I’ve had a lot of experience turning around troubled companies, and one of the first things I learned was that whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why.

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.

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 was depressed to realize that despite the powerful logic—that this services-led model was IBM’s unique competitive advantage—the culture of IBM would fight it.

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.