Its been a while (okay, five months…) since I've posted, and many of you could well wonder if this blog had died the unfortunate death of so many similar efforts.
Alas! The blog lives! The same morbid fascination that drew you in earlier to read my rants and bizarre opinions will rear up its ugly head and do the same again!
But first - let me explain whats gone on in the interim.
I fell gradually off the blogging bandwagon as I had let my militaristically strict regime flag, then finally, come World Cup time in June, I replaced blogging time with World Cup time. What the hell, I figured. The World Cup only comes every four years anyway! It won't disrupt my blogging much to pause thirty days out of every four years.
Of course, it didn't work out quite that way. As I queued up more topics, the spring of the World Cup rolled into a fine summer in the Northeast, and time on my sailboat ate my blog. This is ok, I figured. Summer doesn't last forever.
Yes, well… As sailing, sun, summer, and consulting from my mobile office (that is, my boat) gave way to fall, I found myself embroiled in a number of deals. Whereas the previous center of gravity of my consulting practice had been around "innovation", I found "innovation" was increasingly meaning "mergers and acquisitions", and so I felt I had perhaps best not yet resume blogging. Not until some of these deals cooled off.
Yes, well… The deals didn't cool off. Things got exciting in a number of areas - consumer, social software, emerging markets. Exciting enough that various clients and prospects began to say, "You know, why don't you just come and work for us?"
I have to say, this became quite a challenge. I had rolled off from startup land into consulting and slogged through enough of the hard stuff - defining the business, defining the customers, slowly building a brand dimly recognizable among a subset greater than my immediate family - yet I had to say a variety of these companies were doing pretty interesting things. And offered me some pretty interesting opportunities.
In the end, much to the surprise of many (perhaps even of me!), I found that the most interesting offer was to return to IBM, and run M&A around enterprise social software. Why? Certainly that will be the subject of more than one post, but at least several secular trends are at play here:
- The industry is consolidating.
- The value generated in the consumer world is impacting the corporate world.
- Buyers are expecting integrated propositions of greater and greater breadth.
- Emerging markets are increasingly important.
All these made IBM an interesting place to go and play. Certainly, IBM plays less in the consumer space, which continues to be compelling, but, as VCs like Fred Wilson have noted, valuations are beginning to get frothy there and the locus of returns may be shifting.
We've all shifted our personal lives to "play" differently in the last three to five years, yet many of us still essentially interact with our co-workers, clients, and partners using the same tools. The big enterprise players like IBM will play lead roles in changing this.
Its intriguing to be, once again, tangled up in Blue.
