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

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 other. At the time, I thought that knowledge might never be useful again.

But about six months into my job at IBM, serendipity struck. People started asking: is it possible to build a wireless network? Until then, wired networks were the only viable option outside of limited uses of wireless in aviation. But once the FCC gave out spectrum allocations, the need became urgent: how could you prevent hundreds of wireless devices in a building from conflicting with each other?

That’s a classic coding problem. And it turned out to be exactly what I had worked on in grad school. I knew the answer right away; I didn’t need to reinvent it. What once seemed like obscure academic work suddenly became the foundation for what we now call Wi-Fi.

That’s when I learned an important lesson: curiosity compounds. The questions worth pursuing don’t always yield immediate results. When you allow curiosity to lead you, you never know when it might pay off.

Technology alone isn’t enough

As we developed the technology and began collaborating with IBM’s product team, I learned another important lesson: you can’t win with technology alone. You also need a deep understanding of the market.

We had demonstrated that high-speed wireless connectivity was viable. Still, the product team wasn’t convinced. We saw laptops on the horizon and imagined a world where people could work untethered. But the product team reminded us that customers had already invested heavily in wiring their offices, making Wi-Fi appear impractical. We were disappointed. But that disappointment became a pivotal career moment.

I learned that innovation will never succeed on technology alone. Success requires pairing technical innovation with business insight. You can have the best architecture and the most promising idea, but without a clear business model and deep market understanding, it will go nowhere.

Growth Mindset

There was one final lesson I learned from this experience, and it was more personal. To succeed at IBM, I knew I had to become more than a technologist. I had to develop business skills—to understand markets, economics, customer behaviors, and timing.

Later, I found language that encapsulated these lessons in work by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. She wrote about a growth mindset: the belief that capabilities aren’t fixed, and that progress comes through learning, perseverance, and adaptation. My early setback in Wi-Fi taught me exactly that. With a growth mindset, knowledge you think might never be useful can suddenly become critical. I’m not sure I could repeat that coding work today, but I can still understand it. When our quantum team talks about error correction, I get it right away because it is very similar to what I worked on long ago.

At IBM, we take this growth mindset philosophy seriously. We encourage IBMers to take ownership of their development and provide extensive resources to help them reach their goals. We also extend this beyond our walls through SkillsBuild, our free platform providing global access to technology and AI education.

As technology shifts rapidly—especially in AI and quantum computing—the world needs people who can combine technical depth with market understanding to solve major challenges. For me, it all started with cyclic codes and Wi-Fi, and the recognition that meaningful innovation is as much about mindset and market insight as it is about engineering.

My First Job is a recurring series in which prominent business leaders share what their first job was and what they learned from it.

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