The "B" is for Business

In college, I took one economics class, but those concepts never really took root in my brain garden. I left college with only a vague idea of how computer programming was tied to business. It was pretty much comp sci degrees were getting job offers and that was good enough for me.

When I joined IBM, we still had a 'full employment' policy. So the concept of the business climate impacting my ability to work for IBM hadn't been invented yet. IBM prided itself on its ability to protect its employees and the loyalty that generated. In 1988, D. Quinn Mills wrote The IBM Lesson: The Profitable Art of Full Employment. It tells of various events in IBM history where the corporation retrained people and kept them. I still have my copy and thumbing through it, I think some people who didn't live through that era may believe it's science fiction. While tempting to dwell on full employment longer, I'll move on to my real topic.

Somewhere along the way, I started to realize that behind the technology and my day to day work evaluating performance, there were people striving to figure out how to make the most money out of all of this. I learned there was a difference between marketing and sales. I learned that as great as the software was, it didn't sell itself.

I think my eyes were opened after having seen real customers and even more so, IBM account teams. The people that wore white shirts every single day. Over a couple decades I would meet people who would make me realize that, like it or not, every single IBMer was in marketing whenever they were exposed to customers or the outside world. Some of these people included: Reed Mullen, Jim Porell, Len Santalucia, and Barton Robinson.

Let me share a story about Barton which help made me realize that we're in a business. We were doing a conference in Europe where they had a speaker orientation meeting the night before the conference started. Both Barton and I were speakers at this event. Part of the package they gave us speakers was a list of registered attendees. At one point, I looked over to see Barton making notations on the attendee list.  He noticed my puzzled look and explained:

"These companies here", he said indicating one mark, "they are already my customers. And these others will be my customers at the end of the conference."

 I looked around at some of my peers, we weren't looking at that list. We were looking at the list of restaurants. I realized I had a lot to learn about business.

I started thinking more about how do my customers actually use VM? How do they make money or lower expenses or become more productive using it? My view of my job and VM started to change as I looked for business value in what we did, and not just technological value. Those that work with me during plan build stages have perhaps heard my rules of five:

• Name five customers who are asking for this new function, or
• Name five customers who would benefit from this new function, or
• Name five customers who we can articulate the value of this new function.

A number of years ago, I added a tag line to some of my emails for z/VM: Making systems practical and profitable for customers through virtualization and its exploitation, because the "B" stands for business.