This TED Talk features engineer and innovator Eric Barrage recorded live at TED at IBM 2017.

You've all been in a bar, right? But have you ever gone to a bar and come out with a $200 million business?

That's what happened to us about 10 years ago. We'd had a terrible day. We had this huge client that was killing us. We're a software consulting firm,

and we couldn't find a very specific programming skill to help this client deploy a cutting-edge cloud

system. We have a bunch of engineers, but none of them could please this client. And we're about to be

fired. So we go out to the bar, and we're hanging out with our bartender friend, Jeff, and he's doing what all good bartenders

do. He's commiserating with us, making us feel better, relating to our pain, saying, hey,

these guys are overblowing it. Don't worry about it. And finally, he deadpans us and says,

why don't you send me in there? I can figure it out.

So the next morning, we're hanging out in our team meeting,

and we're all a little hazy,

and I half-jokingly throw it out there.

I say, hey, I mean, we're about to be fired.

So I say, why don't we send in Jeff, the bartender?

There's some silence, some quizzical looks.

Finally, my chief of staff says, that is a great idea.

Jeff is wicked, smart.

He's brilliant.

He'll figure it out. Let's send him in there.

Now, Jeff was not a programmer. In fact, he had dropped out of Penn as a philosophy major,

but he was brilliant, and he could go deep on topics, and we were about to be fired. So we sent him in.

After a couple of days of suspense, Jeff was still there. They hadn't sent him home. I couldn't believe it. What was he doing?

...