The Innovator's Path: How Individuals, Teams, and Organizations Can Make Innovation Business-as-Usual

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Chapter 2

Lead

Throughout the decades of my management career, many top executives and managers helped me grow professionally and become more street-smart. Some of my toughest managers made me stronger and more resilient. IBM excelled in training its managers, and I was the beneficiary of that training. None of it, however, could compare with the effect that Sam Palmisano, the now-retired chairman of IBM, had on my developement as a manager. I was lucky to be the recipient of his personal advice, and I was able to observe him in action. I have to say he became the most important leadership role model of my career.

When Sam became the president of the IBM subsidiary I was working in, he immediately invited ten of the company's female and minority managers to join his diversity council. I was assigned to work on the mentoring program, and so had the opportunity to be mentored personally by Sam.

Sam did not fit the stereotype of top executives in those days. They tended to be straitlaced, very serious, impersonal, reluctant to engage in social conversation, and not much fun. He was different and better in every way.

When it came to getting things done, Sam “drove” me and everyone else along the high-speed lane, with a laser focus on our business results. That's not unusual for any successful leader. But there was more to him—a rewarding personal side that was unusual in an executive at his level. I saw him operate and engage his people with humility, openness, honesty, optimism, ...