On the occasion of ibm.com's 30-year reunion

Carol Moore, ibm.com VP, launched my IBM career in 1996, securing my interview with ibm.com/software’s director. A couple months in, Carol asked, "How's the job going?"

"I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing."

Carol said something like, "Sarah, don't you know? You're supposed to make it up yourself. That's how it works."

IBM hired me as a Web Zealot in what was then the Internet Division of IBM -- a Web Zealot because as a Jew, I refused the original title, "Web Evangelist."

My plan a few weeks ago, in 2024 -- four years after being laid off and bridging to retirement from a mostly wonderful run at IBM -- was to cruise to Greece, Turkey, and then fly and catch a ride with ibm.com Webmaster Ed Costello to the Poconos, for the ibm.com 30th anniversary reunion. "Man plans and God laughs." -- Yiddish proverb

The moment I boarded the ship, I felt sick enough to visit the ship's doctor, who after negatively testing for Covid, reasoned that the white junk he saw on my tonsils might mean strep. One and a half rounds of antibiotics later, it hadn't abated and the doctor concluded: tonsilitis. There went my plan to reunite with sweet friends from IBM’s best old days.

You can see Rhodes’ dry mote. You can see Akrotiri’s ancient Minoan village ruins. You can see Kuşadası, Turkey's modern, solid marble version of the High Line, but even on the Way Back Machine, you can't see the home page of ibm.com/globalnetwork, my first web project from even before joining IBM, when I was with a joint venture at the time of IBM and Sears. 

The art of ibm.com from 1994-2001, my era, resembled a play in a Greek (or any) theater more than a film, which you could watch whenever you liked. A play was relatively evanescent.

ibm.com's early incarnations were no less art for being ephemeral, like the live performances enjoyed by Greece’s throngs. Tourists don't continue marching in exhausted lines to see what we built. And yet...

Herculean/Constantinian/Ottoman power struggles and dramas happened. Fortunately, I didn't lose my job when I agreed with a director of another organization who wanted to poach part of the Software web team I managed to his area. My manager showed up very late to the meeting on the proposed re-org. 

Before he arrived, I had felt pressured into stating my position. I agreed with the director, it made sense for the people to move to his team. I earned my only-ever lowest rating: PBC 3. My tardy manager left not long afterward to make a third, dramatic career change. He had been a monk prior to joining a company that IBM bought. I understood why he was no longer a monk.

That was the tragic part of my ibm.com career. Almost every other bit of that era was a pleasure...

...especially meeting with Ed Costello to show him my plan for the home page of ibm.com/globalnetwork. This meeting took place years before Project Bullseye, which was IBM's move to transform ibm.com's layers' look and feel to appear like they came from a single brand -- like whitewashed and brilliant Santorini. When Ed and I met, "The New York Times" hadn't yet reviewed ibm.com and found the user experience fractured. Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO then, hadn't yet ordered cohesion within 90 days. 

Reflecting on my earnest enthusiasm in my meeting with Ed, I remember how excited I felt at six and seven, participating in my public library's summer reading club. Every book I read and summarized for the Children's librarian, Mrs. Keating, earned me a children's palm-sized, construction-paper owl on the public bulletin board. My favorite part: delivering the oral book reports, where Mrs. Keating listened to me tell her about each plot. It felt sacred.

The day I visited Ed and told him my vision felt the same way. He might not even remember the meeting, but I showed up with primitive hand drawings and explained each element to him. And like Mrs. Keating, he seemed to listen with loving attention. 

Right now, I wish I were riding to the Poconos in Ed's SUV with Ed, our colleague Klaus Rusch, and Ed & Lisa's two canine family members. I'm sad not to be on that ride, but feel grateful for the one I took with Carol, Ed, and the whole ibm.com gang practically 30 years ago. And grateful to Carol, Adam Chng, and Ed for setting up the reunion, and for enabling an online version.

Heraclitus wrote, "You cannot step in the same river twice," and I'm glad all of us are still here to step in the river 30 years later.

Witnessing 1/5 of #IBM100 History...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

...Practically First-hand

Our rabbi likes to use the occasion of High Holiday services, which our synagogue hosts at the Javits Center in NYC, to remind us to be awed by being part of something so much larger than ourselves, rather than being alienated by it. She asks us to look around the mammoth space where our services are held and somehow helps us feel akin with the thousands of worshipers that opt in to these services.

This past July, just 10 days after my 45th birthday, my IBM service counted for 20 years; I was with a joint-venture till '96, but IBM's influence was giant there, too. When it became a joint-venture, for example, all of the sudden, there were learning options galore. The prior company, on its own, sent me to one class in three years, to learn to use a text-processing product for writing my EDI user guides.

Rabbi Kleinbaum's talent for warming up a crowd of thousands comes to mind as I consider IBM's Centennial year, which is starting to be celebrated today. There are ~400,000 IBMers worldwide. Oy! So big! How do we not all get lost?

Picture a really, really, really huge virtual Javits Center, with a mashup of the enormously charismatic IBM leaders from around the world, plus a phenomenally large quorum of warm, interesting, global colleagues and I can't help but feel awed, rather than alienated when I consider the company I work for.

It's the same company that said yes to my helping start up a first-of-its-kind business development team, serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) B2B market; the team celebrates its first decade this year...the same company that sent me to India for six months to help design and deliver accelerated leadership development learning to the region's GM and his direct reports, including a spousal allowance for my female partner, Pat, who accompanied me...the same company whose global non-discrimination policy protected and welcomed Pat and me within IBM's four walls throughout our Indian sojourn...the same company that is sponsoring my part-time Master's at Columbia University's Teachers College...the same company that encourages its employees to engage in social learning online, both internally and externally through blogging services like this one from Google, and through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook...and it's the same company that has enabled me to make real/true global friends including from Austria, China, United Arab Emirates, Israel, India, Japan, United States, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Italy, Canada, UK, Thailand....

Too bad for the weather and inertia that keeps my partner and me from heading out to Shabbat (Sabbath) services this eve, but I'll still end now to begin enjoying Shabbat at home with Pat and our two, sweet cats anyhow. No doubt, alas, it will be TV-and-online-community-infused, rather than liturgy/music/f2f-community infused relaxation, but we'll still take it on this windy winter metro-NY night.

I'll repeat my YouTube comment, which I posted upon seeing the film that's accessible from here:

"I'm an IBMer. That means that I get to make my good ideas real, and I get to be myself in all my humanity...."

My Second Family

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Losing Another Father

My current professor looked at my blog a few weeks ago and observed that every single entry begins with the disclaimer about how the postings are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions....How closely identified you are with the company just by virtue of that disclaimer, he observed.

I thought about how being an IBMer has, over the years, become part of my core identity: Jewish, American, lesbian, IBMer. If he worked for IBM, it would make sense to him. Many of my colleagues feel like a second family to me -- and most often, a healthy one.

Yesterday morning, I cried while driving up 287, hoping for invisibility to the cars in the other lanes. Last night, I had to go to the retirement party of the leader at IBM, who I've most admired, Doug Elix, who was my second father, it felt like.

Doug, for a little while longer, leads our sales organization worldwide and is the senior executive sponsor of the GLBT community at IBM, and still sponsors a global sales team dedicated to the community...which I helped start up in 2001, and about which I've written here before.

He was like the father I got to meet in 2000 at the Millennum March, and got to keep having, since I lost mine at 17, since he was so supportive of my people and me.

While crossing the Tappan Zee, I dialed my mother and said, "Mom, I don't want to talk about us and any tension now [we've been having trouble around mutual frustration at her sudden immobility, and I'm the one, who will need to lose my tension ultimately, since she's the more understandably frustrated of the two of us]. I need to tell you about a loss I'm feeling." And I told her how I felt grief-stricken at the proximity of Doug Elix's retirement.

She understood because she has praised me most of all for my work whenever it has enabled me to advance human rights; his sponsorship of the GLBT community at IBM and beyond it enabled me to do that work for three solid years, till I made room for others to lead the mission.

Last night, I couldn't tell Doug that he felt like my second father, as he's only a few years older than my partner and I didn't want to be hurtful, though it has nothing to do with his age, but rather with his wonderful protectiveness and championship. Instead -- and I posted about this in our GLBT community database at work earlier today:

I went up to Doug's wife at the end of the evening and said, "Robin, I met you at the Equality Forum [in Philadelphia]."

"We loved going to the [GLBT] dinners."

"You'll have to keep coming then!"

"We'll be there if you invite us," she said, "We enjoyed them."

And then I hugged Doug and kissed his cheek and said just, "I love you, and I have to kiss your other cheek, too. I adore you!"

We looked at each other, I want to believe, both sadly, and I said goodbye.

My First Family

On the phone yesterday morning, in response to my expressing my sadness and sense of loss about Doug Elix, my mom said that the next generation picks up where the prior one left off.

I cried really hard, and said, "I don't think you're dying, Mom, but I do feel a loss from before the accident and after it." I felt so much relief. We talked until my 8 am call with my colleague in India, who I gave an earful before we could talk business.

More of my second family: My colleague said, "You know, it really just is. You don't need to forgive anyone for your being in the position you're in because that presumes someone needs forgiving. So you just need to forget it. Not forgive it, which it isn't yours to forgive, but simply forget it. It's just karma. Really.