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.

I think it would have been absolutely naïve—as well as dangerous—if I had come into a company as complex as IBM with a plan to import a band of outsiders somehow magically to run the place better than the people who were there in the first place. I’ve entered other companies from the outside, and based on my experience, you might be able to pull that off at a small company in a relatively simple industry and under optimal conditions.

Fortunately, by the 1980s there were pockets of radical thought inside IBM that were already agitating for the company to join the open movement. And by the mid-1990s, we’d mounted the massive technical and cultural effort required to repudiate closed computing at IBM and open up our products to interoperate with other industry-leading platforms.

Just consider that IBM’s contracts with Sony and Nintendo in 2001 hold the potential to produce more intelligent devices than the entire PC industry produced in 2000.

As a result—and here’s the important point—IBM, for the first time in its history, is now positioned to benefit from the growth of businesses outside the computer industry. This diversification does not take us away from our core skills; we have simply extended them to entirely new markets.

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.