I had interned at IBM in the late 70's (as a high school kid of all things) and decided it was more of a real estate company than a computer company :-). Up until Gerstner, IBM had a policy of acquiring and holding real estate as a hedge. Often reported on the books under "cash equivalents" because real estate had the property that it could usually be liquidated when required into cash. When we were acquired in 2015 that had changed, nearly all of the places I had worked in the 70's were no longer owned (or operated) by IBM.
Our exec said that those property holdings were the only thing that kept IBM alive between 1990 and 2000. They had to ruthlessly re-tool the entire business and that required a lot of up front cash without a product revenue stream to fund it. That was Gerstner's legacy for him, he used that asset to re-invent the company around consulting services, business automation, enterprise data processing, and business insights driven by processing billions of metrics.
And it turned out that a lot of companies needed to understand their business better, and automate it, to adapt to this new fangled thing called the Internet.
We both agreed that they would be unlikely to do that again as they had used up their 'secret weapon' already.
Did this work at all? How did you feel throughout it? What about your colleagues?
What I admire is that one man changed IBM from the 50s and 60s stoggy IBM to a more modern functional company that was able to move forward. I supect that without him IBM would have died long time ago.
While I don't remember every single speech word for word, I remember one of his earliest all-hands meetings. He said, "If I have one more exec come to me with a bunch of slides that can't simply describe what's happening in their business with the key strategic attributes, I'm going to start firing people." He continued, "If you're running a massive section of the business, I should be able to come to you and we should just be able to have a good, solid conversation about the levers. You need to demonstrate to me that you know exactly what's going on, and you can't have your staffer answer my questions."
He also stated that he was completely appalled because, at every other company he had been at, they woke up every day paranoid about the competition. He told everyone we had completely lost our way. if you weren't waking up every single day thinking about the scorecard, you probably weren't right for the new environment.
If you were internal and under any scrutiny at all during these years, you would understand that Lou, without Jerry York, was only half of the story. Jerry was an amazing financial mind who could sniff through spreadsheets and smell bullshit. People would come out of executive reviews hanging on for dear life. Some of these executives, after they had been exposed to York and actually performed well, would leave IBM and succeed elsewhere. However, to be clear, he was an A-hole.
They achieved an enormous amount of cultural change, which was excellent. The problem was that while they had a great cultural leader and a great financial leader, IBM which was built to the brim with some of the most incredibly technical people you had ever seen, was completely lacking a clear technical lead. Inasmuch as these two guys created an amazing turnaround story, they never stopped for a moment to ask how to find the technical leadership to truly transform the place. While they did a great job, you cannot support a stool with only two legs. If IBM had found that third leg, we would still be counting it among the Mag 8 of today.
He commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me."
I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!"
Windows 95 almost killed Apple.
I only came across it at one site, a big UK bank (Midland Bank). They were using a heavily modified version, it didn’t look anything like the original product.