In 1911, Endicott, New York, a company called “Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR)” was founded by Herman Hollerith, Charles Flint and Thomas J. Watson Sr. A company we now know as IBM. The founders enshrined three core values into the company: “Respect for the individual”, “The best customer service” and “The pursuit of excellence”. The values that were meant to last forever.
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Milton Friedman's ideas basically ruined it for everyone but investors.
Hopefully he is sizzlin' right now.
I went through the transition to Gerstner and the disembodiment of the core values. IBM, in keeping with its core values, offered generous early retirement incentives in the mid'80s. Even then, signs were there that this program was insufficient.
Full-employment continued, but the $B losses in the early '90s were too much. I was in management by this time. It was gut-wrenching to sit in a room and rank employees. A lot of anger and dismay over the task. Tears were shed. T.J.W. Jr stopped by and spoke to my new managers class. We were expected to embody the core values, now we were being asked to abandon them by and outsider.
Subsequent layoffs and divestitures continued as LG and team transformed the company Hundreds of employees transferred as divisions were sold and services vended out.
As the '90s ended, the sale of the division meant I too was no longer and IBMer. I am thankful I had the opportunity to experience the IBM of "old" when exe's cared.
It is probably very rare these days to find an employer who cares about and respects their employees. Once in a great while you hear about a CEO who cut his own salary or gave his bonus to his employees
When Lou Gerstner became CEO, Watson Jr tasked him with saving IBM at all costs. Saving IBM was job 1 and everything else was a rounding error. Gerstner said this approx 90 days later (see below) and it shows how he saved IBM by changing its core beliefs to focus on shareholder value. He changed IBM forever, but isn’t it amazing how the old “save IBM at all costs” problems have resurfaced and the solutions then, are almost identical to the fixes needed today. That says IBM management never really learned their lesson, and just fell back into old habits.
“ I said something at the press conference that turned out to be the most quotable statement I ever made:
“What I’d like to do now is put these announcements in some sort of perspective for you. There’s been a lot of speculation as to when I’m going to deliver a vision of IBM, and what I’d like to say to all of you is that the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” You could almost hear the reporters blink.
I went on: “What IBM needs right now is a series of very tough-minded, market-driven, highly effective strategies for each of its businesses— strategies that deliver performance in the marketplace and shareholder value. And that’s what we’re working on.
“Now, the number-one priority is to restore the company to profitability. I mean, if you’re going to have a vision for a company, the first frame of that vision better be that you’re making money and that the company has got its economics correct.
“And so we are committed to make this company profitable, and that’s what today’s actions are about.
“The second priority for the company,” I said, “is to win the battle in the customers’ premises. And we’re going to do a lot of things in that regard, and again, they’re not visions— they’re people making things happen to serve customers.”
I said we didn’t need a vision right now because I had discovered in my first ninety days on the job that IBM had file drawers full of vision statements. We had never missed predicting correctly a major technological trend in the industry. In fact, we were still inventing most of the technology that created those changes.
However, what was also clear was that IBM was paralyzed, unable to act on any predictions, and there were no easy solutions to its problems. The IBM organization, so full of brilliant, insightful people, would have loved to receive a bold recipe for success—the more sophisticated, the more complicated the recipe, the better everyone would have liked it.
It wasn’t going to work that way. The real issue was going out and making things happen every day in the marketplace.
…
Fixing IBM was all about execution. We had to stop looking for people to blame, stop tweaking the internal structure and systems. I wanted no excuses. I wanted no long-term projects that people could wait for that would somehow produce a magic turnaround. I wanted— IBM needed— an enormous sense of urgency. “
The core values of IBM's founders were supplanted by Milton Friedman's ideas on shareholder primacy. Senior executives focus on money, cash flow and stock prices because that is all they know, and that is all they care about. Everything else that you see is just a means to that end.
"Respect for the individual”, but only a few years later they started doing Eugenics for profit, targeting black people http://techrights.org/o/2020/08/16/ibm-powered-purges/
When senior executives feel the need to get rid of people despite their having a good track record simply because they are in a position they are targeting versus getting rid of low performers and then reshuffling people as necessary then it shouldn’t be surprising to see that many people will choose to do the bare minimum while bidding their time
Zero for 3. Quite the corporate batting average!