> I don't know what you're getting at by this statement. Saying "Maybe his teams were all India based?" sounds dismissive or pejorative, as though you were say

> I don't know what you're getting at by this statement. Saying "Maybe his teams were all India based?" sounds dismissive or pejorative, as though you were saying that he must have been somewhere that was not doing premier work, or working as part of a cooperative team in a way that valued the work he and his team did. However the essay clearly described how innovative his ongoing work and contributions were when they were being done, including linking to research papers. They were progressively pushing forward the state of the art in the database world, and did it in production in wide deployment. What happened was that the culture at IBM identified him as someone who could lead, and as I described, their database organizations at the time helped grow people into these roles.