Marc Andreessen explains IBM founder Thomas Watson‘s famous “Wild Ducks” program Marc believes that the organizational complexity is one reason you don’t see innovation at large companies. But that’s not the only reason: “I think there’s another deeper thing underneath that that people really don’t like to talk about, which is the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You’re not going to have a hundred of them in a company… You’re going to have 3, 8, or 10, maybe.” Marc learned this early in his career at IBM, which was one of the most powerful companies in the world and had over 440,000 employees at the time. “They had a system that worked really well for 50 years. Most of the employees in the company were expected to basically follow rules… But they had this category of people they called ‘Wild Ducks.’ This was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson came up with. They often had the formal title of an IBM Fellow and they were the people who could make new things.” He continues: “There were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new, they didn’t have to report back, they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them, they got budget when they needed it, and they reported directly to the CEO.” Marc recalls one wild duck, Andy Heller, putting his cowboy boots on the conference room table “amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.” It was fine for Andy Heller to do that, but it was not fine for you to do that. “They very specifically identified almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules… Their job is to invent the next breakthrough product. We, IBM management, know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product. We know it’s going to be crazy Andy Heller and his cowboy boots.” Marc believes companies like IBM and HP ultimately collapsed when venture capital emerged as a parallel funding system for these wild ducks to start their own companies. Video Source: Andrew Huberman
Mihail S.
3w
The greatest IBM "Wild Duck" brain is considered to be Andrew Heller - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sja6Wz-Vo0
Interesting! It just goes to show how important it is for companies to have people with product ideas and encourage them or grow by acquisition. If not, walk into history books as a company that existed once!
Interesting
💯💯
Devin Agca
2w
Amazing insight 🙏🏻
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