The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

INTRODUCTION

A Blueprint for Improving Corporate Productivity

By Michael Minelli

Coauthor of Partnering with the CIO

Adam Kolawa was trained as a theoretical physicist. His involvement in the software industry resulted from one of those strange twists of fate that happens more frequently in fiction than in real life.

About 30 years ago, Adam was struggling to calculate the mass of a glueball, a highly mysterious subatomic particle composed entirely of gluons, which are the infinitesimally tiny elementary particles that make it possible for protons and neutrons to stick together in atomic nuclei.

As you can imagine, the calculations were extremely complex and required an enormous amount of computing power.

But Adam couldn't find the right software to perform his calculations. Instead of using something that "sort of worked," but was not quite exactly what he needed, he decided to build his own software.

Adam's fateful decision pretty much ended his career as a theoretical physicist. When other people found out about his software—and about the radical approach he had invented for developing high-quality software very quickly—they beat a path to his door.

Adam eventually went on to launch Parasoft, a software company that has survived, thrived, and remained independent for more than two decades.

I must admit that I was never much interested in theoretical physics, much less gluons and glueballs. But I do know something about selling software.

In 2007, I coauthored Partnering with ...