May 03 2011

IBM’s super second act: integrating short- and long-term

In the last nine years, “earning have quadrupled and the stock is up 57%,” says Fortune’s March 21 issue. CEO Sam Palmisano is leading IBM into Chile and China among 20 emerging countries while shifting the product / services mix away from hardware and financing, toward services and software.

Instead of hunkering down after the great financial meltdown, Palmisano started IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. A world leading commitment to research produced 5,896 patents in 2010 and IBM’s 2010 revenue growth of $4 billion would have qualified as a Fortune 500 company.

As I see it, this is an amazing feat of integrating the short-term and the long-term. While delivering improved earnings quarter after quarter Palmisano keeps looking to the future. The investment in research provides the opportunity to see and shape what’s coming in the future. It illuminated the emergence of smartphones 5 years before the iPhone was invented and that prescient view shapes the direction of the company.

I hear too many leaders talking about the trade-offs between the short- and long-term. Thinking that it’s an immutable truth that you can’t have both. Apparently that’s not true.

I wonder where else we are acting as if something is true; obvious; has to be – but it’s just difficult; not impossible.

Where have you done the impossible? We’d love to hear some examples of where you have seen through something that you previously accepted as “true” and it freed you to accomplish more than you thought was possible.

_{Photo: iStock}