If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes: The Nick Donofrio Story

Review\n"This is the story that hasn't been told: if Nick and his team hadn't pulled off the mainframe (reinvention), IBM would not have had the financial capacity to get through the crisis. None of the books are written that way, but quite honestly, the mainframe team saved the company."\n— Sam Palmisano, former CEO of IBM\n"Nick is a gentleman, a very strong technical guy, and a great manager. He's incredibly well respected by everyone who has worked for him and around him. I think he's one of the giants of the industry."\n— Jon Rubinstein, engineer and technologist known as the Podfather for his work on the iPod at Apple\n"Nick is an incredible technology leader who has led the industry through a number of key technology transitions. He's not just a great technologist; he's a great person and a compassionate leader overall."\n— Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices\n"When we thought of IBM, we thought of Nick. We weren't thinking about their machines. We were thinking about Nick. Nick was IBM. Nick is the one who had the brains to really lead the technology side and had the personality to bring all the people who were the customers along with him."\n— Larry Kittelberger, former CIO of Tenneco, Allied Signal, and Lucent Technologies\n"It was Nick who distinguished invention versus innovation within IBM. Invention was coming up with a brand-new idea, something no one had ever thought of before. Innovation was also about newness, but it was about how you use it to solve problems you've never been able to solve before. And that distinction is very important. In today's world, you need both, but more and more it's about innovating new solutions to problems that we haven't solved yet. Nick pushed the idea of innovation deep into the entire company."\n— Linda Sanford, former Senior Vice President of Enterprise Transformation at IBM and member of the Women in Technology Hall of Fame\n"Nick understood that 'I've got to preside over this technical juggernaut, and traditional executives sitting in a room can not conceivably always come up with the best decision or the best assessment of a problem. I need more diverse thinkers. And I've got to go to places where they're not currently coming from to get them on my team.' He became a champion for recruiting women, minorities, and disabled people into the technical family."\n— Ted Childs, former Chief Diversity Officer at IBM\nGuiseppe D’Onofrio emigrated to America in 1904, becoming a hatmaker in Beacon, New York’s Italian ghetto. His third son, Nicholas Joseph Donofrio, served as an aircraft mechanic in World War II, returning home to become a guard at a hospital for the criminally insane.\nNicholas’s son, Nick Donofrio, grew up to lead IBM as Executive Vice President of Innovation and Technology.\nIf Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes is a powerful testimony to our ability as human beings to drive transformation, not just within the realm of technology but across generations. With both heart and candor, Donofrio explains how he led IBM’s global technical team to embrace a market-centric focus—redefining innovation and sparking worldwide collaboration for a new Big Blue.\nFeaturing cameo interviews with luminaries like Sam Palmisano, Jon Rubinstein, Lisa Su, Bernard Charles, Linda Sanford, Vic Reis, and Paul Horn, this one-of-a-kind autobiography will change everything you think you know about what it means to forge the cutting edge of technology.