IBM: Incredible Bunch of Morons. From Product to Service.

IBM:Incredible Bunch of Morons.
IBM: Incredible Bunch of Meat-Heads.

IBM was once a Product-Based company. Now, in 2005, it is a Service-based company. Basically, it has nothing to sell.

What is a Corporation? Have you ever talked to or had lunch with a corporation. A Corporation is a legal fiction created out of thin air. To survive, it has to have Product-Service, Service-Product to sell to the world.

What is IBM selling theses days. What do you use from IBM daily. Not much of anything.

Great companies have great Revolutionary Products that change the world. That's True for Xerox, Apple, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Google. A corporation has to have a Product-Service we use on a daily basis.

IBM lost the relational database business to ORACLE, IP networking to CISCO, Unix servers to SUN, and the PC hardware business to DELL.

Then what does IBM have to sell. Not much of anything, IBM is now a service company with a group of technicians fixing servers and PC.

True, Real companies have products to sell. What engineers and technicians now are selling are the Brain-Skills of the workers. IBM does not own Brains. They can leave at any time. IBM is going the way of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) or WANG to irrelevance.

Gerstner represents what wrong with U.S. executives. All sales, marketing, finance and public relations. It all "HOT AIR"and no Products.

What ever happened to great Products? The English-major who flunked calculus can do the bird-brain, no-brains marketing.

Gerstner middle name was "Frozen Six (6) Months. NO Difference" IBM went from somebody in the tech world to a no-body. All it has now is bunch of techies running around with screwdrivers.

True. Under Gerstner's leadership, IBM went from a great products- company to a service-company. Hence, a company of relevance to a company of no-relevance.

Details... I wanted more supporting details (3.5 to 4 Stars)

Yes Mr Gerstner called all the shots in the 90's and yes he, the company, and the stockholders made a lot of money doing it - and no IBM doesn't need another cheerleader but I must say this book does do a good job of describing what it took to turn around IBM. As a side benefit it also helps bring some logic to the reason "why" the computer arena runs the way it does. In addition it also gives a "business persons'" look at the other major players in the market not just an insider techie perspective.

The target market for this book is for experienced business leaders, young IT managers, AND the everyday computer client.
I would categorize myself as an everyday client. As a client and growing up with Apple as a market leader in the 80's and Microsoft in the 80 & 90's. I would have to say Lou Gerstner's "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance" book was the missing piece to the computer puzzle for me. It balances out what I previously read in Bill Gates' books "The Road Ahead" and "Business at the Speed Thought." The Microsoft desktop with it's web and email access was the standard as far as I was concerned. I simply was not aware of the IBM history that occurred prior to 1990. Looking back, when I was in school we had personal computers on our desktop and in college we had internet access, and when I starting working, email was the norm. So you can imagine my surprise when I picked up this book and discovered that these three technology's were not the norm prior to 1990. I had no idea that much of IBM's work from the 50's & 60's made a lot of today's e-lifestyle possible. Being in the computer industry for the last 12 years and seeing the web reach critical mass and its' subsequent explosion shed little light on what preceded it.

POSITIVES:
Here are a couple of the ideas I liked from the book:
Gerstner's/IBM High Performance Principles: Drivers for success:
1 The marketplace is the driving force behind what a company should be involved in
2 What is at the core of a company: In IBM's case, it is a technology and nothing else
3 Look outside to measure success via customer satisfaction and increased shareholder value
4 Operate as an entrepreneurial organization with minimum of bureaucracy and never ending focus on productivity
5 Have a sense of urgency(Planning & analysis is secondary to action)
6 Never lose sight of strategic vision, direction & mission Reward teamwork
8 Be sensitive to ALL employees needs

NEGATIVES:
When comparing this book to that of GM's Jack: "Straight From The Gut" where you almost need a score card to keep track of all the players - It seems to me, that the entire story of IBM and its' turn around was not told, for what ever reason some information was omitted. I can only recall Mr Gerstner pointing out at the most 4 people.

I think it is fair to say Mr Gerstner does minimize the impact that the phone companies, like MCI, had on rolling out a individual customer based internet product in the early 90's.

Furthermore, one of the other things that Mr Gerstner failed to address was the on-going concerns between access types in the public vs private domain: business vs personal use of access, cost sharing and privacy issues when at work. Issues like, on-line shopping, stock trading, personal email, etc are vague and unsupported. Maybe this is because he is not a so-called "techie."

Whether you buy this book or not I think it is safe to say what happens in your cube on your desktop right now was made possible in large part by the people in this book, ALL the IBM folks (past and present) as well as their competitors.

In summary I can say that I looked at this title a year ago and now in retrospect after finishing it, I wish I hadn't waited so long to read it. I picked up the CD version at the library

Memoirs of An Arrogant Genius

Gerstner is arrogant but with good reason. He knew what to do and did it, however unpopular it was. He was brought in to save this company (and protect its shareholders) from the foibles of the career IBMers who, without malice, were destroying what the Watsons had created. He wasn't there to protect jobs or careers. Gerstner rightly saw that IBM should not be a welfare program for "loyal" employees; it had to be a productive and profitable enterprise and he did what was necessary. Good for him. Genius is always hard to pin down but I have no doubt that this man is a genius and "Elephants" gives great insight into his thinking and actions. (But it also makes clear that, as Shakespeare might say of Lou, "The milk of human kindness does not flow through his veins.)