“Very few senior IBM leaders were technical.”
… With the exception of Jack Kuehler – who was the one of the top 3 leaders in the 80’s. He was an engineer, and at the time, I thought I could climb to be him or at his level.
…the leader you want to become…
Somewhere above you is a person you measure yourself against. Maybe 2 levels up, maybe at the very top. They speak your language, which is rare at that altitude, and you have quietly decided that is where you are going. You have never shown them what your team built.
Most of us keep our heroes at a distance. We read their memos, watch them at the all-hands, and assume they are too busy for a demo. Leaders who came up through the work are usually the ones who miss it most. The Space between the corner office and the lab is wider than it looks from either side, and they rarely get an invitation to cross it.
…the singer who asked for a solar system…
Chris Martin founded Coldplay with Jonny Buckland at University College London in 1996, where he took a first in Greek and Latin. He sings and plays piano, and he asks for things before anyone knows how to build them. In 2010 he told a member of the road crew, “I’d like you to build a solar system…” On October 15, 2021, the band released Music of the Spheres, an album set in a made-up solar system called The Spheres, with 9 planets, 3 moons, a star and a nebula. Martin, typically, played it down: “It seems a bit sci-fi and everything, but really it’s a bunch of love songs.”
Let the people at the top wonder at what your team built. They rarely get the chance.
…to wonder is to stay curious about the work…
To wonder is to stay curious about what is possible, long after your title says you should already know. The best senior leaders never lose it. They want to see the thing, touch it, and ask the question the engineer was hoping someone would ask.
The roadblock is protocol. Senior visits get turned into slide decks, and the people who built the thing end up holding the door. Give the tour to the person who built it. The wonder happens there, for both of them: the executive sees the work up close, and the builder gets to be seen by someone they admire.
…a 10-minute song about a nebula…
Coloratura closes Music of the Spheres. It runs just over 10 minutes, the longest song Coldplay has ever released, and in the album’s made-up solar system it is the nebula. Rolling Stone called it “a panoramic, multi-suite voyage into the cosmos.”
It came out in July 2021, months before the album, as an offering to fans rather than a single. A band with nothing left to prove put out a 10-minute song in the age of the 3-minute stream.
…the day I hosted the engineer I wondered if I could become…
The IBM Shareholder meeting was in Houston in April of 1986. I brought our large Space Station model down, and discussed it with the shareholders who came in for the meeting. I attended the meeting, and watched as John Akers, the CEO, deftly dealt with some very angry people. It was true executive leadership – clearly demonstrating how to communicate what you wanted to say regardless of what was asked. I was awed… and later would see the impact of that as IBM leadership became out of touch with the real world.
Jack was in town and we invited him down to the lab to see what we had built to win the contract (which we later did). I was his host and was able to take him on the demo. It was also the early days of “email”… and I boldly emailed him – the Vice Chairman – and he actually wrote back! He was instrumental in getting IBM to finally wake up and get into the Unix world that we so desperately needed for the federal marketplace – mostly because Intel (then THE company in semiconductors) demanded it. But with his power, he got it done…
…only 5 years later, I briefed him for the supercomputer project we were leading. By then I had been in the executive leadership Space when it crashed and burned. His former power had diminished, and I started realizing that playing at that level is not often as fun as it looks…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Invite the most senior leader you admire to see what your team has built, and let the person who built it give the tour.
If you want help shaping the invitation, or the tour, let’s wonder about it together. Schedule time with me here.
Open the lab doors, and let them hear all 10 minutes of… Coloratura
