Irresistible change
Phil Gilbert is best known for leading IBM’s 21st century transformation as their General Manager of Design. After selling his third startup to IBM in 2010, Phil was asked by IBM in 2012 to use design thinking, coupled with agile, to update how IBM’s teams worked.
The transformation became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, the documentary film The Loop, and feature articles in the New York Times and Fortune Magazine.
Phil’s 45-year career spans startups, large corporations, and board memberships, where he has led organizations ranging from solo ventures to those with 400,000 employees.
Phil retired from full-time operational responsibilities at IBM in 2022 in order to focus on helping the next generation of entrepreneurs, business, and military leaders understand how to impact culture at scale, to improve innovation and team performance.
“ The oh shit moment”
Well, when Ginni said, whatever you did there, can we do it everywhere? And I said, I don’t know, let’s give it a go. And I still thought, look, this is IBM. At the time, there were roughly 400,000 employees. We did business in 180 countries.
In my head, I was like, okay, I’ll put something together, but this is not going to go anywhere. Because I knew the radical changes that would be needed. It went way beyond just adding designers. But that was a start.
The first thing I wanted to do is to stress test it. I wasn’t going to go spend a ton of time putting together a big, long business case and, presentations if the company wasn’t even willing to ante up the starting point. So, in a matter of a few days, I did a back of the envelope plan.
I had a fellow that I had met named Charlie Hill. And Charlie was a longtime IBMer and was also a fantastic designer and a distinguished engineer. So, he had an in with the engineering community. Charlie and I did rough calculations of just the product group. We had about 20,000 engineers. What would it take to make a dent in just the product group with designers?
I had some ratios from the work I had done in the past, roughly 1 designer for every eight coding developer was the number I used. And about half of the engineers were coders and half were not. Okay, we’ve got about 10,000 people. It’s going to take 1,000 designers. And that’s what I needed to get Ginni and Robert to understand, at least at that level, what the scope of the cost was going to be.
I wrote off an email to Ginni and Robert and I said, “I’m in, I’ll do all the detailed work, but at a high level, we’re going to have to hire 1,000 people, 1,000 new people.” This isn’t just reassigning, because the typical transformation is, oh, I’m going to reassign existing people into new roles. which they may or may not be qualified for. And I said, no, “that’s not what this is going to be. This must be net new people because we don’t have these skills at IBM. And it’s going to be 1,000. And we can’t hire them all at once, but let’s say over five years.”
That’s a big number, even for IBM. I sent the email off thinking that it was about the end of that conversation. And within a week or 10 days, Ginni writes back,
“Okay, let’s go. How fast can you go?”
That was the oh shit moment.