He started National Instruments in a garage and gave it a hundred-year plan. In his Texas garden, James Truchard offers a rather practical explanation for thinking that far ahead.

For more than two decades at NI, the aerospace engineer turned product marketer has followed one stubborn idea: the best way to explain a machine is to measure something people already care about.
For nearly 50 years, NI has sold engineers a stubbornly useful idea: the instrument is better when software calls the shots. Now the company has Emerson's scale, an AI assistant named Nigel and the harder task of modernizing without breaking the systems customers already trust.