There's a fine line between commitment and focus on one hand, and obstinance and myopia on the other. Or perhaps there's no line at all. Maybe they only differ when the context differs. That's the lesson I took from the 16th World Congress on Information Technology in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where I moderated a couple of CIO panel discussions. Those discussions were phenomenal, as was the entire program of the three-day congress. But the lesson I took away didn't come from the proceedings. It came from a discussion I had over breakfast one morning with Robert Madge. Chances are that name rings a bell, if a very distant one. Madge founded Madge Networks, a highflying networking company in the late '80s and better part of the '90s that built its fortunes on the strength of the Token Ring networking protocol championed by IBM. In an interview I conducted with Madge in 1994, he predicted that his company would overtake IBM as the Token Ring market leader within three years. He was right.
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