04-29-2026MY FIRST JOB

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on his first job and the lessons he learned from it

‘You can’t win with technology alone. You also need a deep understanding of the market.’

[Source photos: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Adobe Stock]

I joined IBM Research in the early 1990s wanting to be a networking specialist. I spent time in grad school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on algebraic coding theory—specifically cyclic codes—for my master’s thesis. Cyclic codes are mathematical patterns that prevent signals from interfering with each other. Think of them as a way to let hundreds of conversations happen in the same room without anyone talking over each........

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