Over New Year’s I read Lou Gerstner’s “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance”, on the suggestion of Yoav “the bestower of nicknames” Shapira. It was a good read, especially interesting to me as I left IBM 6 months earlier. The IBM I joined was already post-Gerstner. So it was really interesting for me to read about the Gerstner era as I could see the long term changes he had imparted (and some of the things that didn’t necessarily change as much as he’d hoped). Three things that stood out:
1) The Mainframe. Gerstner centers much of the narrative around the break from complete reliance on the mainframe business. My first job out of school was at Kenan Systems, a company focused on delivering a UNIX-based billing system to telecommunications carriers. It’s whole business was staked on replacing mainframes. And I never ever interacted with mainframes in school — we had all sorts of UNIX machines filling up our computer labs in school. By the time I joined IBM as part of the acquisition of iPhrase, IBM put us in with the “distributed” software business, in Information Management. We were completely separated from the mainframe business, for the most part. We executed our business with a set of practices and set of salespeople that were completely separate. Honestly, the mainframe business at IBM was like an entirely different planet to me: different salespeople, different licenses, different SKU’s (even for the same product), different release cycles.
So to read that the IBM that greeted Gerstner was 100% mainframe focused was an eye-opener. Really, the IBM I worked at was much much different than the IBM that greeted Gerstner in ’92 — heck, the software group didn’t even exist then.
2) The Focus on Competition. Gerstner, in the book, frequently talks about pushing the company to focus more on the customer and the competition. Gerstner hammered on about focusing on beating the competition — a mindset that apparently was not prevalent at IBM at the time. The piece about the competition really struck me because focusing on the competition was prominent in a lot of the business process templates we needed to follow (DCP’s for you IBMers out there). It almost felt over-emphasized whenever I was going through the investment approval process at IBM — and now it makes sense. Gerstner wanted it there when those business processes were presumably developed.
3) Executive Assistants. The description of executive assistants at IBM cracked me up, in part, because my manager at IBM took a turn as one. Just seems like a concept from another time and place. It wasn’t totally excised.
What did you think?
