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IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.

The amazing thing about IBM is that it's a company where I have had 10 different careers - local jobs, global jobs, technology jobs, industry jobs, financial services, insurance, start-ups, big scale. The network of talent around you is phenomenal.

And the reason I came to IBM was I think - I always say at a really early age, I learned you've got to be passionate about what you do. No matter what it is, you put too much, your heart and soul in it, you have to be passionate about it. You make too many sacrifices.

IBM has a very solid business image.

I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.

In all the years with IBM Research, I have especially appreciated the freedom to pursue the activities I found interesting and greatly enjoyed the stimulus, collegial cooperation, frankness, and intellectual generosity of two scientific communities, namely in superconductivity and critical phenomena.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

I have been competing against IBM my whole career. It's a good company, with good management and a good team.

IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what people need rather than just by what is possible.

I want to take IBM back to its roots.