An Odyssey of Learning — Part 2

Learning to manage technology and knowledge in large organizations

My move to the ICT industry resulted to a large extent from more than a decade of struggling with questions of the social relevance of my scientific research. While a part of the lively mathematical community in Bonn, I was also engaged by basic social issues raised by the socio-political movements in Europe (the student revolts of the late 60s) and in Asia (the Vietnam War, martial law in the Philippines). Through lots of discussions, reading and even attending lectures in the social sciences and economics, I learned about the importance of innovative technology for economic and social progress and the often-neglected process of turning scientific knowledge into such innovations. While an Assistant Professor at Wuppertal University, I became interested in the theory of error-correcting codes and started collaborating with communications engineers. Through that, I began to learn about computer networks and the important underlying software and recognized the field as a promising bridge for me from science to technology. I soon figured out that the best opportunities in this field were outside the universities, so around March 1980, I started applying to different ICT companies and planning my "big step out" of academe.

I did not take the job which paid best (though the 50 percent higher salary would have alleviated family budget worries: my wife Rosemarie had stopped teaching when we moved with our two kids from Bonn to Munich in 1981), but that where I felt I would learn most – which was as a systems software developer at Siemens in Munich. The first one and a half years in product development were quite interesting for me, as I learned professional software development. I was with Siemens from October 1980 to December 1983. Then I decided to move on because after mastering the initial "learning curve," I found the business processes, especially the decision-making, not sufficiently customer-driven, inflexible, slow and cumbersome. (Siemens has learned from these mistakes and since then transformed itself into a more agile organization). I also had the chance from October 1982 onwards to be part of the 30-person team tasked to develop the new Bildschirmtext Externer-Rechner Software, slated to debut at the Internationale Funkaustellung in September 1983. This effort was organized more like a project – tight schedule due to the fixed delivery date, cooperation across functional groups and departments, close contact with pilot customers, integration and management of external resources. We succeeded in delivering the software and I ended up being the project leader for a third of the team – and getting a special bonus – but the biggest benefit for me was that I knew that that kind of work would suit me best. That was why I moved to SCS (Scientific Control Systems), a subsidiary of British Petroleum, and at that time the leading information technology consulting group in Europe in January 1984.

My roles in consulting evolved quickly: software developer, project team lead, project manager (of several projects), department head, division director, director of a multinational consulting organization. I had to master these tasks without any formal business education (except for short workshops and a weeklong Executive Education course at Harvard Business School in 1997) – I attribute my successes to a willingness to take some risks, learn a lot (particularly from mistakes) and the insight that consulting, management and education are essentially all about ENABLING PEOPLE to achieve their goals – be they clients, colleagues or students. The task of the consultant, manager and educator really is to help create the environment – the right mix of learning and doing – for their "customer’s" success. In my ICT career, I always tried to choose challenges in INNOVATIVE parts of organizations LEADING in their fields – a balance meant to satisfy my interest in learning new things as well as my goal of maximizing impact. At SCS, we pioneered in the Office Automation Group the use of personal computers in large enterprises in the mid-80s. I joined the leading German systems house Softlab (now part of the BMW Group) in 1986 to help develop heterogeneous, enterprise-wide solutions, integrating PC, UNIX and mainframe systems for large companies. We innovated by using portable software and emerging standards as much as possible. At Microsoft, by building an enterprise-oriented consulting services "from scratch" (there were less than 80 consultants worldwide when I joined in July 1991 – nowadays several thousands), we contributed to its transformation from a "desktop software" company to a provider of enterprise solutions.

About 10 years ago, when Kamalayan, a Filipino community magazine in Munich, asked me about work at Microsoft, I wrote: "I like working for the leading software company in the world, hence being able to influence technology and market developments. Microsoft has long-term vision and a unique dynamic culture combining "personal ownership," teamwork and "zealousness" to learn and continuously improve. The drawbacks? Commitment and hard work is part of the Microsoft culture and occasionally I have less time for my family and friends than I would like. Today, I would add "competitive focus" as a further key characteristic, to emphasize the market-driven and customer-oriented characteristics of this organization. I remember the following statement of Bill Gates at a managers’ meeting: "Our current products will be obsolete in three years. We must ensure that we are the ones to make them obsolete." Comprehensive analyses of key competitors in the different markets kick off every December the planning for the following fiscal year (which begins in July). This top-down analysis is followed by intensive weeks of subsidiary visits by the Executive Team (the legendary mid-year reviews), a key element of which is a region-by-region bottom-up analysis of competition. The results form one of the key inputs for the strategy work and business planning in the following months. Microsoft exemplifies in many ways what management scientists call a "learning organization": this synchrony of personal and organizational "philosophies" certainly contributed to my successes there. Personally, the period June to September 1997 is particularly memorable: it began with my elder son Felix’s secondary school graduation as one of the Top 3 of his class, continued with my receiving the Microsoft President’s Award from Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft Global Summit in Orlando, Florida in July and ended in September with the Bavarian team of my younger son Philipp winning the German Youth Team Tennis Championships.

Learning to cultivate interdisciplinary multinational science

People are often surprised when I tell them that from the very beginning, my plans were to stay only 10 years at Microsoft. (Mathematically, it’s trivial: 2.5 years at SCS, five years at Softlab, ?? at Microsoft). Kidding aside, my hope was that by 2001, my sons would be finishing their studies and the family would have a solid financial basis, so that I would have time and energy to engage in activities contributing to science and technology education in Philippines. Throughout my career in the ICT industry, I was able to come at least annually to Manila, not only to visit my family but also to give talks at various universities and conferences. I missed my 1991 plan by about 10 percent (not bad for a 10-year plan), but the extra year was valuable in identifying the focus of my future work.

My interest in the theory of complex systems dates back to the mid-90s and was nurtured by attempts to apply some of its techniques to the complex, dynamic consulting organization I was managing. These attempts had mixed success, but books like "The Complexity Advantage" by Kelly and Allison, which documented Citicorp’s forays into similar activities, later vindicated the notion that "the Science of Complexity can help business achieve peak performance" (quote from the book cover). To deepen my understanding of complexity theory, I attended in July 2001 a conference "Dynamical networks in complex systems" in Kiel, Germany. This conference opened entirely new perspectives for me: the talks demonstrated the power of the network paradigm in understanding complexity and pointed me to important applications in biology and medicine. Participation in a further conference in November 2001 at the IHES near Paris, where I also met outstanding mathematicians like Mikhael Gromov and Christoph Soulé working on biological problems, convinced me that modeling biological networks was a worthwhile scientific endeavor. By year’s end, I started planning the transition back to science and technology education, both in Manila and Munich (where my family is based). It really seems that "luck favors those who are prepared": in April 2002, I got to know Joachim Rädler, an Experimental Biophysics professor at LMU interested in collaborating with modelers and willing to host me as a Visiting Scientist in his laboratory, and a month later, Ric del Rosario (then chairman of the UP Diliman Mathematics Department), who encouraged me to become an Adjunct Professor there. Even Microsoft contributed – by sponsoring my participation in several conferences (in Manila, Boston and Paris) – to facilitating the transition to the emerging, broadly interdisciplinary field of Systems Biology. My essay "Mathematics of Cells" (Star Science, April 7, 2005) described the opportunities for Filipinos in this field as well as initial joint projects between computational scientists here and experimental groups in Germany, which exemplify new forms of multinational Internet-based collaboration.

Lessons learned and to be learned

The results of the first three years of research and research management activities have more than exceeded my expectations – thanks to numerous talented Filipino students and researchers who have recognized and started to pursue the opportunities in computational systems biology. I am confident that we can report on many success stories and a few lessons learned in Filipino forays into this area of world-class science in the near future.

What I have learned so far is to value scientific knowledge of all kinds – I inadvertently experience the "unreasonable effectiveness" (to paraphrase the physicist Eugene Wigner) in combining different pieces of science and applying the result to diverse problems. Not only the "pure" mathematics of my doctoral research is becoming useful for modeling biological membranes, even the consulting approach I learned in my ICT career is applicable to forging effective experimenter-modeler collaboration. But the will to turn science into innovations must be there. For this, the best motto I’ve found so far stems from SCS, the first consulting company I joined in 1984: Das Machbare denken, das Denkbare machen.

I look forward to many more lessons to be learned.

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Dr. Eduardo Mendoza is currently a Research Scientist at the Physics Department and the Center for NanoScience of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at UP Diliman. He coordinates both the Mathematical Life Sciences Initiative at UPD (www.engg.upd.edu.ph/~compbio) and the Munich Systems Biology Forum (www.sysbio-muenchen.de). He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected]