Preface and Acknowledgments
Corporate Explorer is a book 20 years in the making. It started when I (Andy) attended an IBM Strategic Leadership Forum at Harvard Business School led by Professor Michael Tushman and Professor Charles O'Reilly. Mike and Charles were engaged to support IBM's Emerging Business Opportunity (EBO) program. I had just joined IBM from McKinsey and was assigned as an internal consultant charged with supporting these nascent businesses.
One of the leaders we worked with was Carol Kovac, then general manager for IBM Life Sciences, and our archetypal Corporate Explorer. In just five years, Carol, Jamie Coffin, and the team created something remarkable: a new multibillion-dollar business inside a corporate behemoth. Living this story, I was blessed with the opportunity to learn first-hand what it took to succeed. This has forever shaped my belief that it is possible for corporates to beat startups at innovation, even if I also learned it would not be simple.
The IBM experience was core to Mike and Charles's popular book Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma. They describe how IBM and other corporates successfully (and unsuccessfully) ideate, incubate, and scale new ventures. Their book makes a powerful case for an ambidextrous organization that can manage businesses at multiple stages of maturity – some driving operational effectiveness in the core business, while others explore new potential opportunities in the way IBM did in the EBOs.
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