It became clear to me at that point that the company, either consciously or unconsciously, was milking the S/390 and that the business was on a path to die. I told the team that, effective immediately, the milking strategy was over and instructed them to get back to me with an aggressive price reduction plan that we could announce two weeks later at a major customer conference.

I created a Worldwide Management Council (WMC) to encourage communication among our businesses. The WMC had thirty-five members and was to meet four or five times a year in two-day sessions to discuss operating unit results and company-wide initiatives. In my mind, however, its primary purpose was to get the executive team working together as a group with common goals—and not to act as some United Nations of sovereign countries.

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.

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’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.