While I am in Oregon, I took the time to stop at the IBM Beaverton lab, where I did a reprise of my presentation at the Internet Strategy Forum conference. When I talked about how to “Do It Wrong Quickly,” a few skeptical folks asked, “Are we really doing that here at IBM?” It’s a good question and it deserves an honest answer.
It isn’t always easy at IBM. I spent eight good years at ibm.com, but it took quite a while for us to get the right metrics in place to measure what we do. In fact, some of the metrics that we really need on conversions are still not available for every single part of our two-million page Web site.
And some areas of IBM still want to deliberate too long over everything before trying something new. IBM isn’t perfect.
But we are really trying. We’ve made great strides in recent years to run more and more projects based on measurable outcomes and I think it shows. It’s not easy to organize thousands of people across numerous business units and 90 countries to do anything. much less something that requires culture change. But the change is happening and the ones adopting the new ways are proving successful.
And that is about as good as it ever gets. It’s OK that the culture change isn’t total, that it is ongoing. and that it gets a little better every day. Because you can do your culture change wrong quickly too. You don’t have to wait for perfection to do anything—just make sure whatever you change (culture or anything else) is a little bit better than it was before, or else throw that change away and try again. That’s all that “do it wrong quickly” is about, anyway.
