A corporation isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people, with shared values, all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.
Over the last year, 110,000 strong Intel has been changing under the leadership of Robert Swan, who considers the cultural change necessary for its survival.
Its culture badly needed an overhaul, and its 110,000 employees needed to confront issues more openly.
“If you have a problem, put it on the table,” said Mr. Swan, 59, who was promoted to the top job a year ago and has since embarked on a campaign to shake up the Silicon Valley giant.
His efforts remain a work in progress. But the changes — some of which lean on the precepts of Andrew S. Grove, the former Intel chief executive who coined the credo “Only the paranoid survive” — are Intel’s biggest attitude adjustment in decades.
The underlying cause is the same as Gerstner and Nadella faced at their companies: complacency.
Complacency, from years of dominating their markets, and silos, from internal distrust and myopic communications.
Intel was the same.
Intel also had deeply rooted problems reflecting its years of dominance, Mr. Swan said. Managers, complacent about competition, battled internally over budgets. Some of them hoarded information, he said.
These are the same problems that companies of all sizes face.
No matter how dominant times change and competitors can seize the day.
While success is often seen as a case of “us” vs. “them” it’s crucial to remember that “us” includes customers, partners and all parts of the company.
What this mouthful of a name means is if you want a venue showcasing the cutting edge technology in healthcare with 40,000 of your closest friends…well you’re in the right spot.
I was there as a representative of my company and had a chance to have some meaningful conversations, but it was the conversations off the floor that were perhaps more valuable.
As anyone who has attended a convention of this size knows, you’re in for a menagerie of vendor sites and sounds. It can be overwhelming and enlightening
While I had some downtime I took a walk on the floor to see what else is occurring within the medtech sector.
During one of these occasions I had a chance to meet with some folks from IBM. Now IBM needs no introduction, but within healthcare they are a new entrant.
They have utilized their Watson cognitive thinking system to tackle some of the toughest problems in medicine today.
They are currently focused on oncology and determining patients at risk or treating mutations earlier than currently possible.
Something that struck me was the fact that this technology is very affordable to their customers. Their mindset is that all people, regardless of income, location, background or country should receive the same level of care as anyone else.
I was floored.
Healthcare is big business and while most mean well, the stated goals are not so noble.
Where did this culture come from at IBM?
As of now I don’t have that answer, but I wanted to at least inform you that a company of that size has genuine concern for the well being of us all.
Because this time the incompatibility is in the proprietary electronic medical records (EMR) systems that are mandated under the Affordable Care Act and, far more importantly, are an imperative for the health of the entire population.
The money in play is substantial; privately held Epic is one of the largest suppliers and its founder, Judith R. Faulkner, is supposed to be worth around $2.3 billion.
When you’re making that kind of money who worries about lives ruined or lost because of EMR incompatibility?
While the companies building incompatible systems are doing just fine, those who have to buy the systems aren’t—although size does make a difference.
The University of California Davis Health System has 22 specialists installing the technology so that doctors can share patient data between its Epic system and other internal systems, like the hemodynamic monitors in its critical care unit, or with some non-Epic systems outside the hospital. “We’re a huge organization, so we can absorb those costs,” said Michael Minear, the chief information officer at the U.C. Davis Health System. “Small clinics and physician offices are going to have a harder time.” (…) “The systems can’t communicate, and that becomes my problem because I cannot send what is required and I’m going to have a 1 percent penalty from Medicare,” Dr. Raghuvir B. Gelot said. “They’re asking me to do something I can’t control.”
What about regulators?
Regulators responded that interoperability was a “top priority” and that they recently set out a 10-year vision and agenda to achieve it, in an emailed statement from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The office’s spokesman added that achieving interoperability “requires stakeholders to come together and agree on policy-related issues like who can access information and for what purpose.”
So much for regulators.
Perhaps Congress… No; that’s a really stupid thought.
I guess the only sure things in all this is that the entrepreneurs who created the incompatible systems will increase their net worth, US medical costs will continue to skyrocket and you and I will pay the bills.
I am truly tired of listening to the likes of Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg talk abut women in the workplace when, in fact, their world bears no relationship to the majority of women locally or globally.
Elite women, like their male counterparts, marry later and have fewer children than their less-educated sisters. They take shorter breaks from paid full-time employment (a reverse from past trends) and claim an ever greater share of overall female income while relying on nannies and other household help.
Also, I’ve always doubted that having hot women wearing minimal outfits as a booth attraction at tradeshows gives a company an edge. And guess what? It doesn’t.
Booth babes do NOT convert. How do I know? Well, I actually split-tested this a few years ago and the results were indisputable. If you have invested in a trade show to generate new business, using booth babes is a lead conversion boat anchor. –Spencer Chen, marketing professional
“Gender contamination occurs when one gender is using a brand as a symbol of their masculinity or femininity, and the incursion of the other gender into the brand threatens that… Girls and women seem to have more freedom to consume products and brands commonly associated with the other gender than boys and men, who are more tightly constrained by the prevailing views of masculinity that associate being masculine with avoiding anything feminine.“
There is a lot of systemic bias in the system against young women taking this kind of direction with their studies and their career. And we must change that bias and it must be changed at the middle school level.
While many recognize that solutions need to be applied in middle school or sooner, new research shows that just having a male teacher may impede progress and intimidate interest.
The stereotype that men are better at math than women is so ingrained in our culture that women feel stereotype threat — and as a result, perform more poorly in math — just from watching a man take a dominant role in a math study group.
Women have played a key role in some of the most important innovations in IBM’s history. Meet some of them through the Technologista series that celebrates some of these accomplishments.
I think my favorite pro STEM-for-girls is Debbie Sterling, who starts much earlier. She’s the entrepreneur who not only didn’t buy into the hype, but also created toys to combat it.
Who said girls want to dress in pink and play with dolls, especially when they could be building Rube Goldberg machines instead?
Warning: today’s post probably won’t help you manage your group, work better or improve culture, but it is so darn cool I had to share.
It’s also a glimpse of the future.
It’s real innovation—the kind that actually has the potential to change the world—unlike the inane kind, such as Google Glass.
IBM research just released an adorable stop-motion movie, “A Boy And His Atom,” by moving individual atoms around and imaging them. (…)This breakthrough “has the potential to make our computers and devices smaller and more powerful, but also holds enormous implications for the way entire industries operate,”
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer started a brouhaha recently when she ended the company’s policy of allowing staff to work from home; many insiders said it was a good move, because remote workers weren’t performing.
However, low productivity and lack of accountability is a management problem, so if she only brings people on-sight without directly dealing with the underlying management problems the results probably won’t improve much.
Hubert Joly, the new Best Buy CEO, dumped the ROWE culture in favor of 40-hour on-site workdays for the headquarters staff as the best way to boost performance in the turnaround; he also wants to sure that everyone knows they are dispensable (himself included).
However, nothing I’ve seen indicates that the work wasn’t getting done, so dumping ROWE may prove of questionable value.
Tony Hsieh thinks on-site is better not because of accountability, but because “companies with strong cultures outperform those without in the long-term financially. So we’re big, big believers in building strong company cultures; note that Zappos’ business lends itself to having all its staff on-site.
Whereas IBM has a strong, unified culture in spite of being a global company with thousands of employees who work off-site.
Bottom line: It’s not a matter of on or off-site; it’s a matter of the strength of the culture, which is dependent on the skill of the management.
Buying startups and shutting down their business in the name of acquiring talent is a hot trend—and one easily destined to fail.
Talent retention in ‘acqui-hiring’ fails most often for the same reason it has always failed—culture.
And before anyone offers the ‘large company culture vs. startup culture’ argument let me point out that Google and Facebook are large companies, not startups.
Realistically speaking, I don’t care how cool the culture and perks at Google and Facebook are, there is no way they or similar companies can provide true startup culture, camaraderie, or environment.
But it is amusing (if you don’t own their stock) to watch them try.
In the same vein, why is it so surprising when long-term employees leave?
The media loves to feature stories about turnover at Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Amazon, even Microsoft and other startup-no-longer companies, while ignoring the same turnover at Cisco, Intel and. IBM
When will they learn?
Those who get a thrill creating something from nothing and building foundations may start losing interest when the scaffolding for higher stories goes up and become totally disinterested when the walls go in.
High salaries, excessive stock options, even powerful positions may hold them, but retention doesn’t always translate to productivity or cultural harmony.
All I can say is caveat emptor and don’t whine if (when) it doesn’t work.
What is innovation? Is it really embodied in a good deal playing Farmville on Facebook for hours? I found an excellent definition of innovation in a fascinating article about Bell Labs and Mervin Kelly, who, over the course of 34 years, worked his way up from researcher to chairman of the board (something few people today would consider doing—assuming they could even find a company in which to do it).
By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.”
“On a winter day the ball is cold, which makes the rubber harder, the air in the ball denser, so the ball doesn’t really expand and contract off the bounce,” said Ruben Acosta, 32, a hotel concierge who is known on the court as Superstar. “Boiling the balls gives them back their zing.”
While not all innovation makes money they do make waves. When large-scale corruption is uncovered it receives plenty media coverage, but how to address the endemic petty corruption that millions of people face around the world is a tougher question. In 2010 Swati and Ramesh Ramanathan and Sridar Iyengar started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.
On a totally different scale is Tony Hsieh, whose dream is to fix the world by fixing cities, starting with Las Vegas, not as dictator, but as facilitator. According to his friend Sarah Nisperos, “But he wanted all these things based on happiness and merit and how nice you are. I said you shouldn’t build a strip mall, you should be downtown.”
Hsieh’s working through Downtown Project, a company he created with $350 million to spend, to seed technology startups, invest in education and attempt to build a walkable, vibrant downtown.
“You can’t dictate what the neighborhood is going to look like. But you can definitely help support and accelerate people’s dreams and visions,” Hsieh says. “That is really our belief as to what drives our culture. It needs to be organic.”
But never before has it built a citywide system integrating data from some 30 agencies, all under a single roof. It is the handiwork of an I.B.M. unit called Smarter Cities…
Innovation often borrows from the existent to create something new; that process is especially thrilling when something relatively frivolous is used to make something with the potential to truly change the world. Such is what is happening as MMOG expands to MMOC. This is one link to share with everyone you know.
Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education.
I’ve read a lot about Sam Palmisano and previously written about him.
That said, I still found Wharton management professor Michael Useem’s interview with Palmisano covering his 40 years at IBM, including the last decade as CEO, interesting and informative.
It’s a long interview and, if you prefer, you can use the link to read it or download an audio version.
Most importantly, be sure to read the comments, most by IBMers, which, by and large, are anything but flattering.
Do you agree that his focus on the company screwed the employees or did he get it right?
How does a CEO balance the legacy needs of employees against the needs of the company to survive in a different world?
What would you have done differently to achieve the same success?
It caught me because I’m not a lover of sweeping generalizations, since very few hold up against reality and this was one of them.
In this case, the author, with a typical consultant-pundit in support, denigrates as silly the raft of new CXO functions in business.
While I agree that they can be empty window dressing, the majority I’ve seen are powerful positions. You can tell the difference by the report structure—if the position doesn’t report directly to the top boss—CEO, COO, President or owner—it’s likely fluff.
Another statement, that titles were “likely dreamed up by the marketing team,” was really hilarious considering the corporate examples cited.
Kodak and Dell appointed Chief Listeners. Facebook recently added two Chief Privacy Officers. Coca-Cola is really gung-ho on the trend, employing a Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief Scientific and Regulatory Officer, and Chief Quality and Product Integrity Officer, among others. Microsoft has a Chief People Officer; IBM a Chief Information Officer; Xerox a Chief Strategy Officer; and New York City has its very own Chief Digital Officer.
I find it hard to believe that the likes of Sam Palmisano, Michael Dell or Steve Balmer, let alone Michael Bloomberg, have marketing designing their organization.
The list also displays a high level of ignorance, since several of those “silly” titles, e.g., Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) have been around for decades, while others reflect important new priorities.
It’s not that I condone title inflation, but making sweeping statements that disparage efforts by companies to focus knowledge, skills and resources on specific problems and increase accountability by putting one person in charge are worse.
Creating new areas of responsibility to meet the needs of a changing world is necessary and bosses who ignore the changes or the need are setting their companies up for failure sooner, rather than later.
As long as the CXO has a well-defined mission, the authority to achieve it and direct access to the top the position deserves respect and support.
Outsiders who belittle that effort should be ignored.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Decades ago computer manufactures, such as IBM and DEC, created closed systems that wouldn’t/couldn’t talk to each other.
Buying startups and shutting down their business in the 
What is innovation? Is it really embodied in a good deal playing Farmville on Facebook for hours? I found an excellent 
A few days ago an 
