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An IBM executive stepped into a conference room decades ago and posed a question to a handful of young consultants.

“Does anyone know Visio?” he asked.

Silence ensued for several seconds. Then, a hand shot up.

“I do!” said Rob Thomas, who had just started at the company.

But Thomas wasn’t actually familiar with Visio.

“I raised mine because I thought if I don’t know, I can probably figure it out,” he said. “A lot of people weren’t willing to do that.”

Thomas is now IBM’s senior vice president of software and chief commercial officer, but still looks back on raising his hand that day as one of the more significant lessons of his career.

“I realized the ability to learn is really the superpower that nobody talks about,” he said. “It’s part effort. It's part attitude. It’s part humility to acknowledge I’ve got to figure this out.”

The Daily Coach spoke to Thomas about navigating difficult career choices, good versus bad risk, and appropriate reliance on data in decision-making.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rob, thank you for doing this. Tell us about your childhood and some key lessons from it.

I moved around a lot early in my life, pretty much all on the East Coast, Texas at one point. My dad worked at IBM for a long time. He ended up moving on about the time that I joined. My mother stayed at home with us managing the household.

I played a lot of sports growing up. My best and worst moments were playing. You suddenly realize you’re not good enough when you get to high school and have to figure out how to adjust your approach because what was working once was no longer working.

That’s become my mantra as I’ve moved into professional life. You realize everyone is always trying to figure things out. I think it’s a bit of a myth that everyone’s always confident or always an expert. Life is really about figuring things out as you go.

Can you tell me about the “I know nothing” realization early in your career?

I chose consulting because I thought it would put me in a position where I’d interact with a bunch of different companies and I could figure out what I liked. It took me about a week to figure out in consulting, your only job is to help clients solve their problems.

I’m coming out of school, and I realize I literally know nothing. I took the classes, so I know what’s in the books, but that’s not super useful or practical to a client.

I started going to a lot of meetings. There’d be a mix of IBMers and clients there, and I started noticing in many cases — certainly if it was an emerging topic or new technology —  most of them didn’t really understand it that deeply. I realized I could digest a book over the weekend and know as much, if not more, than they did or at least have a point of view. That doesn’t get you all the way, but it gives you a little more confidence to continue to lean in.

It sounds like speed and the ability to learn quickly have been major differentiators for you. How do we train our ability to learn faster?

You have to have a level of intensity in everything you do. If you’re going to learn a topic, you can decide on a plan that’s going to take you two months or you can say, “I’m going on a crash diet, and I’m going to learn this in two days.”

I’m not in any way insinuating you can do in two days what someone would do in two or three years, but if you force yourself to get deep into something quickly, you have permission to go for more because the learning becomes easier after that. Speed, to me, is about intensity. What’s related to that is how do you manage your time?

I see a lot of people who are effective, but they don’t effectively manage their time. When you don’t do that, you’re probably only operating at 20 to 30 percent of your actual capacity. You may be working a lot or that may be a lot of activity, but you’re not maximizing your capacity if you’re not using your time well. I tend to be pretty rigorous about how many meetings I do, where I do them, blocking out time for reading. I tend to start early in the day. I think that generates speed. Speed is ultimately a force multiplier.

What does prioritization mean to you?

There’s always a mental sort between what’s urgent and what’s important. Many times, the urgent things aren’t important. A lot of people struggle to distinguish those two and jump on the urgent and never get to the important. That’s a problem.

I don’t know if I have a secret. I think a lot comes through doing this a lot and having the humility to say “I wasted time” so that you don’t do it again. You start to see patterns of what works better and what doesn’t.

I do force myself once a year to go through what I call a calendar audit and look back at where I spent my time in the last year and how much of that was really a good use of time versus not. That helps you decide on prioritization, but I don’t think anybody’s totally mastered this. It’s ongoing.

You shared an interesting social media post recently on the value of trying to understand others. How do we better understand someone we may not appear to have anything in common with?

What I posted was something I saw in a book called “On Becoming a Person.” Most people, including myself, when they’re talking to others are thinking about what they want to say next or how it impacts me or what they want to do. The point was if you permit yourself to understand them, it gives you a totally different perspective on the situation, on that person. If you understand others deeply and where they’re coming from, it may just have a positive change for you.

Where I was forced to do this a lot was when we moved to Tokyo as part of my career. When you land in a different culture where communication inherently isn’t as easy, you’re straining harder to communicate and understand what someone is really doing, what someone is really trying to accomplish. That helped me think about it more, but I’m still a work in progress on this.

How do you balance trying something new with maintaining what’s previously worked?

If you’re taking risk and there’s huge upside, that’s probably great. If you’re taking risk and there’s limited upside, that’s probably bad. If you’re taking catastrophic risk, that’s probably bad even if it has large upside. You need to think about probability and where can I take calculated risk where there’s appropriate upside?

Some people jump to the extreme of, “You want us to take more risks? We’re going to go do this!” Well, no, if you do that, the company could go out of business. That’s probably a bad risk.

You have to have the right standards established. You have to know when you’re willing to stick your neck out. You have to communicate that there is no growth without risk. People often forget that. The opposite of risk is we’re just going to do nothing. Well, then you’re ensuring there’s going to be no growth for the company, no growth for the employees. That’s not good. It is a forever balancing act, but I think you have to think about probabilities, upside and downside and really understand that.

I know you recently launched Scout Advisor and are working with some professional sports teams. What type of data are you seeking with that project?

The Sevilla Football Club ended up reaching out to us, and we ended up collaborating. It was really fulfilling. It’s an A.I.-powered tool that we developed with the football club, and it’s all about how you enhance the player recruitment process.

We analyzed quantitative data and qualitative data from over 200,000 scouting reports. On one hand, it’s the basics: Height, weight, speed, but then we’re also considering things like written evaluations, which is normally the qualitative stuff that doesn’t make it into an assessment.

What is qualitative data in that context?

It’s quite literally written evaluations. There are still human observers of sports writing on a sheet of paper things like “Seems slower today,” “Reacts poorly in this situation,” “Made a mistake. Performance declined dramatically after mistake.” It’s all of these factors that, if you and I are watching sports, sometimes we see.

When you get that type of insight on a scouting report, it gives you a whole view of an individual versus just how they perform when they’re at their best. If somebody’s running a 100-meter dash or doing a vertical leap, they’ll probably be at their best in that moment. But that’s not the full evaluation.

Can a business or team be too reliant on data?

I think if you make all decisions solely based on data to the point you ignore what’s right in front of your eyes, that’s probably a problem.

If anything, I still see the risk as the other side. I still see a surprisingly large amount of opinion and conjecture in the Fortune 2000s of the world. I think it’s come a long way in the last 20 years, but there’s still more than you would think. Whether we’re doing a (research and development) project or working with my teams, sometimes we have a strong view of what we should do, but have we actually looked at the data?

Sometimes, the data doesn’t line up with the recommendation. That doesn’t mean the recommendation is wrong, but it kind of means we should take another look at how did we get to this conclusion? People get so convinced by the rhetoric, or the discussion, or the common belief, or the common knowledge. Sometimes, the data really matters.

You’ve shared on social media a couple of times “Progress, not perfection.” What does that mean?

With your readership, by the definition of what you do, my guess is 95 percent are perfectionists. They want everything to be right. They want everything to be in place. Perfection is impossible. It's probably been harder for me than anybody else to come to that view over time.

All that really matters is, are you making progress? Are you better than you were yesterday, the week before, the year before, whether that’s as an individual or as a business? I think as we seek excellence or perfection, sometimes, people forget that. If you’re seeking something that’s not possible, which is perfection, you tend to get discouraged, and when you get discouraged, you tend to stop making progress.

I like the notion of “progress, not perfection” almost as a reminder for myself that we have to keep moving the ball forward.

Q&A Resources

Rob Thomas  ― Website | X | LinkedIn | Newsletter: The Mentor | Books

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