IBM Nick Donofrio's speech at NTHU

“No mater you like it or not, change happens” is the opening statement made by Nick Donofrio, an IBM graduate, the Executive Vice President in Innovation and Technology, in the speech to audiences at the auditorium of the College of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, November 6, 2009. The title of this talk is “SSME and Smarter Planet” which are two main endeavors IBM has been promoting in recent years.
He started his speech to illustrate that this world is progressively inter-locked and inter-connected, and people and things are intensively instrumented. Everything is globalized and globalizing. He highlighted that the number of transistors produced is larger than the crops we harvested. It is true that things we see, touch, use, or even not seen are instrumented nowadays. In making a car, the cheapest part is the steel, and the most expensive is electronics. We now have 2 billions of internet users, and one quarter of trillions of devises, which are close to what he had predicted in the early stage of internet in 1998. It means that we got many data nowadays. The issue in dealing with how we create data sometimes is more important than what we created the data. Intelligence in dealing with data becomes a necessity for people and machine.
Besides elaborating what is usually identified by IBM Smarter Planet: instrumented, inter-connected, and intelligence, Nick highlighted the fourth component of smarter planet, that is, inclusive. In a system view, things in a system may interact with things in other systems, where the system boundary may not be restricted because we have limited capacity to model them. That makes me recall the concept of bounded rationality from Herbert Simon that rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions. The complexity of systems requires that we recognize the fact that the value of change, i.e., the value of innovation, is constantly migrating, and we don’t control it. The value could be economic, social, or educational values. In order to create and capture the constant flow of value, we want to be inclusive, we want to be relevant to the evolution. People want to connect with people. No one wants to be irrelevant. Thus, on a smarter planet, everyone is inclusive.
People may refer innovation to textbooks to interpret it as creativity, invention, discovery, etc. Nick treats it in a holistic way to emphasize the innovation culture, that is open, collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and global. One may take the problem, start from the problem, and then apply the technology/knowledge to generate things which are unique and useful. At the end of process, what one hopes is that somebody will like it and appreciate its value. If not, keep inventing, and when the value is unlocked, it means that somebody in somewhere does like it. Thus, everyone could be an innovator. We are in the 21th century, no one wants to be go back to 60s, 70, etc. We should drive the economy forward. We need the people in different characteristics to deal with this instrumented, inter-connected, and globalizing world. T-shape people are what we are looking for. People with profound professional capability with broad domain knowledge, and interested in making the world better and advancing the quality of life are what we are looking for and education wants to cultivate. It does not mean that we don’t need people with skills in specific domains. We still need them, and need them very much, but need them differently. As we can see that in Taiwan’s GDP, 2% contributed by agriculture, 25% by industry, and 73% by service sectors, the increasing proportion on service is the trend. How can we get it in a more productive way to face the continuous growth of world population. As expected, the world will increase 4 billions of people in 2050. What will the world need, and what human societies need? If we want to move up to the value chain, we got to change. We need to treat service as a discipline, and make it work. “Taiwan is so advanced,” Nick asked the audiences, “how hungry do we desire the change?” He pointed out that “1.3 billions of India people living in a condition that they wake up everyday, and want to change, but you wouldn’t.”
Nick ends his talk by sharing his own life story that he is the second generation of Italian immigrant. His father was a guard for a criminal house. In order to raise the children, his father worked day and night, even in the weekend. Nick said, “My father was not well educated, but was a wise man.” Nick had to deliver newspaper six days a week in his childhood (because there is no newspaper to deliver on Sundays). He felt that his father kept him busy all the time. When he went to high school, his summer time was occupied by additional math classes. One day, he could no longer take it without knowing why. He asked his father, “Dad, why did you do this for me?” His father’s answer is very simple but still in his mind vividly: “Nothing changes if you don’t change yourself.” “Change is the only way to make our lives better” is the strong message delivered to the audiences by the end of this speech.
At the end, he urges the audiences to bear in mind: exploration, inspiration, and perspiration, as we move forward to higher value chains of global economy, and enhance the life quality of mankind.
For those who missed this talk due to the conflicting schedule, I know the above summary and elaboration may satisfy your curiosity to a certain extent.