I’ve had a lot of experience turning around troubled companies, and one of the first things I learned was that whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why.

[The key strategic decisions] were:

• Keep the company together and not spin off the pieces.

• Reinvest in the mainframe.

• Remain in the core semiconductor technology business.

• Protect the fundamental R&D budget.

• Drive all we did from the customer back and turn IBM into a market-driven rather than an internally focused, process-driven enterprise.

I have always believed a successful company must have a customer/marketplace orientation and a strong marketing organization. That’s why my second step in creating a global enterprise had to be to fix and focus IBM’s marketing efforts.

Here was a man [Dennie Welsh] who understood what customers were willing to spend money on, and he knew what that meant—not just the business potential for IBM, but the coming restructuring of the industry around solutions rather than piece parts.

This kind of wrenching cultural change doesn’t happen by executive fiat. As I found, I couldn’t flip a switch and alter behaviors. It was, by any measure, the hardest part of IBM’s transformation, and at times I thought it couldn’t be done.