Marc Andreessen explains IBM's "Wild Ducks" program, where Thomas Watson let eight engineers break all the rules and report straight to the CEO. One wore jeans and cowboy boots to work while everyone else wore suits. Venture capital later let these kinds of innovators leave big companies and start their own.
Questions this video answers
Eight.
"4, 440,000 employees."
Andy Heller; Austin.
In jeans and cowboy boots (putting his boots up on the table).
Chapters
Large organizations have a lot of advantages, but they just have a very hard time actually executing anything. The number of people who have to be consulted, who have to agree on things, gets to be staggering. But I think there's another, deeper thing underneath that, that people really don't like to talk about, which is just the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You're not going to have 100 of them in a company or a thousand or ten thousand. You're going to have three, eight or ten, maybe IBM. I actually first learned this at IBM when I was there. It was 4, 440,000 employees. The first half of every meeting was just IBMers introducing themselves to each other. It was just mind boggling in the level of complexity. And so they had a system and it worked really well for like 50 years. They had a system which was most of the employees in the company were expected to basically follow rules. So they dressed the same, they acted the same, they did everything out of the playbook. But they had this category of people they called wild ducks. And this was an idea that the founder, Thomas Watson came up with. Wild ducks. And the wild ducks were, they often had the formal title of an IBM fello. And they were the people who could make new things. And there were eight of them. And they got to break all the rules and they got to invent new products, they got to go off and work on something new. They didn't have to report back. They got to pull people off of other projects to work with them. They got budget. When they needed it, they reported directly to the CEO. They got whatever they needed, he supported them in doing it. And they were glass breakers. And the one in Austin at the time was this guy, Andy Heller. And he would show up in jeans and cowboy boots amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, red ties, and put his cowboy boots, boots up on the table. And it was fine for Andy Hellerty to do that, and it was not fine for you to do that. Right? And so they very specifically identified almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules. Now the expectation is they deliver. Their job is to invent the next breakthrough product. But we, IBM management know that the 6000 person division is not going to invent the next product. We know it's going to be crazy. Andy Heller in his cowboy boots. Ultimately IBM had its issues, but like that model worked for 50 years, right? Like worked incredibly well. But it's a paradox, right? Which is like how do you have a large bureaucratic, regimented organization, whether it's academia or government or business or anything that has all these rule followers in it and all these people who are jealous of their status and don't want things to change but then still have that spark of creativity? I would say mostly it's impossible, mostly it just doesn't happen. Those people get driven out. And in tech what happens is those people get driven out because we will fund them. This is actually, I think the simplest explanation for why IBM ultimately caved in and then HP sort of in the 80s. And I actually think it was the emergence of venture capital. It was the emergence of a parallel funding system where the wild ducks or in HP's case, their superstar technical people could actually leave and start their own companies. And again, this is what doesn't exist at the university level. This certainly does not exist at the government level.
