And Cape says – T school was epic !


I have long held the belief that the most value for clients happen when consultants are polymaths – with world class business skills combined with world class technical skills . I was one of the fortunate ones who had opportunities to strike a balance between business and technology throughout my career , and nothing makes me more happy than helping my younger colleagues who want to take that journey.

It’s not always easy – people in this field tend to polarize to either extreme , instead of developing “T shape” skills with breadth and depth . And it’s not a one time educational event that gets us there – it needs a life long passion for learning from the individual and a well thought out plan from the organization .

Late last year, I was asked by our North America leader Ismail Amla to sponsor the Bee school – our new core consulting school . Turns out that Ismail was a rock star Cobol programmer at the time he started his career !!

It was an eye opening experience to work with our Learning and Knowledge team and get the Bee school up and running . We piloted it in March and by now about 1500 senior managers, managers and senior consultants have gone through that program. Once that was well under way, I wanted to create an equivalent school to focus on the technology side and that is how we created the T school .

Ismail and Jesus Mantas were immediately on board. When I presented the idea to Mark Foster ( he runs GBS world wide) this summer, he threw his support behind it immediately and I realized that like Ismail and Jesus , Mark is a huge fan of consultants developing the “T shape” skill sets .

Jesus calls such consultants “DaVinci consultants” !

My CTO Priya calls them Generalist specialists !

We piloted with an AI school in Columbus, OH . And that is where I first met Cape – and became his friend 🙂

Cape was a gift to IBM from our Sterling commerce acquisition . I found him in a closet in my office in Columbus and thought he would be the perfect brand ambassador for T school . We called him “The Monkey” since he didn’t have a name and he started taking a place of honor in all our meetings . Turns out, he doesn’t have a tail and hence is an Ape . So we thought why not make him a Cognitive Ape who can talk ?

My dear friend Teresa Hamid who runs the Columbus center took up the challenge and her team started calling him the Cognitive Ape as Cape .

He became the host of T school and even introduced me to the class of 100 young consultants and their faculty last week in Philadelphia , and answered my questions . By next school, his cognition will improve to also include vision ! I am told he might do a little dance number too 🙂

An initiative of this magnitude takes a village to come together , and that is exactly what happened . L&K team from North America and Global both jumped in with both feet and started putting a structure around it. My thanks to Debi Steinbacher, Christian Dick, Andreana Miller, Lorraine Rapuano, Kim Morick, Yee Min Ching, Emily Rosenblatt, Patsy Horgan, Suzanna Fishman , Vonda Massingill, Laurie Brage and Walt Zborowski.

And a special thanks to Nate Keating for helping me get this done on top of everything else going on in my day job. I could not have done it without you my friend !

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Every leader in the business we asked for help pitched in too. We did one class on AI in Columbus as a pilot , felt confident, and set to do a full school in October in PHL. Some of the students from Columbus event signed up for PHL as well – becoming our first set of polymath consultants from this batch !

We did a thorough analysis of the market, our offerings and skill needs and decided on Watson AI , data science , full stack development and Watson IOT classes to run in inaugural T school .

Then came the instructors – most of whom I hand picked from amongst the best consultants in the field . The quality of this gang needs to be seen to be believed !

Debi and I enlisted my friend Lorraine to help teach the faculty on how to be good facilitators . Many years ago, Lorraine taught the class of newly promoted senior managers and I was one of her students . Ever since I have been her number one fan ! As always she did a fantastic job .

Debi Steinbacher who runs NA L&K, assigned Andreana Miller to be my partner in T school . I could not have asked for a better partner – she totally took this to a level higher than I expected . Can’t wait to see where she takes us next!

The faculty and the nominated track leaders did an amazing job developing the curriculum in a few short sprints . At one point I thought this was way too much to try and teach in a week – but I was so glad to be proven wrong . When people love learning something new – their ability to stretch is unbelievable. It was beautiful to see the students over come the early struggles and then start to enjoy the new learning muscles they developed .

Thanks to our global team, we managed to get ten of our most popular offerings to be made available for the students to play with in the “Cognitive Playground” . That probably was the signature aspect of the event and I definitely will do more of it in future .

Special thanks to Kevin, our world class caterer ( honest to god his Guacamole is impossible to stop eating) and to my dear friend Christian Rodatus , CEO of Datameer, who sponsored the evenings appetizers and drinks.

Every morning we had a couple of guest speakers – senior IBM executives who presented short sessions and then joined me for “ask me anything” sessions . It is our fourth quarter and these leaders are needed in a hundred different places – but they found time to come to T school and share their experience and give candid answers to tonnes of questions. My sincere thanks to Sharon Hodgson, Pat Eskew, Terry Hickey, Shannon Todd-Olson, Ron Koch, Roy Zahut, Janine Sneed, Sherry Savage, Priya Vijayarajendran , Teresa Hamid and Priya Raman . That was quite the demonstration of the IBM leadership culture !

To my pleasant surprise, the quality of questions were on par with any I have had with the senior most audiences I have presented to in past . We were asked about topics ranging from AI ethics , future of education to how to train dogs 🙂

It was one big happy family – we even celebrated a birthday for our young friend Passion, who is also a top gymnast !

Since the formal definition of an engineer is one that takes in lots of pizza and beer and converts it magically to code, we had plenty of food and beverages to go around. Special thanks to Vonda for making sure everyone was well fed while learning. It was also good to see everyone having a lot of fun – I could always count on finding faculty and students at the hotel bar or lounge late at night, talking with the same high energy I saw in the classes.

Every night the teams spent some time putting together their new found skills into a solution that competed for the prize on Friday. The 14 teams had people from AI, Data science, IOT and Full stack backgrounds.  Predictably this went into an overdrive on Thursday night and they were hacking well into the wee hours of the morning. That showed when they made their 5 minute pitches – shark tank style – to the judging panels.

I sat in on one of the panels with Jesus and Shannon – and we were blown away by the quality of work demonstrated by the young colleagues. Not only were they VERY cool and sophisticated technically, the business case was well articulated as well. I am starting to think I should get some of my VC and PE friends to be on the panel in the next school.

Just before we closed out the school, we distributed a copy of The Originals to the students. The students in turn signed a copy of the book for me – and I read through the comments on my flight back home from PHL to PHX. Now I know you will absolutely make a dent in the universe !

Cape and I are both convinced that the future of IBM is in safe hands with our young “Da Vinci” colleagues – this 105 year old company is well poised for the next 100 years ! And we are happy to be their chief cheer leaders 🙂

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Teachers’ Day – A few fond memories


Today is September 5th , and in India it is celebrated as “Teachers’ day” , in honor of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan who was the second President of India and probably the best comparative religion/philosophy scholar of his time .

My late grandfather, R. Easwara Pillai, was a history professor in University of Kerala. He was the first teacher I ever met – and till date he remains the best teacher in my mind . His ability to explain History , Politics and Economics in simple terms with lots of examples and stories was what kindled a life long interest for me in those subjects .

In Kindergarten ( At Kayankulam St.Mary’s ), my favorite teacher was Ms Kochurani . It amazes me that I remember her name but can’t remember her face any more. But I do remember her visiting our home every few weeks and bringing story books for me to read !

In elementary school (Chinmaya Vidyalaya ) , my favorite was Mrs Nirmala Mathrubhootam. She would take us out of the class room and make us gather around the big trees in the school yard and talk to us about nature , how trees get their food and how they help clean up the pollution.

In junior high (Christ Nagar), there were two stand out teachers . Both of them taught English – Mr Appukuttan Nair and Rev Fr Berthold CMI . The former took away my fear for the language and the latter taught me the nuances of “Spoken English” . I had no idea at that time how impactful those lessons would be in my future.

Pre-Degree ( Govt Arts College ) had some super star teachers – the two I remember the most are Prof Mohan Kumar who taught Organic Chemistry and Prof Jayaprakash who taught Physics. They had absolute mastery over their subjects and demanded excellence from their students .

Then came four years of Mechanical Engineering (T.K.M college) and the first time I really understood that the world has as many bad teachers as it had good teachers. For me there is no doubt who had the most impact on me – that was Prof Nasser who taught us Automobile Engineering . What put him in a class of his own was his passion for the subject – he loved cars and it showed in how he would explain the design principles .

And finally MBA ( IMK , Kerala ) which was probably the two years I enjoyed the most as a student. There were two professors that I gave “rock star” status right after their first lecture, and I can safely say that I have not seen anyone better in those subjects ever since . One was Dr Kevin who taught financial management and the other was Prof Kalyanaraman who taught Statistics . Even today I refer back to my old lecture notes from their classes to refresh the first principles. A close second to these two was the late Dr MNV Nair who was the dean of management studies , and his classes on strategy management were brilliant . He – and Dr Kevin – encouraged us to challenge them and I (and many others) did and learned from that experience . I remember him telling me after a debate on business law that he lost that ” You did well,young man . I am fiercely loyal to my own ideas – but only till someone proves me wrong” .

I have left off several great teachers in the list – but I am grateful to all of them . I will echo Dr. Radhakrishnan’s point of view as my parting note – “Teachers should be the best minds in the country”.

The new Uber CEO’s primary challenge


I think Uber board picked an amazing leader as the new CEO , despite all the leaks and drama and all around it . With adult supervision from the new boss and hiring experienced leaders to work for him in various functions , I think a lot of their current problems with culture , litigation , board politics, driver retention etc will get resolved .

Solving the current problems is unfortunately just table stakes really . The fundamental question in my mind is whether Uber has a sustainable business model . How long can they capture growth by subsidizing costs when we are talking in multiple billions ?

Clearly, they have made some mis-steps by trying to optimize for market share at all costs . So getting out of some international markets was a necessary step , and I expect more of the same for near future . Getting out of leasing also seems like a smart thing to do .

I am a firm believer that driverless cars will become a mainstream reality soon – between google , Tesla , uber and many others putting their might behind it – it’s only a matter of time . But that time is not in next couple of years . So for foreseeable future , they have to subsidize human drivers and figure out better ways to retain drivers . And then there will be a period where self driving cars and human driven cars will do-exist . And some time in far future – perhaps they can switch to mostly driverless cars ( assuming they have the legal and political backing to do so in the major markets ). Will investors agree to bleeding money for that long ?

Also – when they do mostly driverless cars, wouldn’t they just incur even more costs for owning ( or leasing ) and maintaining a big fleet ? And my guess is that insurance cost will be quite high for the in-between period where they need both human driven and self driving cars .

Not sure how to correctly extrapolate here – but my best guess is that for next decade it is not going to make profitable revenue with the “cheap taxi” business alone , while also capturing significant chunks of the global market.

While uber is getting out of some geographic markets, it’s definitely entering some adjacencies – like trucks and boats. But the business model is still the same – so all the problems with the economic model of taxis should apply to boats and trucks too .

First mover advantage is with uber – but there is always the significant risk of fast followers who can learn from Uber’s mistakes and avoid the heavy initial capital investments and expenses .

If private markets are fine with all this and Uber just chooses to remain privately held for a very long time – none of this might be an issue . But going to public markets without proving out their business model seems like mission impossible . Even in private market, my suspicion is that they cannot sustain the $69B valuation given all the economic issues . And a loss in valuation might start a round of talent attrition which might make it really hard to execute on whatever roadmap the new CEO puts in place .

So all things considered – I think the main challenge for the new Uber CEO might not be the things in the news now . They are all no doubt important problems to solve , and unless he solves them first – there might not even be a chance to change the business model . But the true fight in my mind is to figure out how to run this business as a sustainable enterprise , while preserving as much of the valuation as possible .

Given the size of the short term and long term challenges for uber – I hope the CEO, the board and the staff of Uber have the stamina to do a few marathons back to back !