3One of Us
Who Are These Geeks, and Why Are They Important?
Ryan Boyles works for IBM. He helps them shape the future of Watson (their artificial intelligence products) as well as their IoT (Internet of Things) practice. When Chris met Ryan at a conference a few years ago, none of those details were brought up. Instead, they talked about science fiction and other nerdy stuff. Ryan's Twitter stream is a mix of random points of interest, examples of sharing posts from his friends—and then there's an occasional IBM piece.
Because Ryan communicates and interacts like a three-dimensional and full-fledged human being, whenever he talks about IBM, we listen. We listen because he's a reliable source, and because we feel from all the other non-IBM interactions that he's one of us. He's a human. He belongs.
Sandy Carter works for Amazon, specifically around their cloud products (AWS). On the day we checked in on her Twitter account, Sandy shared a joke that programmers would find funny, a meme about how we all have massively powerful mobile devices that we mostly use to take pictures of cats, and a reply to someone who mentioned a cool guided journal for women leaders. It took us pages and pages of messages to find Sandy talking about Amazon in any professional capacity.
This means that when Sandy finally does talk about something interesting happening at Amazon, we haven't tuned her out. We listen. She spends her time building connections and interacting with people who will not likely ...
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