Pinoy wizard

IBM Philippines has been here for 80 years, a pretty long time. Global IBM, on the other hand, has been around for 107 years and I was surprised to learn that IBM Philippines is one of the oldest IBM entities outside of North America.

IBM Philippines has an amazing computer scientist, truly a genius in his field, who sits at the helm of the company, Mr. Luisito Pineda, a native of Davao who took his middle school, high school, and college (including a Master’s course which needs 10 units to complete) in Seattle, Washington. His parents were both bankers, and he and his brother studied at the Ateneo de Davao.

In the ’80s, Davao was not very peaceful and because of the insurgency problems, the family had to relocate to the United States. A funny story from Luisito: he was the only Asian kid in a predominantly black school and the students expected him to be something of a Kung Fu master, so he was in a fight almost every week. This, he said, taught him early on to face his adversities while pursuing varied interests. He excelled in tennis and with his brother became members of his high school team. Later on, he became enamoured with flying and later became a certified licensed pilot, flying regularly every weekend. This is getting ahead of the story, but today he flies all kinds of planes, from propellers to jets!

But apart from pursuing his varied interests, he gravitated toward the technical field, in Engineering and IT, and got a degree in Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in the University of Washington. He found an internship opportunity at the IBM in Kingston, New York and it was such a fulfilling six-month internship that he fell in love with the company as well. After graduation, he was offered a job at IBM in six different locations, but wisely chose Silicon Valley in California, then ‘The’ place to be for technology. His first job was to test information model which quickly bored him after three months. Looking for more excitement in his job, he thought of creating a tool that would allow business people, not programmers, to create applications based on those information models. He clearly remembers that this happened on a Thursday, and that night and a couple of nights after, he didn’t sleep and finished a full prototype of his idea which he presented to his manager the following Monday. Needless to say, the idea so impressed his immediate boss that in no time, it was presented to the top executive of the Silicon Valley lab who asked him pointedly: what will it take to have this released? He asked for six months and a small team, not knowing that to fully develop a software took at least a year with a much bigger team. He selected his own team, almost all of them his own batch mates who were all as passionate as him and they did the impossible in six months flat. Luisito was then only 23 years old.

The application was called the Repository Manager Work Bench, which improved productivity of application creators at least 10 times. It was a huge success and their first customer was a reseller of IBM who bought the entire rights to the app that they ended up selling the app themselves. That was Luisito’s first product that he invented, but other products which he invented or co-invented came after that. He called these his “crazy ideas.”

One such “crazy idea” came from his early work at McDonald’s in high school. He combined the franchise model and the technology he learned from IBM to create a software development and services franchise that can be built and serve customers around the world. He quickly developed this and presented it to IBM executives. He admitted being rejected several times, but took the opportunity to learn a thing or two from these rejections. He refined the approach and “after the 35th iteration,” met up with a marketing organization within IBM who quickly gobbled up his idea. This was in the mid ’90s and their mission was to penetrate the Chinese market. He thought it would be a good idea to build his first franchise in China, but he didn’t know anyone from the country. Luckily, a friend from his Computer Science class hooked him up with Professor Ling, the father of Computer Science in China, and this was the beginning of the joint venture with the Chinese university and IBM. From there, the franchise grew fast across the globe – Latvia, Belarus, Egypt, Jordan, Siberia, Moscow, South Africa and across Europe. Luisito’s team developed software and customized applications and solutions for clients, and Luisito was the business owner, chief architect, and chief seller.

How did he get his Philippine assignment? Luisito was in charge of technical support worldwide for IBM. Because of IBM’s presence in too many locations, the company simply had to rationalize and consolidate, and he was surprised to find out that the Philippines topped the list of countries where IBM would establish a technical support center. He found himself back home in the Philippines after decades to lead IBM Philippines.

Everything that IBM USA offers its customers are also offered here, and even more. They have a delivery and innovation center in the Philippines that does high value work for clients across the globe like supply chain management, finance, and even Artificial Intelligence for oncology, which means IBM also hires doctors in the Philippines.

But this well-rounded top executive also knows how to be grounded, and it is family life that does this for him. His three children are fairly young, aged 10, eight and four and he spends a lot of time bonding and travelling with his family. He also enjoys golf, but has not been able to go flying since he got posted here.

His message for today’s young leaders is what his mentor taught him: do not be pre-occupied with reaching the top, with “chomping the bit.” Relax and enjoy the journey and you will eventually get there.

Mabuhay!!! Be proud to be a Filipino.

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