Now, I must tell you, I am not sure that in 1993 I or anyone else would have started out to create an IBM. But, given IBM’s scale and broad-based capabilities, and the trajectories of the information technology industry, it would have been insane to destroy its unique competitive advantage and turn IBM into a group of individual component suppliers—more minnows in an ocean.

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.

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.

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.

In IBM’s culture of “no”—a multiphased conflict in which units competed with one another, hid things from one another, and wanted to control access to their territory from other IBMers—the foot soldiers were IBM staff people. Instead of facilitating coordination, they manned the barricades and protected the borders.