Back to School at Big Blue

Last week, I packed my bags for Armonk, NY, a lovely town north of Manhattan that nobody would ever hear of were it not for three letters that make up one of the most familiar acronyms in the world. It was my third week at IBM and my wife was confused. 

“So you’re leaving me and the kids for an entire week to learn how to sell?” The interrogation continued, “Didn’t these guys hire you because you’ve been successfully peddling technology for like, 20 years?”

“Ummm, yes,” I nervously reply like a guilt-ridden husband explaining why he needed to go to Vegas with his buddies on Valentine’s Day weekend. “And I will also have tons of homework to do over the next couple of months before going back for another week. Therefore, binge watching Sneaky Pete is out.” 

As she scratched her head, I kept reminding myself to embrace and enjoy this wildly peculiar concept to a startup guy like me – business travel with no immediate and direct revenue to justify the expense. I had no plans to visit a single client and my boss and colleagues were not only supportive of that, but also vowed to try not to bother me during such an important week. Wow, weird, right?

Once I arrived in Armonk, my trip seemed even more abnormal to me than ever. My Uber drove me up a winding, woodsy country road to a registration office akin to a classy boy scout lodge in the Sierra mountains. And the little talking Watson robot near the front desk reminded me that I was definitely not coming to learn how to survive in the wild. I was given my room key tucked into a map illustrating the outdoor path to my dorm-like building named after a tree (Maple). I certainly wouldn’t be getting Starwood or Hilton Honors points for this stay! 

So, this was the IBM Learning Center and I was a skeptical, middle-aged freshman returning to college. Class started promptly at 8:30 after working at a surprisingly nice gym and after gorging at the massive breakfast buffet. I met my “Team Blue” teammates, as well as the Red, Blue and Yellow teams, and for the first time in about a dozen years, I didn’t feel like one of the oldest dudes at the office. 

My role was no longer that of an executive team member, scheming ways to get our millennial staff to stay focused, motivated, happy and off Snapchat at least until lunchtime. No, I was just a student among a bunch of really smart fellow classmates with 20+ years of professional experience and similar life challenges as myself. The most common challenge – figuring out how to squeeze a few more moments with our kids before they go off to college, while simultaneously making a ton of money to pay for said college. 

“You gotta learn to earn,” opined our highly professional, sharply dressed, and well prepared facilitator who relocated from IBM Korea. The training material that he delivered was a perfect balance of online and face-to-face, along with tried-and-true IBM methodologies and real-life and freshly-implemented business cases. Peppered throughout the week of the rigorous school was multiple anxiety-inducing mock sales calls. These twenty-minute auditions plus fifteen-minute feedback sessions were the cornerstone of the curriculum, and there was a shocking surprise about them that I had not anticipated. 

What made these uncomfortable hot seat moments excessively valuable were the people who posed as our clients and then quickly morphed into our judges and potential executioners. They were a half dozen semi-retired IBMers rotating from group to group, one minute pretending to be a happy VP ready to sign a PO, and the next minute, acting like an irate CIO anticipating her pink slip.  

It was these highly committed part-time retirees who reminded me and my classmates why we all joined this legendary company with the familiar but continuously reinvented acronym. After 30+ years each, they just couldn’t ride into the sunset – their love of IBM and for the art and science of satisfying clients brought them back to Armonk and our classroom. 

These folks were sharp as nails, enthusiastic as college new hires and so motivated to help us to succeed that you’d think their retirement depended on our success – and it kind of did! My informal poll determined that not only were all these retired facilitators IBM shareholders, but many were also doubling down their stock positions on the future of IBM. So they were choosing to do everything they can to safeguard their investments by sharing their vast knowledge and experience with the next generation of sellers like me. 

Suddenly, I feel the weight of hundreds of thousands of IBMers and millions of shareholders who are counting on me and my classmates to deliver the World of Watson vision to the world. I better get cranking on that homework.