Strategy as surfing a wave: David Grossman’s moment of recognition at IBM

In a dialogue between UCLA’s Richard Rumelt and McKinsey’s Lowell Bryan, Bryan says – In this (uncertain) environment if you say “I see the future. I’m visionary, I’m going to make the future happen” then it’s a hallucination, not vision. To which Rumelt adds – Good strategy is more like surfing a wave than having this clear vision of the future. I like this metaphor of “surfing a wave” (I had also liked his "predatory leap" metaphor). However, before we see what “surfing” means, let’s step back and ask - how does “moment of recognition” of a wave look like? Let’s zoom into Cornell University’s campus at Ithaca, New York in February 1994 and see what David Grossman is up to. (Full story here).

David Grossman was a mid-level IBMer stationed at Cornell’s Theory Center using a supercomputer connected to early version of Internet. Grossman was one of the first people in the world to download Mosaic browser and experience the graphical world wide web. The Winter Olympics had just started at Lillehammer, Norway and IBM was its official technology sponsor, responsible for collecting and displaying all the results. Watching the games at home, Grossman saw the IBM logo on the bottom of his TV screen. But when he sat in front of his UNIX workstation and surfed the web, he got a totally different picture. A rogue Olympics web site, run by Sun Microsystems, was taking IBM’s raw feed and presenting it under the Sun banner. Grossman says, “If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that the data was being provided by Sun. And IBM didn’t have a clue as to what was happening on the open Internet.” When he talked to a marketing executive part of Olympics campaign, Grossman got a feeling that one of them was living on the other planet. Grossman felt – Sun was about to eat Big Blue’s lunch. Grossman subsequently took a workstation with him and drove down to IBM headquarters four hours away at Armonk, New York to personally show the Internet to senior executives.

This story shows how sensing a wave happens. But not everybody present senses the wave – at least not with the same intensity. Around the same time Internet wave hit Grossman, I was only 125 miles away from Ithaca perhaps sitting in front of a Sun workstation in Computer Science Department at SUNY Buffalo. As a graduate student I used Mosaic to surf the web and find technical papers. However, I don’t recall any moment when I felt, “Man, this web will change the world”.

By combining Pasteur's first law of innovation with surfing metaphor, we can say: Waves favor prepared mind. Stay tuned for more surfing.