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A few months before its centennial anniversary celebration, IBM faced one of its greatest challenges. The battle wasn’t against global competitors over market share. The arena was the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy! Big Blue was participating in a showdown that pitted man against machine. Can a computer outthink the human brain?

Two of the challengers vying for the $1 million grand prize were Jeopardy! champs Brad Rutter, the game’s highest-grossing player with $3.3 million in winnings, and Ken Jennings, winner of the most consecutive matches in the show’s history. The third was a room-sized computer system named Watson–after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson–that can rapidly process and analyze natural language including puns, riddles, or complex questions. Positioned between the two human players, Watson, who spoke in a synthesized, electronic voice, seemed the embodiment of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative focused on using intelligence to drive innovation for global solutions.

When the challenge aired in February, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebrek sought responses from the contestants on topics such as literary characters, the Beatles, and Olympic oddities, with Watson receiving the clues via text file. The computer quickly emerged as the dominant player. By the first commercial break, Watson had answered 10 of 13 questions and amassed $5,200 while Rutter had won $1,000 and Jennings just $200. Watson would continue this drubbing over three matches and eventually take the $1 million pot (which was donated to charity). It was IBM’s first tech vs. human victory since Deep Blue checkmated chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Watson is nothing short of a scientific wonder, an intelligent machine designed for answers and human interaction. What gives Watson its edge is the workload-optimized system design based on IBM DeepQA software and POWER7 processor-based servers allowing for custom algorithms and terabytes of storage. The speed of its circuitry outpaced human reaction times. The computer displayed the remarkable ability to parse keywords in a clue while searching for related terms as answers and proved impervious to players’ psychological tactics.

The real winner may turn out to be society. The exercise demonstrated computing power to the nth degree that can be used in medical diagnosis, business analysis, and other critical functions currently performed by knowledge-based workers.

It took a brilliant human mind, however, to manage the creation of Watson. So if Trebek one day says, “The answer is the man responsible for oversight of the development of servers for the computer that won Jeopardy! and changed the world,” the correct question will be “Who is Rodney Adkins?”

As senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, Adkins, 52, is quite a technological marvel himself. Appointed to the position in October 2009, he oversees all aspects of IBM’s semiconductor, server, storage, systems software, and retail store solutions businesses. The company’s integrated supply chain, which includes global manufacturing, procurement, and customer fulfillment, also report to him. His 50,000-employee division generates $18 billion in annual revenues. Moreover, Adkins serves as a member of the IBM Operating Team, responsible for day-to-day marketplace execution.

In reviewing the progress of STG for the first half of 2011, he said the unit’s growth was driven by “smarter computing,” the intelligent use of IT to make customers more efficient, cost-effective, and nimble. Serving global clients in automotive, banking, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing, he believes in the creation of system architecture that’s “tuned for task,” providing computing power to manage massive databases or operate within highly integrated environments.

“The first component of our strategy was a focus on momentum because there’s nothing like business momentum, and how you get business momentum is focus on execution and results,” he asserts. “Once you start to establish that momentum, that helps build up confidence, and we have a world-class team that has produced some very positive results in terms of IBM’s overall performance. It’s all grounded in focus, building the momentum, providing the right products that would allow our clients to see some type of value in terms of economic benefit.”

To achieve that end, Adkins believes Big Blue must be the definitive driving force for innovation. An engineer by training, he’s passionate about the prospects of new and inventive developments such as Watson: “We’re going in what I think is a much more exciting era, where systems like Watson that are analytic based can do deep computations on massive amounts of data to deliver new insights and new capabilities.”

This type of visionary thinking has earned the veteran stripes as one of Black Enterprise’s Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America. His achievements and management prowess has placed him among the leading candidates to replace retiring IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano. For his leadership role in bolstering business performance and driving innovation of one of the world’s largest and most profitable information technology corporations, Adkins has been selected as the 2011 Black Enterprise Corporate Executive of the Year.

The Driven Innovator
The fight for market share has been fierce as the $100 billion company with operations in 170 countries has squared off against a bevy of tough competitors such as EMC Corp., Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Accenture, and Cisco. The serious, focused Adkins appears to exhibit the drive to take them on: In his 30-year tenure with the company, he’s never taken a full week off.  (He recently decided to take a 10-day excursion next month to go on safari in Tanzania and tour the Taj Mahal in India to celebrate his wife’s 50th birthday.) His relentlessness enabled STG to post revenues of $4.7 billion for the second quarter, up an impressive 17% from the same period last year.

STG officials maintain that IBM develops an array of power systems software and hardware that help customers build IT infrastructures to become “on-demand” organizations that are flexible, scalable, and energy efficient. For instance, Tata Motors, India’s largest auto manufacturer with $7.95 billion in revenues, needed IBM to create a storage system to help protect data compiled through its CRM, or customer relationship management, system. Another customer, Hutchison Telecom, which provides mobile services throughout Asia, was impressed by IBM’s customer-focused approach to installing eServers at the core of its tech infrastructure without any service downtime.

To produce such testimonies, Adkins has developed a multidisciplined structure to guarantee top-flight performance. He develops “macro-teams,” bringing together marketing professionals from different business units to track trends that drive product requirements; customer counsels that test concepts; and development teams that work with IBM research to figure out technological capabilities and potential for new inventions. “That’s when we end up creating new products, new solutions, and new software that aid us in that innovation around the pain points,” says STG General Manager Adalio Sanchez of the department’s knowledge-based leadership. “Rod knows diversity of discipline, diversity of thought is a very powerful thing. This is a business that tries to drive and create new products, that quite frankly takes advantage of the best minds.”

Sanchez has known Adkins since the pioneering days of the PC business when the two line managers met during a breakfast meeting in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1984. Over the years, he has witnessed Adkins’ growth from an engineer to a corporate leader. Sanchez, who has been a peer during much of that time, now reports to Adkins. “One of the hallmarks of Rod’s leadership style is that he is open and flexible. You can speak your mind with Rod. Oh, and by the way, he is very good at putting you in your place when you need to be. But you don’t get to these kinds of levels without doing that.”

The Master Engineer
Attired in a blue-on-blue windowpane suit, white pique shirt with monogrammed French cuffs, ice blue tie, and cufflinks, Adkins takes us on a tour of STG at IBM offices in Somers, New York. He’s fighting a fever and sore throat but, true to form, he doesn’t let a cold interfere with the task at hand. His review of the company’s technological history coincides with his own corporate trajectory.

In his years at IBM, Adkins has worked in 19 different positions spanning almost all aspects of the company’s various business areas including hardware, software, UNIX servers, PCs, and mobile computing. He arrived at Big Blue as it expanded beyond massive mainframes to embrace the personal computing revolution of the 1980s. Like a museum curator, he shows off a model of a second-generation PC XT he worked on as an engineer in the 1980s. A bit later, he points to one of the first laptops in the 1990s, the IBM ThinkPad, which he helped design.

Adkins has played a significant role in IBM’s innovation-charged history. He has also traveled a long distance from Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood. The middle child, he was encouraged to strive for excellence by his hardworking, supportive parents. As a youngster, he became attracted to technology like a magnet to iron filings. Always curious, Adkins began tinkering with his family’s appliances. “If it plugged into the wall, I’m pretty sure I dismantled it,” he quips.

While his parents and teachers nurtured his intellect, he began to develop focus and discipline at age 11 by studying Nisei Goju Ryu, a Japanese martial art that built up confidence and inner strength. A black belt at age 13, he continued to practice this form of karate until about 15 years ago.  (Today, he applies his focus on the golf course to pursue his other passion.)

Adkins was his high school’s valedictorian, and he studied physics at Rollins College near Orlando, one of 25 African Americans among a student body of 1,200. He joined IBM upon graduation, leaving the company only once–to complete a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech.

Adkins deftly applied himself as a hardware engineer but soon discovered he had to be open to a diversity of assignments to advance within the company. “One of the things I typically advise young engineers and young computer scientists is always have a view of what your next two jobs should be,” he maintains. “[It] allows you to think about the best way to plan your career, moving forward. The other thing that helped me in my career is having opportunities in multiple parts of the business. Although I was an engineer, I accepted assignments in other disciplines.” His range of experiences not only developed broad skills, but increased his business and operating perspective. He quickly acquired a reputation as the go-to executive to tackle tough assignments.

On his first international project he collaborated with engineers at Yamato Development Laboratory in Japan on IBM’s first mobile PC called the p70. He held stints as general manager of PC Desktop Computing before taking over the UNIX Server business,and then Pervasive Computing Software. Adkins is now credited with putting the hardware business back on track after assuming the role in 2009 when his boss, Robert Moffat, was arrested in relation to the Galleon insider trading case. Installed in the position on an interim basis, Adkins was permanently promoted less than two weeks later.

Mentors guided Adkins through critical periods in his professional ascent. His most valuable lessons, however, came during the company’s darkest days. In the early 1990s, Big Blue could have been more aptly dubbed Big Red. Between 1991 and 1993, the company posted net losses of $16 billion due to increased competition and a flawed divestiture and reorganization plan. Its new CEO Louis V. Gerstner initiated a corporate turnaround, restructuring the IT business, adopting Internet strategies, promoting product integration, and remaking the corporate culture over the next decade. After laying off thousands of employees, slashing billions in expenditures, and selling assets, Gerstner converted IBM into a solutions-oriented, customer-obsessed company. “I learned that the most important thing in any given crisis is our ability to focus,” Adkins reflects. “There was a famous statement [from] Lou Gerstner when he was asked about vision and strategy. He said, ‘The last thing we need at this point is a vision’. Now, any company will have a vision and a strategy, but the point he was making was that it was much more about focus.”

The Stem Advocate
Adkins, a National Academy of Engineering inductee and board member of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, has made ensuring diversity in the industry one of his professional and personal missions. Currently less than 13% of the more than 70,000 U.S. engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2009 were awarded to minorities, according to NACME. African Americans have obtained only 4.7% of bachelor’s degrees in engineering. Adkins maintains that for companies like IBM, and the United States as a whole, to remain competitive in a global economy, business leaders and policy makers must work to reverse this trend.

As a member of the Board of Governors for the IBM Academy of Technology, Adkins takes a hands-on role in preparing the next generation of engineers and scientists. For example, he has been involved in the development of Pathways in Technology Early College High School, a new school for grades 9 to 12 in Brooklyn, New York, that’s the outgrowth of collaboration between IBM, the New York City Department of Education, New York City College of Technology, and the City University of New York. The students can graduate with an associate degree, along with the skills and knowledge necessary to continue their studies or transition directly into IT jobs.

Such “proactive intervention” is what’s required to increase the number of minorities in the tech sector’s executive ranks, says Arnold Donald, president & CEO of the Executive Leadership Council. Adkins represents a cadre of black professionals who have risen from the engineering ranks to the C-Suite and  “demonstrate to new generations of corporate professionals that you can go beyond the lab and use your science background to move up to the top levels of major corporations.”As one of IBM’s highest-ranking executives and a member of the leadership team, he has a real seat at the table influencing the direction of the company and its involvement in communities around the world.” Adkins’ post at IBM, one of black enterprise’s 40 Best Companies for Diversity, shows, Donald says, that “the company walks the walk when it comes to embracing diversity in evaluating performance.”

NACME’s President and CEO Irving Pressley McPhail says Adkins has been invaluable in “bringing IBM’s presence and opening up his Rolodex” to the organization’s efforts to raise scholarship funds, provide internships, and increase corporate representation. “Rod is passionate and very committed. He really wants to make a difference in what we see as an American dilemma, the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM.”

“He is an excellent mentor,” McPhail continues, “He is willing to take his time to work with individual students. It’s important just to take time with young, impressionable students so they can see that they can become a Rod Adkins one day–that they can ascend to be among the top three in leadership at IBM. That’s something they can’t get in any engineering program.”