Tag Archive 'Focus on Solutions'

  • Invest in R&D: the Solutions Perspective

  • Shortly after Gerstner arrived at IBM, he demonstrated his willingness to invest in the company’s future, in the form of research and development, despite the company’s mind-numbing losses. On the table was his predecessor’s plan to dissolve IBM’s research and development department. Again, Gerstner went in the opposite direction. He decided to keep the Watson [...]

  • From Big Iron to E-Business Juggernaut

  • The bold moves that Gerstner made early on proved that IBM’s CEO was among the first leaders of long-established companies to grasp the mind-boggling potential of Internet technology. The IBM chief regards the Internet not as simply another new technology, but as the leading edge of a bona fide paradigm shift: Every day it becomes [...]

  • When Hardware Stalls, Turn to Service

  • Gerstner knew that IBM’s hardware business, which had carried the company for so long, was shrinking at an alarming rate. Within a 3-year span during the early 1990s, hardware sales dropped 50 percent, erasing more than $14 billion in hardware profits. Meanwhile, margins were thinning to an alarming degree. Although the company sold $12 billion [...]

  • Gaining the Solutions Edge

  • Early in his tenure, the new IBM chief set his sights on expenses. Desperate to get costs under control, Gerstner eliminated 60,000 jobs in his first year as CEO, using the blunt instruments of layoffs and early retirements to transform IBM’s unyielding white-shirt culture. Jumping to the punch line, the effort (and related efforts) was [...]

  • Put a Customer in the CEO’s Office

  • But Gerstner knew he had to go far beyond simply keeping the company together. He knew that a dramatic shift in mind-set and culture would be a key prerequisite for any sustained turnaround. Through his personal observations, he had determined that the company’s insularity and arrogance had helped to fuel its downfall—that the company’s long [...]

  • One IBM is Better Than Eight

  • In December of 1992, IBM’s then CEO John Akers developed a plan to break up his company into several smaller units. The plan—to some extent motivated by the Justice Department-inspired break-up of the Bell system into the "Baby Bells"—had many advocates, especially within the company. With IBM in such dire straits, many insiders believed that [...]

  • What Would Lou Gerstner Do?

  • IBM is a solutions company. We start with a customer’s business problem, and work back to the right combination of technologies and expertise. —LOU GERSTNER, former CEO, IBM So there was IBM, the company that had led the prior phase of computing and had invented many of the industry’s most important technologies, crawling out of [...]