The Visionary
Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s long road from Cuban émigré to Internet pioneer
Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series based on an interview with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former vice president of IBM, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology, and visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wladawsky-Berger, born in Cuba, is widely credited with helping to lead IBM’s successful foray into Internet computing, and continues to provide business technology thought leadership to organizations.
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call.
In 1995, another event took place that made our world even smaller: the first Web-based video telecast, between two sets of audiences – one at the IBM offices in New York City and the other in San Diego. I had the privilege of being on hand for the event in New York and witnessed the jerky-motion images, accompanied by audio that was tinny and echoing.
But still, the link was made, and so was history. Up to that point, the internet was little more than a network of static Web pages and messaging protocols. Suddenly, it was blooming into a global multimedia communications channel, unlimited in scale and scope.
Leading the charge into this new reality was a band of visionaries within IBM who recognized that the burgeoning internet represented not only the future of the company, but also of computing itself, and, ultimately, global communications. Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who coordinated and moderated the San Diego panel on that groundbreaking day, was one of these new thinkers, having already led the rebuilding and rebranding of IBM’s supercomputing line, in which he artfully re-purposed existing company assets to build what were at the time some of the world’s fastest and most powerful machines.
Recently, I caught up with Wladawsky-Berger, who retired from IBM as a vice president in 2007, and still has the ear of the company’s upper echelon as a thought leader and visionary. He also works with Citigroup to help identify new opportunities in mobile commerce and digital money. And, he is a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, and adjunct professor at the Imperial College Business School in London.
Wladawsky-Berger, a native of Cuba, never forgets his roots. His last name hardly sounds Hispanic, but that’s because his parents immigrated to Cuba from Eastern Europe — his father in the 1920s, followed by his mother in the 1930s. “Both my parents were born in Eastern Europe, that’s why my name is Russian-Polish,” he says. They arrived in the Western Hemisphere with little in their pockets, but by the 1950s had built up a thriving store in Havana.
Wladawsky-Berger’s parents had even begun to expand their store when the rise to power of the Castro regime changed everything. The store’s assets were confiscated by the communist government, and the family made plans to flee their beloved adopted country.
In October 1960, at the age of 15, Wladawsky-Berger left Havana with his sister to stay with relatives in Chicago, followed by his parents several years later. “They had to leave just about everything behind and start life all over again,” he relates. “My father had relatives in Chicago, so that’s where we all ended up.”
Wladawsky-Berger completed his final two years of high school in Chicago, and earned both his MS degree and PhD in physics from the University of Chicago before joining IBM in 1970 as an engineer. During his time there, he also served as co-chair of President Bill Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, as well as a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He is also a former member of University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories and of the Board of Overseers for Fermilab.
Mentoring
Despite all that recognition, the 2001 recipient of the Hispanic Engineer of the Year award considers time spent helping Hispanic students and business people to be his most significant and far-reaching achievement. While at IBM, he participated in IBM’s Hispanic leadership program, where he helped encourage technology adoption among businesses within the Latin community. These days, he continues to contribute time and expertise to encouraging Latinos to pursue careers in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math). “Whenever I can, when I travel, I try to meet with local Latin groups, just to offer encouragement,” he says. “I tell young people: ‘Don’t let anything stand in your way. For the most part, it’s all inside you. Yes, there are times when there is overt discrimination, or overt forces against you. But that’s happening less and less.'”
Wladawsky-Berger says more opportunities have opened up for young Latinos and Latino business owners than when he first started out in the early 1970s. “I speak with an accent, and that’s okay. IBM has always been so supportive of diversity, and I think the country tilts more that way.”
Wladawsky-Berger was quick to recognize the opportunities that came his way as his career progressed. While his accomplishments contributed to dramatic developments in information technology, he points out that the economy and society are undergoing an upheaval.
In the next installment of this series, Wladawsky-Berger explains who will be the winners in the new digital economy that is emerging.