More on the Near Death Experience

BIF-3 storyteller Irving Wladawsky-Berger has written a follow-up piece to the story he shared at our summit a few weeks ago. To quickly recap, Irving was questioned whether any company can truly reinvent itself without having a near-death experience. Irving said no.

Having time for reflection, here's a bit of what Irving has to say:

"Must a successful organizational re-invention be preceded by the kind of cataclysmic events that open up the mind to new experiences - essentially cleaning the brain from its previous inflexible views of life? The ancient Greeks certainly thought so, as reflected in their tragedies.

So, in reply to Walt's initial question, I told him that I believe that IBM's near-death experience was - in my opinion - an essential part of our successful transformation. We used to think that we were the marketplace - the kind of hubris that the gods in Mount Olympus will absolutely punish. Having invented RISC microprocessors and relational data bases in our research labs, as well as established the IBM PC as the leader in the marketplace, we let others reap the benefits of our work because we were making so much money from our proprietary mainframes, compared to the returns from these puny, emerging businesses. They don't call them tragic flaws for nothing."

Irving's video interview with Walt Mossberg is now online. It can be viewed over at our Innovation Story Studio.

I also blogged about Irving's story last week (as did several others including Bill Taylor, Lois Kelly and Erica Driver).

Posted October 30, 2007 01:48 PM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink