Between “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” Davis Guggenheim has probably become the country’s most famous young serious non-fiction filmmaker. Now he’s made a short film for none other than IBM. It features the voice of David Strathairn and focuses on four visionaries who have been helped out by Big Blue, including Howard Shapiro, chief scientist at the Mars Corporation and Sunil Mittal, founder and CEO of the largest telecom company in India. It’s called “wild ducks,” as in the term Thomas J. Watson Jr. loved to use to describe innovators. Here’s Watson himself, from a 1961 TV broadcast:‘’I talk a lot around here about wild ducks, and people kid me a good deal about my wild ducks. But it takes a few wild ducks to make any business go, because if you don’t have the fellows with the new ideas willing to buck the managerial trends and shock them into doing something new and better, if you don’t have those kind of people, the business pretty well slows down. So I would tell a 21-year-old I.B.M.‘er what I’ve told a lot of 21-year-old college people . . . that is, that the priceless ingredient that a youngster has when he starts in business is that sense of not compromising beyond a certain point.’’[IBM / NYT]Connections:
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