5月15日，正值国家风险投资协会（National Venture Capital Association）40周年大会，作为议题之一，《财富》（Fortune）资深作者杰西•亨佩尔对IBM首席执行官罗睿兰进行了专访。以下是本次采访内容的部分节选。

    《财富》：IBM曾一度以大型机、PC和打印机为主要业务。现在的IBM致力于服务、软件和沃森超级计算机。你如何看待公司现状？

    罗睿兰：两年前，IBM举办了100周年庆典，当时也有许多人问相同的问题。在过去的工作中，我总结了一条非常宝贵的经验——千万不要用某个产品束缚了自己。我希望IBM被看作是一家创新性公司。一家公司要想长远发展，关键在于不停地适应时代。随时代而转变，这就是创新型公司的含义。

    创新型公司是任何人都梦寐以求的。你正在带领40多万员工完成这一目标。对如此规模的一家大公司来说创新意味着什么？

    我对持续创新颇有心得，这对于其它企业家或许能有帮助。我总结了以下5点。

    第一，你必须时刻铭记在心，保证公司能瞄准高收益的业务。这在高新技术领域格外重要。技术界充斥着颠覆性创新和随之而来的商业化，创新/商业化的周期在不停运转。

    你们【风险投资家】在其中扮演着重要角色。因为你们在不停地收购、剥离、然后再按自己的想法进行整合发展。不过，收购和剥离本身非常重要。要知道，IBM已经剥离了150亿美元的资产，收购了140家公司。而指导原则就是，促使公司转向更高收益的业务。

    第二，保持对市场的敏感。你可以从购买者、产品分类、地域等多个方面考虑如何拓展市场。

    第三，你可以假设自己的年纪有点大，对改造自己的核心业务有一种紧迫感。难道不是吗？例如中间件这种软件就可以向移动中间件演进。这样一来你就能保持创新。

    第四，你要记住，从人的层面上来说，创新意味着技能。在这一点上你别无选择。有人能自我创新，也有人不能。所以你可以通过改进技能来创新。最后，我们都必须不断审视自身、审视公司，并改造公司，这与我们前面谈到的公司如何改变多少有些关系。

    On May 15, Fortune senior writer Jessi Hempel interviewed IBM (IBM) CEO Ginni Rometty as a keynote for the National Venture Capital Association's 40th anniversary conference, Venturescape. What follows is an edited version of their conversation.

    Fortune: IBM was once about mainframes, and then PCs and printers. Now IBM is about services, software, Watson. How do you think about the company?

    Rometty: Two years ago, IBM had its 100th anniversary, which is when people asked that question the most. And I think one of my biggest learnings has been, never define yourself by a product. I would like us to be thought of as an innovation company. The only way you survive is you continuously transform into something else. It's this idea of continuous transformation that makes you an innovation company.

    Now, an innovation company is something that we all aspire to be. You are aspiring to be that with more than 400,000 employees. What does it even mean to be an innovation company especially at that scale?

    I've got a formula in my head about this idea of continuous transformation, and maybe it's helpful for people as you build out these businesses, because I break it into five different pieces.

    I think the first thing you always have to do is keep reinventing yourself for high value. I think particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it's a cycle of innovation/commoditization.

    You guys [venture capitalists] play a big role for us in that because you acquire, you divest, and then you remix your own development. But that acquire and divest is a really important piece. You know, for us, we have divested $15 billion. But then, we have acquired 140 companies. So, the formula is, in part, move to higher value.

    The second thing you've got to always do is keep thinking about how to make a market, and I think you can do that by buyer, by category, by geography.

    Then the third thing I think about is, you know, assuming you live to be a little bit older, you've got to reinvent your core franchises. Right? Things like middleware will get reinvented to mobile middleware, as an example. So, you reinvent.

    And then I think the fourth you can't forget, when you said about all the people, it's the skills. So, you absolutely, you have no choice. And many people can reinvent themselves and some people can't, right? So, you reinvent skills, and then at the end of the day, I think what we all end up doing is you've got to keep looking at yourself, the company, and reinventing the company, which is a bit of when we were talking about how does the company change.

    IBM很少对外部公司直接投资，而是选择和风险投资进行合作。这一策略是如何运转的呢？

    我和你分享一下IBM收购时的选择标准以及背后原因，这至关重要。事实上，我们会仔细斟酌这家公司如何整合，通常会花一段时间进行考察。我们会做一个财务路线图。两年前，我们开始了一个历时5年的财务路线图，截止到2015年，IBM总计将在收购方面投入200亿美元。

    所以，我们非常清楚自己的专注领域。我们所进行的收购都是有关联的。它们都与IBM的发展战略密不可分。

    其次，这些收购通常都与知识产权相关。我们在170多个国家运营。如果收购得当，我可以让一个也许只在一两个国家成功的公司实现规模化，这就是IBM能带来的价值所在。

    在年报中，你谈到IBM在收购决策中利用了分析流程。

    的确如此。我们对你公司的方方面面都进行了预测，而结果直接影响到你的业务价值。所以，我们在所有收购中都应用了这一流程。一家公司的评估点多达300到500个。顺便提一句，这种方法在速度上真没有优势。我们自身的研究机构进行了大量分析工作，以预测将对收购影响最大的三至五个独立的因素。

    大家都知道沃森可以参加Jeopardy猜谜游戏。不过，在你看来，沃森还有更大发展前途，对吗？

    是的，沃森还有潜力可挖。第三次科技变革即将来临。最原始的计算机只能计算。第二代计算机可以编程。而现在的沃森具有学习能力。只需要少数指令，沃森就能自主学习更多的知识！

    所以，你看到沃森登台Jeopardy猜谜大赛。它能回答简单的问题而且击败了最好的人类选手。现在，我们让沃森尝试医疗工作。我们的合作伙伴包括斯隆凯特林纪念医院（Memorial Sloan Kettering）、马里兰安德森中心（MD Anderson）和哥伦比亚大学（Columbia）等全球顶级医疗机构。

    对沃森而言，医疗是个收益极高的行业。风险投资也许也能加入其中？例如人机交互和某些细分医疗市场。

    Instead of making direct investments in companies, you guys work closely with the VC company. How does your strategy work?

    Let me share with you kind of what we look for and why when we look at an acquisition, because it's a vital piece. In fact, it's so important to how we think of remaking the company, we actually commit over a period of time. We do something called a roadmap, it's a financial roadmap. And the five-year roadmap that started a couple of years ago ends in 2015. We've said we'll acquire $20 billion of companies.

    So, we're pretty clear about what are the areas I talked about some that we're focused in. So where we'll do acquisitions, they're adjacent. They'll always cluster around strategic areas.

    The second, they'll typically always be intellectual property. I've got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that's part of the value that IBM brings.

    In your Annual Report, you talk about an analytics process that you use for acquiring.

    Yes. So, every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future. So, we did this for all of our acquisitions. We used to look at 300 to 500 things on every acquisition. Okay, well, that wasn't necessarily good for speed, by the way. We did a lot of work with our own Research group on the analytics to be able to predict three to five factors individually by acquisition that are going to make the biggest difference.

    Ginni, for many of us, Watson is that Jeopardy! Game; but when you think of Watson it's a much bigger thought, right?

    Yes, she has done way more than that! It's about the coming of a third area of technology, right? You know, the original systems counted things. The next set of things were programmable. This thing learns, right? You give it very little instruction and then the more information it has, the more it learns.

    So, since the time that you would have seen it on Jeopardy! when it could answer simple questions and it beat the best humans out there, we put it to work for medicine. And we have been working with Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, Columbia, some of the finest institutions in this world.

    Medicine is one high-value area for Watson. Might there be a role for venture capital there? There might be, in areas such as interfaces and certain specialized areas.

    不过，还有更有意思的。在高收益市场，我们看到了沃森有机会扮演咨询者角色，这使得我们可以瞄准其它智力密集型科研企业。例如制药业，或者拥有庞大零售客户的企业。还有金融服务业和电信业，这都是可以考虑的。

    沃森是一项服务，我们会围绕沃森打造生态系统，你可以在之上开发自己的应用。当然，你也要有一定的专门知识。这在将来会为你创造价值。

    你把目前这个阶段称作“科技黄金时代”。你提到社交信息有望成为新的产品。你怎么看？

    我在非常努力地推动IBM向社交企业演进。摧毁森严的组织架构。加快发展步伐。你必须要明白社交网络架构是如何运作的，例如我们拥有自己的节点，遍布全球的关键客户将我们关联到一起。

    我想象有这么一天，即便有那么多员工，但更重要的是你分享了什么，而不仅仅是你了解些什么……重要的不是你说自己知道什么；我关心的是人们认为你懂什么，客户认为你懂什么。

    或许有朝一日，你的薪酬取决于人们的想法和欣赏，取决于你分享了什么。这同现今大不一样。我相信，社交化生产这一理念将成为许多公司的运营方式，尤其是在全球环境下。

    你在IBM担任首席执行官期间，一直积极进军社交工具领域。你在此过程中遇到的最大挑战是什么？或是学到了什么意想不到的东西？

    一个附带的好处是我能够快速与整个公司进行双向沟通，其范围之广、速度之快，可谓无与伦比。而且不再是单向的讲话，而是双向的对话，我可以迅速了解情况。这使得整个公司的层级消失于无形。我可以推进到底。

    但更重要的是，我决心进军社交工具领域的另一个原因是，我们现在招聘的员工都是80后。社交网络就是他们的工作方式。(财富中文网)

    译者：项航

    But here's what's more interesting. That's a high-value area; we are also now about to come out with Watson in what we consider as an advisor, and it will be in volume around research-oriented industries. Think of things like pharma; or as a client advisor in industries that have huge numbers of end retail clients. And so, think of financial services, think of a telco.

    And Watson's a service; we will launch an ecosystem where Watson's a service and you build applications around it. And you have to have domain expertise. That's what will be your value of the future.

    You call this period a "golden era of technology." And you mentioned this idea of social information as the new production line. What do you mean by that?

    I am very aggressive internally in IBM in moving into a social enterprise. It flattens organizations. It enhances their speed. We have hubs, as an example, now around some of our key clients around the world that attach everyone, irrespective of where they are in an organization, in a way that you have come to know how social networking works.

    And I envision a day even with all your employees where it's more important what you share, not just what you know ... It's not so much what you say you know; I care about what the world thinks you know, what clients think you know.

    And then maybe there's a day that you're paid that way, based on what people think and appreciate and what you share. It's a very different paradigm than today. So, I believe this idea of being the social production line of the future is how many, many companies will operate, particularly in a global environment.

    So, to that end, Ginni, you have in your tenure so far at IBM been very aggressive at moving internally into the social tools. What have been the biggest challenges as you do that, or the unexpected things that you've learned?

    Some of the wonderful side benefits have been my ability to communicate two ways with the organization pervasively and quickly is beyond compare, and to have a two-way dialogue. That's not just a one-way push; that is, you learn things very fast. You can take layers out of an organization, right? You can push it down.

    But more important, the other reason I am so intent on this is, as you look at what we are all hiring, I often call it the millennial generation that is the way they work.