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 have worked in services companies (McKinsey and American Express) and product companies (RJR Nabisco and IBM). I will state unequivocally that services businesses are much more difficult to manage.

Our wonderful technology was whipped by a product that was merely okay, but supported by a company that truly understood what the customer wanted. For a “solutions” company like IBM, it was a bitter but vital lesson.

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.

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.