All of this takes enormous commitment from the CEO to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more. No institutional transformation takes place, I believe, without a multi-year commitment by the CEO to put himself or herself constantly in front of employees and speak in plain, simple, compelling language that drives conviction and action throughout the organization.

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.

Abby’s job was to get control of the spending and the messages. I asked her to present a plan to the newly formed Worldwide Management Council at our conference center in Palisades, New York. It was a tough meeting, but she did a very smart thing. When the thirty-five WMC members walked into the room, they found every wall adorned with the advertising, packaging, and marketing collateral of all our agencies. It was a train wreck of brand and product positioning.

I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management—any management system, in fact—can set you on the right path and can carry you for a while. But no enterprise—whether in business, government, education, health care, or any area of human endeavor—will succeed over the long haul if those elements aren’t part of its DNA.

I’m a strong believer in the power of language. The way an organization speaks to its various audiences says a lot about how it sees itself. Everywhere I’ve worked I’ve devoted a good deal of personal attention to the organization’s “voice”—to the conversations it maintains with all of its important constituencies, both inside and outside the company. And I have chosen my own words—whether in written, electronic, or face-to-face communications—very carefully.

The truth is, you can learn a great deal about a place simply by listening to how it talks.