What does being an IBM Fellow mean to you?
First of all, it’s very humbling. The magnitude of being in the company of so many industry giants, including Turing Award and Nobel Prize winners, is still sinking in. The thought that what I’ve contributed can be compared in any way to their work makes me want to redouble my efforts to create something lasting.
What are you most proud of, professionally?
In the IBM Cloud Garage Method, we combined elements from many different parts of software engineering, software development practice, organizational transformation and IBM Design Thinking into a comprehensive approach that crosses all parts of the software lifecycle. We have been able to demonstrate how to use this approach on a large scale at a major airline, where we are helping them change the way they develop, deliver and operate their main customer-facing applications. I’m especially proud of how the work on the IBM Cloud Garage Method informed and guided our work, and how the things we’ve learned in working with them and with other clients have been able to be folded back into the Method as we’ve learned from each engagement. Every day yields new insights and discoveries as we realize new connections.
What is your life’s motto?
Be kind to everyone. It costs you nothing and multiplies happiness. The golden rule is the simplest, yet most profound statement ever uttered.
“Be kind to everyone. It costs you nothing and multiplies happiness. The golden rule is the simplest, yet most profound statement ever uttered.”
What’s your advice for tackling tough problems?
Sleep on it. Literally. First of all, that’s when you form long-term memories, but also REM sleep is when your brain turns random neural firing into meaning. You’ll generally find it easier to make new connections after thinking about a problem for a day, sleeping on it, and looking at it again the next day.
If you could invite anyone to dinner, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you cook (or order)?
For me, the most interesting people are the integrators and the polymaths — people who have wide interests and can contribute to a number of fields by pulling together insights from far and wide. The person who best represents that to me, my dream dinner guest, would be the Hungarian-American mathematician John Von Neumann. He was not only the inventor of the Von Neumann stored-program architecture that all computers still use, but he made major contributions to quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics and pure mathematics. He invented game theory and influenced economics. He also conceived the idea of self-replicating autonoma resulting in the “Von Neumann Machine,” which populates so many science fiction novels.
As for dinner, I’d make goulash; my wife is part Hungarian, and it’s a recipe I love to make. It would have to be a formal dinner as Von Neumann was a notoriously sharp dresser who always wore tailored three-piece suits. In fact, there’s a story that the most memorable question his PhD examination committee could come up when he presented his thesis came from David Hilbert, who asked: “Who’s your tailor?”