The Regeneration Imperative

Ever since I announced that I would be stepping down as President of Bell Labs (and CTO of Nokia), I have been inundated with inquiries from colleagues, friends, family and even people I barely knew, asking one simple question: ‘why?’. There was a certain level of incredulity to the question, with the prevailing sentiment being that it was one of the best jobs in tech that one could imagine, and that it seemed to fit me perfectly. And I agree. So, why change? Was it a moment of madness, or dissatisfaction with some aspect of the role, or the company? The simple answer is ‘none of the above’, it was simply time for a change, or to put it another way, ‘it was time for this Doctor to regenerate’. 

Let me explain that last statement for the uninitiated. There is a hugely popular British TV series called Doctor Who, about a humanoid extraterrestrial Time Lord who is an odd type of British superhero vanquishing foes of all sorts, most famously a rather odd-looking cabal of mutant robots, known as Daleks (that were truly terrifying to any child of the 1960s and 70s, as many will no doubt attest). But the most relevant point about Doctor Who was that he/she had the power to ‘regenerate’ into a new form of the Doctor, when the current instantiation had reached the limit of what they could accomplish in the role. And this has happened precisely 13 times in the history of the series, which spans almost 60 years.

So perhaps the analogy is a little more clear; I am a Doctor (Ph.D.), acting as the 13th incarnation of a role that is almost 100 years old (in 2025), and one that is almost supernatural in terms of the universal impact that Bell Labs has had in terms of pioneering the modern age. And, simply put, I feel that I have accomplished everything I can in the role, and it is time to pass the baton to someone else, or for this Doctor to regenerate.

This may seem a little fanciful and ‘Sci-Fi’, but in fact the concept of regeneration is profoundly important not only to people, but to the organizations they form, in order that they are able to continuously evolve with the times, and reinvent themselves to lead and achieve success in a new era. I think nearly everyone would agree with this sentiment, but the problem is being able to identify when the time for regeneration is nigh, and then to have the courage to go through with it.

And, after almost 8 years at the helm of Bell Labs, 10 years as a Bell Labs researcher, 11 as CTO of the company, and 25 years in some variant of the company, I think the time is right for me, and for Bell Labs, to find a new Doctor to lead the way and invent the future. So we have begun an active search for my successor – the 14th incarnation – of the Time Lord (or Lady) to lead Bell Labs through its centennial and beyond.