Samuel Palmisano and the Re-Birth of IBM

Great profile of Palmisano from Steve Lohr – How Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. Stayed a Step Ahead:

behind I.B.M.’s relentless progress over the last decade is a game plan that has been anything but conservative. The company shed multibillion-dollar businesses. It chose higher profit margins over corporate size, and expanded aggressively overseas, seeking sales, low-cost engineering talent and quicker organizational reflexes.

Investors, however, haven’t been bored. The company’s stock price has surged. In November, Warren E. Buffett, who typically shuns technology stocks, announced he had accumulated $10 billion of I.B.M. shares, a stake of more than 5 percent.

All of that didn’t just happen. A large portion of the credit goes to Samuel J. Palmisano, who steps down on Sunday after nearly a decade as chief executive. During his tenure, I.B.M. has been a textbook case of how to drive change in a big company — when so much of the study of business innovation focuses on start-ups and entrepreneurs.

This column is a glimpse of the thinking behind some of the major steps I.B.M. has taken under Mr. Palmisano’s leadership, based on two recent interviews with him.

He says his guiding framework boils down to four questions:

• “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?”

• “Why would somebody work for you?”

• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”

• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

NY Times Magic Mirror

NYTLabs Magic Mirror Reveals News and Health Statistics - information aesthetics:

The Magic Mirror [nytlabs.com], developed by The New York Times Research & Development Lab (with Alexis Lloyd, among others) has just been selected as one of Time's "50 Best Inventions" of 2011. It is probably the best gadget to fullfil those urgent craves from the data addicted, during those few moments they cannot reach their smart phones.

At first sight, the mirror looks like any normal plain, reflective surface. However, next to showing one's reflection, this mirror is also able to deliver daily news and weather details while brushing your teeth or combing your hear. It combines a Philips Mirror TV with a Microsoft Kinect camera to allow you to access all sorts of information while admiring your own reflection. For instance, the mirror can check one's daily calendar and social feeds, and displays all sorts of statistics regarding one's health, including historical sleep patterns or walking activity.

New York Times R&D Lab: Health and the "magic mirror" from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

New York Times R&D Lab: Retail and the "magic mirror" from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Reveal Project - Personal Data Mirror from NYT R&D on Vimeo.

Cell Phones in the Classroom

Lisa Nielsen on Making the Case for Using Cell Phones in the Classroom:

has started a conversation about whether it is time to lift the city’s ban on cellphones in schools. SchoolBook, The New York Times and WNYC combined effort to share news, data, and conversation about schools in New York City, reached out to me and my Teaching Generation Text co-author, Willyn Webb as experts to share our ideas about ways to incorporate cellphones into the classroom.

In the article we share ways real educators are using the power of cell phones for learning and explain the building blocks that must be put in place for success.  

You can read the article at http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2011/11/01/cellphones-why-not-use-them-to-teach.

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

very moving

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

(Via daringfireball.net/)

Who Inspires You?

For many young entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs, the answer would be Steve Jobs. A good piece in the New York Times by Christopher Bonanos on The Man Who Inspired Jobs:

IN the memorials toSteven P. Jobsthis week,Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered hishero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of bothTimeandLifemagazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.