[theologic]

I arrived at IBM just a little before Gerstner got there. He was an absolutely amazing individual in terms of how he spoke incredibly bluntly to everyone. At IBM, it was all about legacy internal political structures, where you would have enormous presentations held by various executives trying to explain why their business was going to be best and why you needed to invest in it. The ritual of presenting at IBM’s headquarters in Armonk was a symbol of the culture.

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.

[__patchbit__]

Today, a technical leader at IBM should be able to advise Ford leadership on how firmware in trucks, fleetwide, should be refreshed in minutes without all hands behind backs and waiting hours for each truck to be done.

[twoodfin]

Great point. I’m trying to imagine, with the full benefit of hindsight, who that might have been in that era.

Jim Clark is the best I can come up with.

[theologic]

The benches inside of IBM were phenomenally deep. They did not need to go to the outside world.However the research arm was divided into a bunch of buckets in each division had a tendency to be their own siloed operations. The various heads of research were really really good and there was some work to try to pull some of the stuff together but never a single driving overreaching strategy that I saw as an insider.