Jay Bellissimo, Leader of Cognitive Process Transformation, GBS, thank you for meeting with me. I have been starting these off lightheartedly, so would you be able to share your favorite food, your favorite hobby and your favorite movie?
Okay well I must start with a favorite food - being Italian - so mine is veal parmesan. My favorite movie is
Cinema Paridiso and my favorite hobby is ice hockey
Did you play?
I did. I played in college
Oh wow
I enjoyed it. I wanted to be a professional ice hockey player but that never panned out, so here I am at IBM
And do you still get out there?
I do. I did until recently, but it's a great sport. I know in Australia you have a lot of good sports down there, not sure if I could ever play Australian rugby or Aussie football, but I like watching
Yeah it's pretty rough . We'll go back to your roots I suppose, when you started at university. What did you study?
So I was a political science major and I had a minor in economics and when I first left school I worked in
Capitol Hill for Congressman
Joseph Kennedy, he was Bobby Kennedy's oldest son. Bobby was the attorney general back in the late 60s who was assassinated. He was JFK's brother. So I worked for Joe, I did legislative writing for 3 years after college and then I moved over to management consulting and I've been doing it for the last 30 years
Wow. So what was your your first role with PWC?
I was a programmer, which was interesting because I never took programming in school and I just loved it. I became a sponge
What language?
COBOL. Oh and I actually worked for Andersen Consulting which is now Accenture. So I thought COBOL was a colour but I found out it was actually a programming language
It's still a colour right?
Yes haha it is
And so it was after that you moved on?
Well it was a great thing in all seriousness. I wanted to work on Capital Hill but after 3 years and decided I wanted to do something different. I didn't know what I wanted to do, I just ended up at Andersen Consulting and I just fell in love with technology even though I didn't have the background. So fast forward, I moved over to Pricewaterhouse about two years later and then I became a partner when I was 31. Then during that time for the 7 years there I really just loved the technology. So I spent a lot of time teaching myself everything - that's a big lesson I will share with you - it is the need to reinvent yourself. It's no different 30 years later. I'm spending 5,6 hours a week, just on the weekends or late at night, learning about new cloud technologies and other things. You can never learn enough. And if you don't learn and continue to push yourself and reinvent yourself, you're going to fall behind and you won't be as needed and you won't have the opportunity for advancement. So going back almost 30 years ago, I started out programming, I didn't know anything about it but I loved it. I did it for 7, 8 years, made partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then I moved over to the business side. I needed to expand and exercise new muscles so I moved over to a new area that I didn't know on the business side - procurement and supply chain. I did that well, for several years. So since I joined IBM in 2002, I am now in my 8th role in 16 years
Wow
Yeh, so a lot of moving around. So my one big lesson would be always go with the flow and never stop learning
Its such a fast moving field as well
It really is, you can become outdated and you never want that
So at IBM, you've always been in GBS. Is that correct?
Correct. There was one time I wasn't, back in 2014 when we started the Watson group. I was probably employee number 4 and I was the general manager. The logic was that, Ginni our CEO, took one leader from each of our brands, so I was selected from GBS and became the general manager. I brought over about 150 GBSers with me and that's how we started the Watson group. 2014 I spent a lot of time in Australia. Australia was one of the first adopters of AI and Watson, very progressive. We talked about Perth and
Woodside with Peter Coleman the CEO and his team and it was really awesome. But I spent 4 years as a general manager in Watson and in January 2018 I returned to GBS
Is there something about GBS that you particularly enjoy?
Well I have had the benefit of almost 30 years - minus the 4 years in Watson - to see everything in consulting over that time and I think right now in 2019 what's really exciting is what
Mark Foster has built around this
Cognitive Enterprise. As many of you know Mark spent his career at Accenture, retired 5 years and came back. And what he's done in the 2 1/2 years since he's been here is just amazing and it's contagious right. We always say winning is contagious, leadership like Mark's is contagious and he's really turned the business around. And so I'm just very excited when I look at what clients want and what we built in GBS, leveraging the rest of IBM and in the end it's all about winning and I think we're well positioned as we've ever been since I've been at IBM
We're in good hands with Mark Foster
We are in good hands with Mark Foster and Ginni. I spent 45 minutes with her last night with a client and you want to talk about genuine authentic leaders? Ginni is it and that's why this company has persevered as much as we have over the last several years
What do you find most rewarding about what you do?
It's delivering against commitments. Whether it's personal life or work, once you make a commitment you have to honour it and - to the best of your ability - achieve it. And I think in this business, especially in the GBS part of our business, everything is about relationship selling and delivery comes with selling. I always say delivery is the best selling tool. Clients are buying you as a representative IBM and if you let them down you let yourself down. So the biggest thing for me is always make sure, whether it be me or my teams, we always deliver against commitments and quite frankly we always want to try to exceed what those commitments are. And that's what gets me going every week, it's making sure that no one else in the market can do what we do but more importantly we can deliver what we commit to our clients
When the day comes that you have to look back on the career you've had. Is there one particular thing or accomplishment, something that you've done, you'll be able to look back on and be most proud of?
I'll give it two flavors of that. I think what makes me most proud in all the years and the different roles I've been in - and I've lived in Brazil I've been around a lot - it's just the sense of teamwork. I grew up playing sport my whole life and teamwork is everything. I don't remember a deal in 30 years I ever did by myself, not that it couldn't of, but you always want to have a team and make sure that you really work together to solve the most complex business problems. So that's been very gratifying, the teamwork aspect. In terms of a legacy, I think my 4 years and Watson, and it didn't stop there it's still continuing. I think this time of AI and Watson will go down in the history books, and to have been part of those early days in Watson and just seeing it manifests itself to where we are today in 2019
Yeah thats huge, must be so rewarding
It was rewarding and certainly the most memorable part of my career
Definitely. There's obviously a lot of exciting things going on here at THINK that we've been hearing about - AI, quantum, blockchain - Is there a particular field that excites you the most?
Well I think the field would be AI. I think - for all the reasons we know - it's exciting, but I would take it up a level and I would say for every IBMer - the 375 thousand of us - whether you have to take a test or not you need to learn cloud and cognitive. You cannot be successful without it, you have to be able to tell the narrative. So AI is from an interest point of view, the coolest for me personally but I would encourage and ask each IBMer to make sure they know cloud and cognitive and have that story because it's all about solving business problems but some people are not equipped to have that full conversation and they only talk about their area. I just did a video earlier today that will go out to GBS and I'm asking everyone in GBS to be able to tell as part of that Cognitive Enterprise, the cloud story because if you can talk to cloud and cognitive and all these other things - data, AI, it's all wrapped into that - then we're going to have great success as a company
If you could imagine a younger version of yourself, when you first started out your career. If you could go back with the knowledge and the experience that you have now, what would you tell that younger version of yourself that's just starting out their career?
Well that's a great question. Honestly I wouldn't do anything differently
Well that's good that's a good place to be haha
Yeh haha, I took the easy way out. No I say that because life's about experiences and the one thing that has served me well is just confidence. And I said - even recently with some people - it's no different for me. Sometimes you might have a tough session with certain people but confidence is everything. When you have confidence in life - whether be personal or professional - you can do anything. Will you make mistakes? Yes. Especially in the last 10 years, we've tried so many different things. The old expression "if you fail fail fast", but you have to learn and move on
Is there a particular pivotal moment in your career that's really helped to get you to where you are today?
Oh I don't think there's one event per say, I think it's been just back to the point of learning, I've had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I can because I've had some setbacks where I lost some best friends to car accidents and other things and I vowed when I experienced that at the age of 16 that I would live life to its fullest. So to that point, I'm always volunteering to do things, whether it be in work, in the community, I have two children who are gay and some very involved in LGBT+. So my point is it doesn't matter if it's societal, within your community, at work, but just you have a thirst for life and you want to maximize every day and live every day to the fullest because I had that setback at 16, another one 5 years ago where I lost my best friend again and so it just really proved to me that in life you need to just enjoy what you do. What my friend used to say before he passed away was "love what you do and do what you love". So that would probably be it - not a single event - but that would be my philosophy on why I'm as driven as I am and I won't stop for many years to come
Thank you Jay
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