let’s-see -what -they-think-about-this” arrogance of corporate marketing organizations,  it was the ability to listen to customers, sift through encyclopedic  knowledge of internal plans and projects, and  envision a solution.  Sometimes a  solution was forthcoming.  Sometimes it took a little while longer than customers were willing to wait.  But sometimes solutions were sabotaged.   To have an HP outsider from the East Coast — a telephone equipment salesman, not an engineer — propose a solution to customer problems was an unpardonable sin to some.   It was a WWC culture class that she was slow to recognize.

She was widely criticized for her lack of operational experience, but  the truth is that Carly delegated operational authority too widely and to managers with suspect motives (including past and future pretenders to the throne).  As a newcomer,  I tended to apologize for injecting long-range thoughts into the very operational discussions of the Executive Council, until one day Carly stopped me and said: “You don’t have to apologize for that.  It’s true that we’ll never get to the long-term without taking care of the short-term, but it’s the long-term that makes the short-term worth doing at all.”

Council chemistry changed in the months before the Compaq merger. Vyomesh Joshi took over as head of the imaging and printing business unit.  V.J. is not only a brilliant executive, he is a skilled engineer, whose technical  insights  were mainly responsible for transforming ink jet printing.

The other major additions were Pradeep Jotwani and Iain Morris.  Pradeep had control of worldwide consumer  sales.  He was fond of  long discourses —  sometimes literary, sometimes merely speculative — but their effect was always to slow down a speeding train and turn the discussion in a direction that was more productive.  Iain is a big, brash, Harley-riding  Scott  who Carly recruited from Motorola to carve out emerging businesses  like handheld computers and  entertainment.  Carly quickly transferred   the personal computer businesses to Iain from Duane Zitzner’s  computer business unit where they had languished as unprofitable also-rans.  Morris knew hardware, software and manufacturing from his days at Motorola, and he was also a great salesman.

At one of his first Council meetings, Iain walked in with an HP laptop and stopped everyone cold when he opened it up and bellowed: “What’s wrong here?”  When you  looked at an open HP laptop from the back, the “hp” logo was upside down. It read “dy”, and of course,  that was the way most people saw the laptop:  open and  from the back, inverted logo.  If anyone before had noticed this, it never made it to the upper reaches of management.  The order went out immediately to invert the logo and all of the millions of HP laptops produced since that time now display the logo right side up,  so that it reads “hp”.  It upset some of the industrial designers who argued that laptops were closed a lot of the time and that the orientation of the logo doesn’t matter when a laptop is closed.  It took a salesman’s eye to recognize that it was stupid to have millions customers staring at a “dy”  laptop.

This episode followed on the heels of two other quick-shifts.  One involved HP’s always painful  Federal sales performance.  I will talk about this more fully in a later post.  The other involved architectural consistency,  a concept that bridged customer issues and product design.

Shortly after VJ took over the imaging and printing business, he held an advanced projects review for me in San Diego.  I was struck but the ubiquity of infrared (IR) connectivity ports on HP printers and cameras, and mentioned it to VJ.  He had many compelling reasons for insisting on IR, but complained that Zitzner’s PC division had recently removed IR ports from HP laptops.

To Duane’s immense displeasure, I called  a meeting with some of his design engineers, ostensibly to review the component cost envelope for laptops.  At the end of the meeting, when everyone was worn out,  I asked about IR, and they had a string of good reasons to throw it out.  When I pointed out that HP printers, cameras, and PC’s no longer worked together, they just sat there blinking at me.  Carly overruled engineering objections and IR ports made  a miraculous (albeit short-lived) reappearance in HP laptops.

It would  not be apparent outside the CEO suite for months, but architectural consistency was a technology theme that would drive many R&D investment decisions, both near-term and long-term.   In an effort to jump-start a consumer-facing initiative, Carly had approached Sony about sharing some key technologies.  One of Sony’s success stories was the introduction of memory stick technology into a broad range of Sony products from hundred-dollar consumer entertainment devices to studio-quality video cameras that cost a half million dollars or more.  My counterpart at Sony was a CTO named Mario Tokoro, a computer scientist and engineer who had spent time at the famous computer science department at Carnegie-Mellon University.  Mario had been instrumental in arranging for memory stick technology across a staggering array of Sony’s consumer and business products. The idea of arranging product strategies around this kind of architectural unity would have sped up HP’s brief surge in Internet and Web technologies.  It was an idea that was undone by colliding worlds on a much different scale.

[1] Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price, The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation, Stanford Business Books, 2009

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,

A Letter to the Editor

January 11, 2010
Alan Perlis

Alan J. Perlis

I had planned to write a post later this spring on the collisions between what engineers sometimes perceive as practical and what turns out in practice to be useful.  It’s a complex issue and there are examples that cut both ways, suggesting that a deeper understanding of both the underlying technology and the social “soup” where innovators thrive are needed to avoid some famous traps.  I mentioned this briefly in my discussions of the impact of social fragmentation on innovation and the pitfalls of ignoring social contexts.

Then the January 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM crossed my desk.  As I skimmed the contents, I was surprised to see my name in the headline of the Editor’s  Letter, an attack by the Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi on a thirty-year-old paper [ Social Processes ] that I wrote with computing legend Alan J. Perlis and my colleague Richard J. Lipton (author of the popular Godel’s Lost Letter blog and subject of Dancing with the Stars ).  The paper itself was controversial in its day and addresses exactly the WWC questions that I plan to write about.  It is extraordinary for an Editor of a professional journal to use his position to make derogatory comments about articles, especially to  further his own views.  Mr.Vardi’s letter demanded a response.  Lipton and I will jointly publish a longer and more technical essay on this subject at some point in the future, but today we are jointly publishing the following Letter to the Editor. The letter will also be sent to the Communications of the ACM.

In his  Editor’s Letter in the January 2010 issue of CACM entitled “More Debate Please”,  Moshe Vardi makes a plea for controversial topics in these pages, citing a desire to “let truth emerge from vigorous debate.”  It is a sentiment that we support as well. But we question Mr. Vardi’s judgment in using his editorial position to mount an attack on colleagues who were neither forewarned nor given an opportunity to respond.  Mr.  Vardi’s target was  our 1979 critique of formal program verification entitled  “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,”  It was co-authored with the late Alan Perlis, one of the originators of the field and a lifelong advocate for the kind of open discussion that the Editor advocates.  We can only hope that future contributors have higher standards for debate than does the current Editor, because his out-of-context references to the 1979 debate over the practical efficacy of formal verification, his ex-cathedra determination that the article was “misguided” and his ill-informed view of the decision to publish it have no power to illuminate  a serious subject.

We do not care to respond to Mr. Vardi’s substantial mischaracterizations and misstatements at this time, but we do think it is fair to point out that  the publication of “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,” was not a singular event that might be classified as either misguided or not.  “Social Processes” was a refereed article.  A preliminary version was accepted  by a highly selective conference program committee in 1976 and its presentation was attended by virtually every living contributor to the field.  It was then submitted to this journal and reviewed by anonymous referees. Its publication was followed by many months of public presentations and workshops, letters to the Editor, written reinforcements and rebuttals, and — several years later — a special issue of this journal devoted to the topic.  Mr. Vardi faults the editorial board for not publishing an opposing “counterpoint” article, a suggestion that — although it has all the “fair and balanced” trappings — would have been hard to reconcile with the confidentiality usually accorded to contributed articles that are sent to referees for review. The irony is not be lost on us  that we were offered no such opportunity prior to publication of his letter.

The article itself has been reprinted dozens of times and has appeared in several anthologies in the philosophy of mathematics.  Its publication and the ensuing debate have been the subject of social science research (Donald MacKenzie’s 2001 book[1] “Mechanizing Proof” remains the definitive sociological and historical analysis of both the paper and its implications for the field). If our arguments seem off the mark to Mr. Vardi, then perhaps the right course of action is to resurrect the social process that led to the article’s publication in the first place and jump into the fray. Until that time, the correct editorial position for CACM and its Editor is to let both the paper and the written record that surrounds it speak for themselves.  It strikes us as inappropriate, after thirty years of silence,  to use the cover of an Editorship to  attack unsuspecting passersby, especially while touting the moral virtues of free and vigorous debate.

[1] Donald MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust, MIT Press 2001, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Posted in Comment and Review, Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
Tags: ,

A CTO’s List of New Year’s Resolutions

December 30, 2009

Dilbert.com

There are many ways for Chief Technology Officers to be undone.   Appropriately enough  — in light of  Friday’s  college football bowl fest —  being an effective CTO is  like being a college football coach.  You don’t actually do the blocking and tackling yourself, but you’ll fail if the fundamentals are not done right —  even if your game plan is perfectly constructed.  I will have more to say in an upcoming  post about game plans, but today I want  to recognize the arrival of the  New Year with a short note about the fundamentals.

George Heilmeier, former DARPA Director, Bellcore CEO, and the inspiration for my” Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” series[1][2][3] was a mentor to me and to many other  technology leaders .  One day I asked him for a bit of career advice, and he hauled out a Heilmeier list — twelve  rules for CTO’s to follow if they have any hope of navigating the many dangers of the colliding worlds of innovation and execution.  I quickly found out that, true to form,  George had reduced best practices to a few rules of the road because dozens of others had asked for the same advice.  They are fascinating and valuable bits of advice, and they range in scope from broad business fundamentals to technology and culture.   I haven’t come across anyone who thinks that they are not important lessons — not to tuck away for future use, but to internalize and use as a platform for technology management in any setting.  It was December , so I turned George’s list into New Year’s resolutions.

  1. For each “client” establish/conceive a list of technologies and initiatives that drive his business and a list of technologies and initiatives that could change his business.
  2. Use the Catechism to get people to focus on the real “care-abouts” when making investment decisions and establishing priorities.
  3. Establish the physical, economic, and manufacturing limits of the technologies and capabilities that drive the business today.
  4. Establish a good working relationship with your peers
  5. Establish what [insert name(s) of  your CEO and Chairman] real priorities are.
  6. Establish the metrics for success in their eyes.
  7. Don’t shy away from doing some near term problem solving.  It builds credibility and respect.
  8. Never have your peers or clients come to your office for meetings with you.  Go to theirs.
  9. Any display of arrogance will cost you. Don’t do it.
  10. Compile a list of “innovations yet to be made”
  11. Make sure that each program or initiative is output oriented not activity oriented.
  12. Learn the [insert your company name here] culture.  It is unique.

Have a happy and safe New Year, and, by all means, don’t get caught when worlds collide.

[1] http://richde.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner/

[2] http://wwc.demillo.com/2009/10/11/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner-part-2/

[3] http://wwc.demillo.com/2009/10/19/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner-part-3/

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,

The Saga of Eric the Red and the Anthropology of Innovation: A Parable

December 28, 2009
Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Eric the Red) Icelandic manuscript (17th century)

Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Eric the Red) Icelandic manuscript (17th century)

In Murder, Starvation and Catastrophe, I drew a line to connect the historical behavior of doomed societies with the business performance of large enterprises.  One of the most compelling of Jared Diamond’s stories is the saga of Eric the Red, the 10th Century Viking who founded Greenland.  The preposterously named colony was eventually home to 10,000 Norse settlers who were perhaps fooled by the name into thinking they were heading off to some sort of North Sea resort for Vikings. The story of Eric the Red is a parable for how the human factor in WWC  promotes or stifles innovation.

Eric was a scoundrel.  A suspected murderer, he fled Norway for Iceland around 980 AD.  It was a short, but violent, stay.  He was ejected from Iceland, and, sailing west, discovered an island of fjords, glaciers and grasslands. He returned to Iceland long enough to kill a few people and recruit an expedition of 25 ships to build a settlement on Greenland. Despite their violent beginnings,  the Greenland settlers established a farming economy and a humane society, including a government that provided for the poor in times of scarce crop production.  The Viking settlers had sporadic wars with the Inuit natives, but apparently flourished for hundreds of years until sometime in the early 1400’s when they just disappeared.

It was one of the great anthropological mysteries of all time:   how could fierce competitors — apparently successful  in a new environment that was not much different than the one they left behind – suddenly fail so catastrophically that their entire society was wiped out in only a few years? When archaeologists excavated the Greenland settlements, they found the usual trash of human civilization:  tools, debris, the remains of livestock,  and garbage from cooking.  But they found no fish bones.  The Norse Greenlanders were expert seafarers who lived in the world’s richest fishing waters and inexplicably starved to death because they did not eat fish.

The Vikings brought with them the culture and preferences from home. They brought food:  pigs, cows, goats,  and sheep.  The Norse knew how to grow crops in cold climates, so they planted crops like barley, oats, wheat, rye, cabbage, onions and peas. They hunted seal for food and  traded  walrus ivory with Europe  for material not available on the island.

By 1400,  demand for ivory, polar bears, and other luxuries from Greenland fell. Black Plague had wiped out nearly half of Europe’s population.  The Crusades opened new sources of ivory and spices to the now smaller market in Europe. The early 1400’s also marked the beginning of the Little Ice Age, blocking natural water inlets and delaying the arrival of migratory seals.  Deforestation left Greenlanders short on lumber, fuel, and iron.  Climate change and poor crop rotation led to crop failure, so the settlers consumed pigs, cows, and sheep to the point of extinction.

They had cultural inhibitions.  They did not eat their pets, for example.  They could have learned to hunt fish from and traded with the Inuits, but the Norse regarded the natives as pagans. Greenlanders were Norse, and they thought of themselves as dairy farmers.  When Eric the Red founded Greenland, it was uncharacteristically temperate —  a special time when their cultural preferences led to success.  They relied on past behavior and — when the climate changed, relations with friends and enemies faltered, and their environment was damaged —  they starved to death.

15th Century Greenland has something in common with IBM  in 1980:  a belief that historically successful behavior will succeed in the future. The Norse preference for pigs and cows required them to dedicate more time and grazing land to those animals than to the heartier goats and sheep.  Their Euro-centrism prevented them from learning from and adopting the eating habits of “pagan savages.” The thinking appears to be that their lifestyle was successful in Norway, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be successful in Greenland. On the other hand the Norse settlers were not great innovators.

Thomas Watson Sr, understood the role that innovation would play in the company’s future. He opened IBM’s  first dedicated research center next to Columbia University in 1945 and the results were immediate, spectacular innovations including time sharing and  magnetic core memories.  Thomas Watson, thinking it was too risky to continue having its research done in the relative open environment of a joint university lab, and using Bell Labs as a model, established dedicated corporate research labs in New York and Zurich. This ushered in a golden age for IBM.  By any measure of success—sales, market cap, profits, patents, R&D budget—IBM,  and  in many ways,  defined the industry.

Then came the 1980’s and its disruptive changes to the computer industry. These  changes were not kind to IBM and in 1992 the company reported the single largest annual loss in U.S. corporate history to that point: $4.96 billion after taxes.

How did this happen?  Unlike the Greenlanders’ demise, this one isn’t a great mystery.  The Watsons believed fervently that doing the things that had made IBM a great corporation would make it successful in the future.  IBM knew how to profitably sell computers and to whom.  After all, they defined the industry.  There is a widely known internal 5-year forecast of worldwide PC sales that shows shipments peaking  at less than 80,000 units in 1983 before settling into a comfortable rate of 40,000 per year by 1987.  Less than 250,000 over the five year period.  5% to business customers who would continue to rely on IBM mainframes.  In fact, over a million PC’s were sold by 1985.  The industry was in the midst of explosive change and not only did IBM did not recognize it but they believed that past success was a predictor of future success.

But by 1982 it was all over. If IBM had recognized the value of the PC, they would have kept it proprietary and the computer industry would have developed very differently.  Without its IBM  licensing deal, Microsoft would have withered early.  Intel would be a niche player.

IBM, Xerox,  AT&T, and Nortel were all  innovative companies.  They hired the best and brightest – and there was low employer mobility since after all how many places were there for a computer science PhD to work?  The IBM Research Lab in Yorktown Heights developed and incubated products in the historically successful vertical way.  The barriers to entry for IBM’s  competitors (especially the small ones like Compaq and DEC) were huge. How could a small competitor build a direct sales network to rival the famed Xerox sales force?  What did an academic startup like Cisco,  aimed at the tiny data network market, have to do with the output Bell Labs or the market clout of Nortel?

This is how innovation looked at the end of the last century. It is too easy to draw conclusions about why old models stumble.  An apparently obvious lesson from the story of Erick the Red is that  the Little Ice Age caused the Vikings to die off in Greenland. Current conventional wisdom is that the technology giants stumbled  because they were too old or rigid or bloated to compete smaller, nimbler competitors who were themselves innovating although in very different ways.  Actually neither is really true.

It is simply built into the fabric of innovation that the marketplace is an environment – you have to adapt to it to survive.  If people want low-cost computers then drive cost out of the manufacturing process and learn to prosper on thinner margins. There are occasionally companies that try to change the environment.  Hewlett-Packard grew for 60 years on a simple business model:  innovate to create a product category and ride market growth until the margins shrink.  Then exit.  The ink jet printer is such a product — and there is much discussion in HP about exit strategies for ink jet printing. So was the hand-held calculator.  Most companies cannot imitate those successes. HP eventually faltered when it tried large scale environmental engineering with its failed acquisition of PWC and the gut-wrenching merger with Compaq.

So, if adjusting to the environment is the answer, why didn’t the Greenlanders just start eating fish?  The Greenlanders damaged their environment through poor livestock selection, clear-cutting forests and poor crop-rotation. There was significant climate change brought on by the Little Ice Age. The Inuit qualify as hostile neighbors.  They had friendly trade partners for many years, but eventually lost them.  But above all,  the Norse Greenlanders’ response to these factors was culturally based.  They didn’t eat fish  because it was not viewed as a reasonable option in their culture.

Innovation is frittered away because it is not viewed as a reasonable option in a company’s culture.  The structure of leadership accounts for a lot in determining the role that culture plays.   Distant, authoritarian, decision-making tends to rely excessively on the past as a predictor of the future.  Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said as much  in a 2008 speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business:

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made over time…is not wanting to nurture innovations where I either didn’t get the business model or we didn’t have it.

Examples abound. The HP Jornada™ pocket PC could play MP3 music files before the  iPod™  hit the market.  But there was no HP music store. Running an online music store was not an HP competency.  There is a certain — sometimes irrational –  optimism that past success engenders in leaders at the precipice.  When Mike Zafirovsky took over as CEO of Nortel Networks in late 2005, it was a company on the brink of failure.  Massive layoffs had decimated the iconic Canadian company.  In early 2006, I was escorted for the last time through its cavernous Toronto facility — a building laid out as a city with streets and parks — just before it was shut down.  All you could hear was the click of heels reverberating down the empty faux boulevards. Mike Zafirovsky wanted to communicate his energy and sense of the future to the demoralized employees who remained.  His first email  in December 2005 to Nortel employees defined the tone of his administration and sent the company down a path that emphasized execution of a plan that emphasized ideas that had worked before:

To Nortel employees,

Last Friday night, as I was flying back from a very productive trip to Europe following several customer and employee visits, I came across a newspaper article entitled “Optimism Puts Rose-Colored Tint in Glasses of Top Execs.” Included in the article were quotes like:

“99% of CEOs thought they could lead their companies from crisis;”
“Optimism is all about possibilities, change, hope…without those qualities, how can any leader succeed?;” and,
· “By definition, leaders are slightly delusional.”

My first reaction was to take exception to the word “slightly” . . . .

Seriously, the question of our confidence in ourselves—and as members of Team Nortel—is something I will begin discussing today and a topic I will continue to raise in the coming weeks and months. Confidence in ourselves and each other will be critical factors in how far and how fast we take this 110-year-old company..

I discussed with you in a previous letter our plans for the BIG initiative (Business Transformation, Integrity Renewal and Growth Imperatives), our new leadership values, and our focus on people that will be rolled out as part of Session I in the first quarter. In my first few weeks, I have also spent time evaluating our relative strengths and weaknesses and pinpointing areas for improvement.

…My strong take-aways and beliefs are that our positives are significant and difficult to replicate. At the same time, our challenges are also significant but, I would argue, very fixable. I don’t believe I am looking through rose-colored glasses, but rather have adopted what I describe as an attitude of “forceful optimism.” This is a mindset, a belief and an attitude that I expect from everyone at Nortel—a combination of positive anticipation for the future combined with a determined approach to maximize positive impact.

Forceful optimism is one of the 30 action attributes supporting our recently-defined Nortel leadership values. And as promised in my last letter to you, I worked with select members of the Leadership Edge program and cabinet members to finalize these attributes before year-end.
[...]

As a positive heads-up to the many people who were hoping to be on the Business Transformation teams, we will be kicking off the Six Sigma Quality Program in the first quarter, and there will be opportunities for involvement and leadership. We will be looking for Six Sigma champions and master black belt, black belt, and green-belt candidates (much more on this early next year).

The combination of the Business Transformation initiative and the Six Sigma Quality Program will improve the basic equation of our business, including higher customer satisfaction, simplified processes, lower cost-of-rework, fewer quality issues and lower costs for our products and business structure. And we’ll see teamwork inside the company improving as a result. We will continue the focus on forceful optimism, leadership and our people agenda by launching our Session I program in the first quarter. The programs and initiatives we deliver as part of Session I will ensure we are building strong leadership capability and bench strength across Nortel.

Lastly, and arguably most important for the long-term health of the business, here are my thoughts on customers and the Growth Imperatives, which you will be hearing much more on throughout 2006. I am meeting and speaking with an increasing number of our customers (e.g. the four largest European customers last week) and our go-to-market and product management teams, and I can’t wait to attend our global sales conferences in January. In my straightforward view, good, profitable growth is to a business as air and water are to flowers. We have much to build on and also much work to do, including how we develop meaningful value propositions for our customers. To this end, I am excited to report that we will be introducing our new business mission at the sales meetings. It will guide much of our behavior externally and internally, and keep the focus where it belongs—on our customers.

Let me wrap it up by saying how privileged and proud I am to be leading Nortel and to be working with all of you. I wish you and your loved ones a relaxing holiday and warm wishes for a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2006.

Thank you for all you are doing for Nortel.

Mike Z

Mike Zafirovsky is a capable senior executive, an alumnus of Jack Welch’s CEO boot camp at GE.  He was part of a long string of strong leaders that Nortel recruited to put the company back on track.   He could not have anticipated the Little Ice Age of late 2008, but by New Year 2006, Nortel was already hurtling toward disaster.  Its stock was delisted and the company was shrinking.   I asked Mike about industry changes, but he did not react.  There was no sense of urgency at Nortel. There was a sense that the telecom equipment market was not an environment at all and that what really mattered was the company’s belief that its current direction would take them back from the edge: “a combination of positive anticipation for the future combined with a determined approach to maximize positive impact.”

In January 2009, Nortel filed for protection from its creditors. Its main businesses are being sold. When that is complete,  it will cease operations. Zafirovsky stepped down as CEO in late 2009.

One of my first projects at Bellcore  was to redefine its core software business for the emerging ISP and Cable markets.  The climate was changing in the early 90’s.  Bellcore sold  operations support systems – a sort of ERP for telcos.  A typical sale was in the $25-30M range and $100M deals were not unheard of. So we rolled up all the functions that we could think of – customer acquisition, provisioning, engineering, support – and came up with a product that we thought we could sell for $15M.  When we showed the requirements to cable operators, they just shrugged.  They were using Excel spreadsheets which cost them essentially nothing.  Today, Bellcore — operating under the name Telcordia — leads in none of the operations support or business support markets that defined its core business in the 1990’s and is not even in the top ten in cable and ISP markets.  What they really wanted help with were the services that they could sell to their customers.  One of those services was search.  Another was customer aggregation.  Both were areas in which Bellcore had fundamental patents.  One for the “seed” that underlies virtually all search engines today.  The other for “recommender” technology that underlies all social networking. The search technology was given away to Excite.  The recommender technology was assigned to MIT’s Media Lab and eventually became part of Amazon’s recommendation engine.  We were not in the lightweight database business – although there were many smaller competitors who were.  We were not in the search engine or social networking  businesses, although we had friendly relations with companies that were and had many university collaborations.  We were in the software business.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,

Climate Change, Ivory Towers and The Journal of Irreproducible Results

December 8, 2009

There’s a kerfuffle on the eve of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. 1,700 email messages  that were supposed to be stored on a secure server somehow found their way to open servers and were rapidly picked up by bloggers and others, who jumped on the opportunity to use the sometimes embarrassing messages to discredit  the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists that the earth is warming at an alarming rate and that human activity is the most likely cause. Aside from the shocking coincidence of events — what are the chances that a massive, worldwide fraud would be exposed at the same time the conspirators are getting together to impose their new world order? — and the uproar among climate scientists — who are launching ad-hominem attacks at every skeptic who pokes his head above ground — are there other lessons to be drawn from this shameless bit of theater?  My Georgia Tech colleague, climate scientist Judith Curry, hit the nail on the head when she  pointed out that: (1) there is really nothing in the released messages that discredits published scientific results and (2) scientists are being incredibly counterproductive by retreating into their Ivory Towers and passing up the opportunity to educate and engage both skeptics and the public.  Her Open Letter to Graduate Students and Young Scientists should be required reading for everyone interested in how to keep worlds from colliding:

…even if the hacked emails from HADCRU end up to be much ado about nothing in the context of any actual misfeasance that impacts the climate data records, the damage to the public credibility of climate research is likely to be significant. In my opinion, there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and “tribalism” in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process.

For “climate science” you can substitute “innovation” and the message is the same. If you’ve circled the wagons and are shooting at anything that moves, the easy target is public understanding of not only science but innovation in general.  The American public is not interested in the long-term thinking required to make sense out of squabbles like this. There are simply not enough people like San Diego Florist Steve Boigon, who — according to the New York Times — downloads MIT physics lectures because he  finds that:

I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.

Curry did not go after the easy targets. Instead, she talked honestly to students about the importance of climbing down from the Ivory Tower. The interactive relationship between basic science, technological innovation and public policy — what Donald Stokes calls Pasteur’s Quandrant –  is a hot topic these days, because  so many important societal issues can only be resolved at their intersection.

There’s a veil that conceals the inner workings of creative science and engineering  from the lay public, and attempts to lift it sometimes produce  bizarre reactions.  I was once struck speechless  at an all-hands meeting when one of my engineers stood to scold  the  CEO for making product decisions because he knew “nothing about electronics.”  A prominent member of my Board of Advisers at the National Science Foundation once countered criticism of his particularly cumbersome approach to software development by angrily proclaiming,  “Programming is like playing a piano.  Only virtuosos should do it!”  A world-renowned engineer once responded to an essay critical of his methods by widely distributing a letter entitled “On a Political Pamphlet from the Middle Ages.”  I was one of the young authors who was at the receiving end of that one.  When  outsiders try to lift the veil, the best course is to repair to the upper reaches of the Ivory Tower, hope that the hubbub goes away, and shoot down if it doesn’t.

It is a world view that is somehow wired into university training. The Medieval regalia, semi-religious icons,  and murmured  incantations that convey special status on the conferees reinforce the impression at every college commencement that something mystical has taken place. Science textbooks are uniformly silent on how science is done, presenting instead the subject as a linear, completed work — orderly in progression and tidy in its use of knowledge.  Nearly every engineering textbook guides  readers through well-rehearsed exercises to successful completion of design tasks. Why would anyone want to learn how to build a bridge that falls down?

Insiders, of course, know differently. What takes place behind the curtain is as important as the finished product.  Some of the best technical books ever written lift the veil.  Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos describes  the centuries-long frustration of mathematicians  trying — and repeatedly failing –  to precisely define polyhedra.  The process led some of  the greatest mathematical results of all time. Why Buildings Fall Down by Mario Salvatori and To Engineer is Human by Henry Petrosky are both compelling arguments that progress in  engineering is inextricably tied to understanding engineering failure.  Insiders know that failure is part of the package.  That’s exactly what makes the most outrageous of the climate change attacks so improbable.

There is a sub-genre of humor devoted to obvious, boundlessly incompetent scientific failure, real or imagined.  The Journal of Irreproducible Results is perhaps the defining publication that holds technical vanity up to ridicule. An article entitled Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives helpfully noted that

Development of hydro power in the desert of North Africa awaits only the introduction of water

My personal favorite medical discovery was an announcement entitled The Incidence and Treatment of Hyperacrosomia in the United States:

Some very famous Americans  have indeed been afflicted with Acute Hyperacrosomia, among them Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Lyndon Johnson.  Their condition is readily apparent upon comparison with normal individuals such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Truman Capote  and Dick Cavett…..Since the male population does express the condition to a higher degree, it falls primarily to the female population to objectively consider the risks of involving themselves with hyperacrosomic males…

The jokes are so well-known that Henry R. Lewis apparently had not second thoughts when he wrote The Data Enrichment Metho d:

The following remarks are intended as a non-technical exposition of a method which has been promoted (not by the present author) to improve the quality of inference drawn from a set of experimentally obtained data.  The power of the method lies in its breadth of applicability and in the promise it holds in obtaining more reliable results without recourse to the expense and trouble of increasing the size of the sample of data.

I have a hazy understanding of the data manipulation charges that climate skeptics are leveling at researcher, but I am pretty sure that The Data Enrichment Method was not involved.  There is also the issue of transparency that is specific to climatologists, but Curry handles that well. And then there are the charges that editors of journals were unduly influenced by political considerations.  Like the Inspector in Casablanca, I would be shocked — truly shocked — to hear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smart, educated, and highly ambitious people make decisions based on self-interest. The secret that Curry reveals is that it may be regrettable, but  it doesn’t matter in the long run.  Science is not an orderly, axiomatic progression of knowledge. It is a social process.

Even a brief peek under the veil would be enough to convince many fair-minded skeptics that if there were another, compelling, contradictory analysis of the same data, it would have by now appeared in a reputable scientific journal.  Why?  Because it would be a career-making result.  The article would write itself.  What editorial board could long resist publishing an epochal article?  History teaches that political manipulation is much more likely to focus on who gets priority as multiple groups rush to publish simultaneously.  It’s a to maintain a conspiracy when everyone is looking out for himself.  None of this means that everything that has been published is correct. It just means that it’s very unlikely that the shrill cries of  systematic fraud have any validity.



So strong is the urge to seek out systematic scientific fraud, that there is a magazine devoted to the subject. The Skeptical Inquirer (SI) is a kind of companion to The Journal of Irreproducible Results. It specializes in debunking academic myths and scientific hoaxes.  It has over the years exposed magicians, perpetual motion charlatans, creationists, and hundreds of scientific frauds.  Who are these crusaders?  They are the very power brokers that would have to be co-opted if the climate change conspiracy theorists were right.  Here’s a partial list of SI Fellows:

If there is  a less easily manipulated group under one banner, I have not seen it.

Judy Curry’s Open Letter does not only apply to climate scientists. It applies to every boardroom that squashes the discussion of how innovation takes place and every executive suite where technologists are too busy innovating to engage seriously with corporate management.  Of course, it also applies to the easy targets — facile business leaders who confuse near term planning with technical progress and are too quick to jump to the “bottom line” — but that discussion will have to wait for another post.

Posted in Higher Education, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,

Murder, Starvation, Catastrophe

November 30, 2009

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself reading more and more history. I am told that the way to appreciate history is not to “play it in reverse” – that is don’t look at history from today’s perspective where you already know what happened.  You have to “play it forward” – what was it like to live in that place and time and to have to make the big decisions of the day?  It occurred to me several years ago that we think of historical trends as big things.  Nations moving against nations.  The rise and fall of societies.  Then I realized:  Many of the big events took place in  familiar terrain  – collections of people organized around a more or less well defined set of goals and working toward a common purpose. And if you go back in history far enough – say 1,000 years or so — the numbers are also pretty familiar,  usually less than a million people.  In fact, nations and societies with 10,000 to 200,000 people were the norm.  In other words, they were in many ways like the modern business enterprise.

That’s worth saying again:  except for the details of time and place, there is really not a whole lot of difference between  modern enterprises and  societies of antiquity. The fate of large groups of people is determined as much by human aspirations and failings, reactions to threats, wise use of resources, and  the emergence of leaders as by anything else.

So with that as a backdrop I want to ask a couple of questions that seem to be completely unrelated to each other.

Question 1:  Why didn’t the 1940’s Western Electric  videophone make it?

Sure, the structure of the industry mattered, but it wasn’t lack of innovation that doomed the videophone.  After all. Video conferencing is ubiquitous today. So why didn’t that technology make it when today, for a hundred dollars,  you can stream high quality video to another hundred dollar device?  The culture of innovation is fundamentally different today than it was when the videophone was developed by Bell Labs in the 1940’s.  In fact the species of innovator that Bell Labs represents is today very nearly extinct.

My Second Question is:  What was the person who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island thinking about while he was doing it?

In truth, I can’t claim credit for the question. It was posed by Jared Diamond in Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, an historical and geographical tour-de-force that poses a framework for looking at decisions that societies make on their way to success or failure.  Those decisions invariably relate to:

  1. environmental damage
  2. climate change
  3. hostile neighbors
  4. friendly trade partners, and
  5. cultural response

Let’s take the similarities between ancient societies and  modern enterprises seriously – they involve similar numbers of people, they define their own value systems.  The historically successful route for both was a kind of vertical integration that made it reasonable to work and innovate in relative isolation. The way that 21st century companies innovate in the face of environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors is very important in their long-term prospects for survival.  On the other hand, how they treat their friendly trading partners determines how much of the work for survival has to be carried on their shoulders alone.  And what about cultural barriers?  The whole point of WWC is to learn from companies that innovate around the right values but are culturally unable to execute effectively.  Diamond’s language is anthropology, not business – but we’ll see in upcoming posts that the difference between success and failure is often rooted in the same factors that led to  murder, starvation and catastrophe in the ancient world — and ultimately to the collapse of societies.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Tags:

“the chase” — A Trip Report

November 24, 2009

It never fails. Someone from engineering joins the interdisciplinary team and the shoulder pad thumping begins:  tales of sales teams bartering local currency for booze in exotic locations or bailing customers out of jail for busting up a hotel lobby. Sometimes it’s that hilarious story about dressing up like a chicken, sacrificing dignity for a greater cause.  It usually has all the authenticity of  late-night, one-upmanship, “I can top that!”  fraternity bull sessions or maybe the battle scar competition between Quint, Brody and Hooper in Jaws.   I don’t remember that any of these stories had the dramatic impact of Ken Follett’s retelling of the rescue of Ross Perot’s  EDS employees from Iran [1]. But it sends a  WWC signal: “We business guys risk it all.  We’re dedicated. We live in a different — and way more exciting — world than you do.”  Maybe all the engineers need is a story like this one.

We were within hours of defaulting on the delivery schedule for an important contract.  My team was working around the clock to test and package software on a magnetic tape because those were the days when bits had to be sent from place to place in back of a truck. It was late Saturday afternoon and the only one who knew how to get to the Federal Express office in North Atlanta before it closed was our graduate student assistant, Walt, who, as we found out, was not only ingenious and loyal but had some experience in, umm,  navigating back roads.  Walt just wanted to be reimbursed for gas.  “Sure,” I said, “send me a short trip report.”

From: walt@gatech.edu  Sat  Sep 26  16:58:15  1987

Message-Id: <8709262147.AA17782@gatech.edu>

To: rad

Subject: the chase

Status: R0

well, it is on its way — but not without some work!!

i flew to fedx, speeding, running lights, etc. i ran the light at northside in front of oga’s bbq in the turning lane at 60 mph. there was a cop just gettin out of his car at the trajik markup.  i lost him by cutting thru the kroger parking lot and slipping across i-75. then i cut the big star lot to collier. next i had to get passed  the police station on collier — which i did with no trouble but then i came to the light on defoors ferry an met one comming the other way. i bit my lip hoping the other one had not radioed ahead, but he didn’t bat an eye. finally i get down the road to fedx and the truck was waiting for me. did my business and started back out.  there was 4 or 5 blue boys crawling up and down collier and defoors! i hid behind a dumpster til the coast was clear and then slipped 200 ft up defoors to bohler — an old trick — thru the residential section up to moors mill onto 75 and gone!

anyway — if they come get me tonight you may have to contact cathy for any more developments. i really don’t think they got my number.

signing off

walt — in hiding

My Thanksgiving request to all of you who would like to share a story that our dramatically challenged engineering colleagues can haul out as proof of  physical courage and personal commitment is that it be true.  Or at least someone should assure you that a friend of theirs swears that the story is true.

Like the time we took sausages in trade for network hardware.

[1] Ken Follett, On Wings of Eagles, William Morrow & Co 1983

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tags: ,

Great Meeting, Bob

November 9, 2009

It’s come up a few times  in  recent weeks.  Here’s the scenario:  I am meeting with Bob,  the CEO of a start-up who’s just returned from a two-week sales tour — three Fortune 100 companies, three mid-tier suppliers, two government agencies, another early-stage technology company, and a university research center.

“How did it go, Bob?

“Great, every meeting was a home run.  They liked the product.  They liked the technology.  They really liked the company.”

“How many orders did you sign?”

“None, yet.  But they all asked me to come back.  Except for the university guys, and they wanted copies of my presentation. Lots of excitement about this stuff!”

If you’re in the innovation business, the last thing you want to hear — even if you make the improbable assumption that everyone was telling the truth — after a meeting that doesn’t close a sale is “Great meeting, Bob!” It’s a sure sign of impending catastrophe as worlds collide.  I’ve talked in other posts about conflicting agendas and how the need for technical recognition can shape an innovator’s view of what is actually taking place. The great meeting phenomenon goes beyond that.

I was in the lobby of Netscape Communications a few days after its 1995 IPO, waiting for a former colleague who had promised to set up a series of technology exchange meetings between Bellcore and Netscape.   Bellcore  had just filed patent applications for two server technologies that we knew would be important to Netscape, and we were hoping to license them.  One was for buying and placing ads on web pages, and the other was for video streaming.  I had been in meetings like this before, and it was good to know that there would be a couple of familiar faces on the other side of the table.  So I sat there watching visitors file in and out.  There were a couple of guys dressed in three-piece suits, clearly bankers.  There was a Hollywood type with massive  gold chains around his neck — he and his two handlers had just rolled out of a black Town Car.  There were two kids in the corner –  complete with sandals and dirty tee shirts  — who looked like they had just crawled out of a basement.  Lots of khaki’s and blazers and  Madras shirts with pocket protectors.  I remember trying to guess who they were there to see and what they wanted from Netscape.  Except for the guys in the suits, who were quickly escorted  past security, we were all ushered in turn to small  conference rooms off the lobby. I realized in a moment of panic that I had no idea what Netscape wanted.

The meeting was awful.  The Netscape executive I really wanted to see was off doing other things (something about buying an Irish castle).  My contact was selling, not buying.   After about fifteen minutes of nervous chit-chat we agreed to keep in touch.  But not before I asked about the strange collection of visitors in the lobby.  “I’ve been in lots of technology companies,” I said, “and I’ve never seen anything like it.  I see why the financial people are here, but what do you think is going on with the others?”  What he said stunned me, and as soon as I left the building I wrote it down.  “We don’t know,” he said. ” The guys in suits are from a Russian software company, and we get a lot people who just want to stop in. It’s chaos.”

I’ll tell you in a later post what happened to our technologies, but Netscape did not figure prominently into Bellcore’s future.  They were not excited.  They told me almost nothing about their business.  They did not want to know about ours. It was not a great meeting.  It was the best thing that could have happened to us.  I want to use Bob’s great meetings to explain why.

The University Meeting

Let’s first dispense with the university meeting.  Universities are in the great meetings business.  Professors give great talks.  They are great listeners.  All it takes for a  great university meeting is a great story told well.  There are some possible positive outcomes.  For example, Bob could have heard about a new invention that would help the business, but that would have involved the university selling to Bob.

The Government Meeting

Government agencies do in fact buy from small companies, so it’s not hard to imagine a meeting with a good outcome.  It depends on who is in the room.  A meeting of technologists is all about learning what Bob knows, and they are inclined to lavish praise on anything they can use to sell ideas and programs internally.  That’s literally what they have to spend.  The outcome of almost every other meeting with a government customer is irrelevant to closing orders.  Bob may hear about proposal opportunities or new programs that the company is qualified for, but government employees never show up pen in hand ready to write a check.

The Meeting with Another Early Stage Company

If a meeting concludes without an order being signed, it’s because they are the C-O-M-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N. They are thrilled to hear what you’re doing.

The Meeting with a Bigger Company

Big company meetings are the most dangerous. Almost everyone is interested in what Bob knows.  Engineers run internal projects and Bob is the ideal guy to help educate them.  Marketing casts a wide net looking for trends and intelligence. Who better to help them out than the head of a company that has just acquired investors and is thinking day and night about what new customers want?  General management doesn’t have time to spend on a meeting (Irish castles, remember?) and mid-level managers, who are not inclined to spend money, know that, if you keep coming back, they are buying time in a possibly interesting market.  Bob could have snagged a meeting with someone who manages vendors, and it might have led to a sale, but it would not have been great.

What I said to Bob was “Great meetings lead nowhere.”  Every one of Bob’s  meetings was designed to transfer value away from his company.  Everyone he met with was so thrilled with this that they told him how much they liked him.  He educated companies with greater resources and provided fodder for PowerPoint™ presentations by technology managers.  All for the price of a sandwich and a bag of chips.  And they were willing to do it again.

My Netscape meeting was awful, but I learned that

  1. We were a small slice of a value chain that we didn’t understand;
  2. Innovation bubbled all around Netscape, and they did not need to get on a plane to New Jersey to get access to it;
  3. The market looked as chaotic to Netscape as it did to me.

A great meeting with Netscape would have felt good.  They could have said how important we were to their success or how much the Bellcore patent portfolio meant to them.  I could have come away feeling that the 1995 golden child had the market all figured out.   I could have been enticed to go back for a second or a third meeting.  None of those things happened.  Instead, Bellcore started its own e-commerce company and for a brief while was a smaller, dimmer but still exciting star.  The star eventually fizzled, but that is a different colliding worlds story.

I was once on the board of a start-up with new technology for analyzing transactions to determine probable future customer behavior.  It was in  the earliest days of CRM and almost no enterprise-ready products had hit the market.  Every  financial services company had internal projects in this area and wanted to have a meeting to hear what was up.  I made introductions within my own company, although I told the CEO to not waste his time, because we were engaged in ten simultaneous discussions with large software companies.  Every six weeks the board heard about a string of successful meetings — great meetings.  A lot of them were great, but not one led to a dollar of revenue.  The company was eventually sold at  a huge discount to a  much larger company where there had been a great meeting years before.  How much better off  everyone would  have been if, instead of a great meeting, there had been a little blood on the boardroom floor.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tags: , , ,

“Dear Mr. Watson, My employment with IBM has been terminated” (More Loose Cannons)

November 3, 2009

Dilbert.com

There was a birthday celebration of sorts last week.  From the October 29th edition of  ABC News Science & Technology:

While the actual date of the Internet’s birthday is somewhat debated, many say that the Internet was born 40 years ago today at the University of California, Los Angeles, when a computer to computer message was sent for the first time from the UCLA campus to Stanford.

At the time, Leonard Kleinrock and his colleagues were charged with developing the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET), a government-funded research project in global computer communications that eventually grew into the Internet.

I thought it would be a good occasion to  reflect on how easy it is for Loose Cannons to get smashed by colliding worlds.

In the days before ARPANET, computer-to-computer communications were homogeneous, and computer manufacturers liked it that way. The very idea of not owning every aspect of a technology stack seemed to be ridiculous.  Where’s the value if you can get critical components from anywhere?  What if competitors start using the same suppliers?  Heads of business units hated the idea, but Loose Cannons kept proposing technical architectures that looked, well, open.  The idea was playing out in many ways in many companies.

At IBM, two architectural revolutions were simultaneously  underway. We now know that they were related. In the summer of  1980, IBM executive Bill Lowe prepared to brief  the company’s Management Committee on development plans  for a personal computer:

It was a dangerous place to be.  The Management Committee — or, given IBMers’ fondness for acronyms, the MC — ruled on issues that couldn’t be resolved at lower corporate levels, so going before the committee was, to IBMers, like going before the Supreme Court.  It was actually rougher because the top IBM executives who sat in judgment were known to be brutal, especially if they thought someone was wasting their time.[1]

Bill Lowe had been beaten up by the MC before, but this time Lowes’ plan to use outside suppliers drew polite questions from MC members who expressed some concern about turning over even partial control of any of their businesses to “outsiders.” What Lowe and the vast majority of IBM engineers didn’t know was that earlier in the year the MC had received a  forecast for global PC sales that showed a peak market of 80,000 units in that began to rapidly decline in 1984 as the specialized customer  need for computers was satiated:

IBM had already been embarrassed by early missteps in the PC market but the corporate culture was focused on mainframes and services.  Problems might be created by opening up the hardware and software architecture of personal computers, but

The general attitude…was that you don’t have big problems in small markets, and we thought the personal computer was a very small market.[1]

The MC might have been more inclined to turn its attention to a market that had real legs.  Like, say, networking.  Ed Hendricks was an engineer at IBM’s Federal Systems Division in San Diego.  Hendricks had helped design VNET, at that time the largest computer network in the world.  VNET was  IBM’s internal corporate network, linking IBM mainframes at scientific data centers.  By 1980, VNET was a global asset with hundreds of  hosts in North America, Europe and Asia.

Meanwhile, ARPANET was growing into the Internet, and Ed Hendricks was interested in how IBM’s technology would continue to prosper when the world started connecting IBM mainframes to large UNIVAC computers, HP mini-computers,  PC’s, and supercomputers from Cray or Control Data.  Hendricks became an industry player in this arena, collaborating with my colleague Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin as the expansion of the ARPANET began in earnest. Ed  Hendrick’s IBM Internet Gateway Project was aimed squarely at insuring that IBM mainframes would not be stranded in a world in which they could only talk to each other:

The objective of this project is to begin to bridge the gap between IBM computer systems and network technology predominant among government agencies, conractors and universities.  More specifically, we are working to develop according to DOD standards the technical capacity to interconect networks of IBM computers and systems to similar but different computer networks used by government agencies and their affiliates.

Hendrick’s website preserves the sometimes heated but  thoughtful and deep technical discussions — involving Hendricks,  the legendary Jim Gray, and MIT’s Jerry Saltzer, among others –  that took place througout 1980 about the relative merits of ARPANET and IBM’s networking strategy. For reasons that are still unclear, IBM decided to move the Internet Gateway Project to IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, an effort that Hendricks calls “screwy.”   Hendricks along with team members Gerot “Mike” Engel and Dale Johnson planned to spend a week at Yorktown Heights, getting comfortable with IBM Research’s Systems Laboratory, their proposed  new home:

…the Systems Laboratory was created to focus more directly on perceived business needs. Consequently, Systems Laboratory projects are evaluated and prioritized on the basis “leverage” they exert on the software product line…by design, ninety-five percent of the work carried out in the Systems Laboratory is so closely related to strategic product development that it cannot be discussed outside IBM.

Shocked, the Internet Gateway team concluded:

…a project such as ours which is intended to establish internet communication compatible across differing systems…could not be carried out under such guidelines.  Our overall reaction…was that the ARPANet Internet Gateway project could not have been started within the Systems Laboratory.

They concluded that if the project was to have any chance at all of success, there would need to be a formal review of management decisions, what  IBM called the “Open Door” process.

March 14, 1981

John R. Opel, President IBM Corporation

Dear Mr. Opel,

This letter is intended to invoke the IBM Open Door Policy.  My purpose in requesting this Open Door is to seek clarification of the decisions which led to a situation where a project which is clearly critical to IBM’s future posture in the data communications industry cannot be pursued…Bureaucratic accomodation for only that which is in the strategic plan is a very dangerous posture to be in while the data processing and communication industry is rapidly evolving.

[My team and I] have been working to carry out a project to establish a capacity…to cooperate with the U.S. Government and University Computer Science departments in the evolution of techniques to interconnect dissimilar computer networks…There is essentially unanimous agreement that this activity promises important advances for IBM and for computer technology in general.

In September 0f 1980 we were notified by our management that this work could not be carried out…On each occasion when this qustion [of where the work could be carried out in IBM] was being escalated to the proper level, my management would insist that I leave the management issue to them and to concentrate my own efforts of the technical work.

Last week I was informed verbally that no sponsorship for this project could be found.  My manager asked where hie should look to find me a job. My position was…that inability to find organizational sponsorship for the project is not equivalent to a decision that IBM should not be involved in developing the capacity to interconnect IBM networks to government and university networks…to look for other professional opportunities now and give up attempts to pursue this technology…would be to let the company down….

Sincerely yours,

Gernot Engel

19 March 1981

Mr. Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Chairman Emeritus

Dear Mr. Watson,

My employment with IBM has been terminated as a consequence of recent management decision which are incompatible with my professional goals…I believe I am justified in requesting more thorough and explicit responses to the following questions:

  1. What “business needs required the termination of our ARPANET Interconnection Gatweway Project and the abandonment of the…professionals we had been dealing with?
  2. What factors prevented alternative organizational arrangements that would have allowed our group to continue its work within IBM?
  3. What is IBM’s posture regarding professional cooperation with the computer scientists working in association with DARPA…to establish mutual techniques for interconnection of dissimilar computer networks?…

Sincerely yours,

Gernot Engel

May 15, 1981

John R. Opel, President IBM Corp.

Dear Mr. Opel,

On March 4, 1981 I sent a letter to your office requesting clarification of a decision which cancelled the internet gateway project…Your office’s attempt to analyze the internet decision appears to be stalled because it was handed back to middle management….I can only conclude in this instance the Open Door Policy has failed. My recommendation to salvage the situation is that you give fifteen minutes of your time to receive a presentation on the internet project and attempt to evaluation for yourself the value of this project to IBM’s future.”

Sincerely yours,

Gernot Engel

May 19, 1981

Dear Mr. Engel,

I have reviewed the results of [the] investigation into your concerns.  Your disappointment with the decision to terminate the VNET/ARPANET project is understandable; however, I conclude the decision was properly based on the need to fund other Ad Tech projects with greater business potential…

I understand you are currently considering a return to IBM, and I hope you choose to do so.

Siuncerely,

John R. Opel

Number 1-81: September 11, 1981 MANAGEMENT BRIEFING

TO ALL IBM MANAGERS:

Organizations seem to have an irresistable tendency to codify successful practices in rules, instructions and controls which soon begin to take the place of judgement. When that happens, the result is bureaucracy.

IBM is not immune.  Earlier this year, reports from many sources indicated to me that a growing bureaucracy is affecting the performance of our business…corporate staff heads, group executives, and the division presidents are exploring ways to reduce unnecessary controls, rules and approvals in their areas of responsibility…We will succeed in that effort only if you managers, at every level of the business,k are willing to stand up and fight bureaucracy wherever you find it…If you have all the information to make a decision, make it…

[signed by John Opel, president]

John Opel stepped down as IBM president in January 1985 and chairman in May 1986.  He was succeed by John Akers, and he was succeeded by Lou Gerstner in 1993. Gerstner, the former CEO of RJR Nabisco, described his transformation of IBM in “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?”[2].  Most observers agree that critical to IBM’s turnaround that took it from a free fall in the early 1980’s to unquestioned market  leadership in computers, software and services was the dismantling of a remote, hierarchical management culture that squeezed innovation in political pincers.  By the time I took over the computing research directorship at the National Science Foundation in the late 1980’s, IBM had become a major player in the growth of the Internet [3]:

In the mid-1980s, NSF decided the time was right to try to link its regional university networks and its supercomputer centers together. This initial effort was called NSFNET.
By 1987, participation in the new NSFNET project grew so rapidly that NSF knew it had to expand the capacity of this new network. In November of that year, it awarded a grant to a consortium of IBM, MCI, and a center at the University of Michigan called Merit to create a network of networks—or inter-net—capable of carrying data at speeds up to 56 kilobits a second. By July, 1987, this new system was up and running. The modern Internet was born.

REFERENCES

1. Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1994

2. Louis V. Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, Collins, 2002

3. National Science Foundation, NSF and the Birth of the Internet, http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/textonly/index.jsp

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

« Previous Entries
Next Page »