Great post, Katrina. TIL the concept of Highest and Best Use. I love it!

As I’m sure you well know, one of Phil’s obsessions (in the most positive sense of the word!) is with scale. And he led the very successful effort to scale IBM Design.

Now that IBM Design is roughly at scale, I think its Highest and Best Use is to help IBM re-learn how to nurture fledgling offerings so they can scale from small to large. As I wrote in my farewell email, IBM has forgotten how to make transformative cupcakes. Some of the failures of the past few years, for example Watson, were due to IBM’s practice of demanding that all offerings have a business model delivering billions in revenue virtually overnight. But that’s not how major transformations work — they start small, and stay small until market demand organically drives them to eventual hockey-stick growth.

When I look around at the number of transformative cupcakes introduced by competitors in recent years (Slack, Zoom, Tableau, Splunk, Mailchimp, ServiceNow, Cloudflare, Google Apps), I think IBM has the talent and the vision and the design capabilities to have created all of these offerings. What it lacked was the senior leadership willing to nurture and protect transformative offerings from the bureaucratic and business-model constraints of its mature products until such cupcakes can drive hockey-stick grow of new markets. I say this as a key member of the IBM Design team that designed IBM’s (then) new Offering Management framework. We tried to deliver a framework that enabled this, but so far, I feel that we failed.

I left IBM in the beginning of 2018 because I doubted at the time that it would ever have the senior leadership needed to produce a transformative cupcake. Here’s part of the conclusion of my resignation letter to Ginni:

Consider this resignation letter free advice from a seasoned IT analyst who IBM used to listen to for constructive criticism. Perhaps it’s not too late. If enough IBMers speak up and say our transformation is failing, that we are not successful enough in winning new SMB users who have barely heard of IBM, then maybe you and the other IBM senior executives will redouble your efforts to truly complete the transformation. Nothing would make me prouder than to see IBM wow the market with a truly delightful cupcake that becomes a broad market leader in the cloud.

I still hope to be proven wrong. I would still love to see IBM produce a transformative cupcake, and then another, and then another…

So in response to your request for what IBM Design can do to put design to its Highest and Best Use, my advice to you as it was to Ginni, is to focus on helping IBM regain the ability to deliver transformative cupcakes to market.