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In 1990, IBM had its most profitable year ever. By 1993, the computer industry had changed so rapidly the company was on its way to losing $16 billion and IBM was on a watch list for extinction -- victimized by its own lumbering size, an insular corporate culture, and the PC era IBM had itself helped invent.
Then Lou Gerstner was brought in to run IBM. Almost everyone watching the rapid demise of this American icon presumed Gerstner had joined IBM to preside over its continued dissolution into a confederation of autonomous business units. This strategy, well underway when he arrived, would have effectively eliminated the corporation that had invented many of the industry's most important technologies.
Instead, Gerstner took hold of the company and demanded the managers work together to re-establish IBM's mission as a customer-focused provider of computing solutions. Moving ahead of his critics, Gerstner made the hold decision to keep the company together, slash prices on his core product to keep the company competitive, and almost defiantly announced, "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision."
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? tells the story of IBM's competitive and cultural transformation. In his own words, Gerstner offers a blow-by-blow account of his arrival at the company and his campaign to rebuild the leadership team and give the workforce a renewed sense of purpose. In the process, Gerstner defined a strategy for the computing giant and remade the ossified culture bred by the company's own success.
The first-hand story of an extraordinary turnaround, a unique case study in managing a crisis, and a thoughtful reflection on the computer industry and the principles of leadership, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement. Taking readers deep into the world of IBM's CEO, Gerstner recounts the high-level meetings and explains the pressure-filled, no-turning-back decisions that had to be made. He also offers his hard-won conclusions about the essence of what makes a great company run.
In the history of modern business, many companies have gone from being industry leaders to the verge of extinction. Through the heroic efforts of a new management team, some of those companies have even succeeded in resuscitating themselves and living on in the shadow of their former stature. But only one company has been at the pinnacle of an industry, fallen to near collapse, and then, beyond anyone's expectations, returned to set the agenda. That company is IBM.
- Sales Rank: #138372 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-10-13
- Released on: 2009-10-13
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
good primer on business basics, but not a compelling yarn
By Robert J. Crawford
This is a fairly good book by an immensely talented CEO. It takes up more or less a few decades after the retirement of one of the greatest businessmen of the 20C (TWatson Jr.), when the business had lost its way and was under attack by extremely nimble rivals.
Gerstner took over the failing, almost bankrupt, company and both re-made its startegy and culture, re-focusing it on customer needs and re-engineering it (i.e. laying off an awful lot of people). In this book, he tells the outlines of how he did it, which is indeed extremely interesting. In particular, he stresses that while a strategy is needed, implementation of it is far more important.
Unfortunately, he does not go into enough detail for the reader to fully understand what he faced and how he did it. Neither the technology nor the brutal methods he had to employ were adequately addressed, at least for me. I read it carefully and did not feel I had had quite the full meal I expected. The reader also gets virtually no insight into what makes Gerstner tick, other than that he "wants to win" with passion. THe book was also entirely written by Gerstner; his style is competent, if somewhat like a business memo: good analyses are "actionable" and effective actions are "impactful."
Nonetheless, this is a very good primer on basic strategy and organizational behavior. He has lots of valuable advice to give and pinpoints many important issues. I will keep it and return to it.
THere were some things that I found questionable and surprising, if also unintentionally revealing. FOr example, he made IBM both an honest broker in offering comprehensive technology-based business solutions - for the first time, its employees could recommend the hardware of competitors if they better suited the customers' needs - while another part of the company continued to strive to produce the best hardware. This flatly contradicts both what Porter advises and Gerstner himself argues elsewhere in the book regarding the self-reinforcing compatibility of the elements of a business strategy and makes me question if Gerstner really thought it all thru. In addition, he astonishingly posits that Japanese business reporters are the best in the world, when in fact - and I worked in Japan for Nikkei, a leading business news wire service - they are merely part of the PR apparatus of firms, reporting verbatim what they were told to report by companies! If that is what Gerstner expected of Western reporters, then he was naive. But then, he was a benevolent dictator and is open about his dislike and lack of trust of the press.
REcommended. But if you really want a rivetting account of IBM, I would recommend Watson's autobio, Father Son & Co. There is also an excellent account of the turnaround of Xerox, using TQM, that is far more compelling a read than this book.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Inside the Head of a CEO at Turnaround Time
By Wally Bock
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?
Who says an arrogant guy can't write a helpful book?
There are a lot of people who don't like this book. Some don't like it, because they perceive Lewis V. Gerstner as arrogant. Some don't like it, because his tenure at IBM saw thousands of people lose their jobs. Some don't like it, because they don't think there is anything new here. I like this book.
I like the book, because it is one of the most cogently and personally presented stories I've seen of a major corporate turnaround by the person who was in the CEO's job at the time. Here's a quick outline of the story.
Gerstner became Chairman and CEO of IBM in April, 1993. At that time, IBM, once the icon of American management, was in big trouble. The deathwatch was on. The conventional wisdom among the pundits was that IBM needed to be broken up and sold off piece by piece to create lots of small businesses that would create income for shareholders.
This was the heyday of the dot com boom. Smaller, networked computers were expected to rule the future. Big mainframe computers, the stuff that IBM sold, were supposed to be the troglodytes of American business, and heading for extinction.
Gerstner came to IBM after being a McKinsey consultant and after a successful eleven-year career at American Express, and four years as Chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco. He describes what he calls "the courtship" that brought him to IBM in the beginning of this book.
The company he took over was once seen as the very model of the best in management. When I was starting out in business some thirty-five years ago, we looked to IBM as an exemplar of all that was good, effective and profitable. In 1982, Peters and Waterman featured IBM in "In Search of Excellence," with a long list of references in the index.
But by the time Gerstner took over many of the things that had made IBM great had fossilized. Many of the practices that had been touchstones had turned into radioactive rocks.
Gerstner started off with three critical challenges. He needed to stop the hemorrhaging of cash and stabilized the company. He needed to learn enough about the business and the people he had walked into to make good strategic choices. And he needed to put together a strategy to turn IBM around.
This book tells us about how he did all of those things. It does so candidly and that's one of the reasons I like the book.
While lots of people see Gerstner as arrogant, I found him, at least in this book, to be humble. That doesn't mean that he didn't think he had a lot to offer and had made lots of good decisions. It does mean that he understood that many of his decisions didn't work out the way he thought, and some of his ideas weren't the best. Those get play, too, and that's rare in a book like this.
I also appreciated the refreshing style of the book. It was not written with a ghostwriter or co-author. Gerstner did it himself. The language may not be the language that a professional writer would have chosen. But it is the language that's common to businesspeople everywhere, and that makes this a good read.
The big advantage of this is that we get a real view inside the head of someone who led a successful corporate turnaround. We don't get a view that's filtered through a collaborator.
Because Gerstner wrote the book, it's short on some of the details that might be here if a business historian or journalist did the writing. For my money, that's OK, because this is a real inside view.
This book is for you if you want a lucid discussion of a difficult turnaround process by the CEO who did the CEO's job. It is all of that and a good read besides.
75 of 94 people found the following review helpful.
Saving IBM from Itself
By A Customer
While at IBM Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. developed a reputation of aloof arrogance. One would not suspect this from reading his book, in which he gives generous credit to the tens of thousands of people who created the company and to many others, some by name, who helped to save and resurrect it.
As a former IBM executive who took early retirement twenty years ago, just as the company's bureaucracy was beginning to strangle the organization, I was fascinated to learn how that bureaucracy spread and the extremes to which it went, creating a culture thst led to decisions (if any) by committee, conspiratorial compromise, and self-protective behavior. This is not the IBM I had known. Even more interesting is the rapidity with which Louis Gerstner diagnosed the sickness of the company and the speed and persistence with which he administered tough medicine.
Despite IBM's near-terminal condition Gerstner saw it correctly not only as a business enterprise but as a "national treasure" that was well worth the collossal efforts needed to restore it.
Unlike Jack Welch's adolescent "Jack: Straight from the Gut", this book focuses on the processes of leadership and management, strategic choice, and the decision process. But it speaks also to the essential importance of corporate culture, at IBM a way of life that is based on values rather than just on being first.
As a recovering IBMer I salute Mr. Gerstner for his remarkable achievements and as a reader applaud him for this exceptional contribution to the business book genre.
Don't miss it.
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