15: BUILDING THE WORLDâS ALREADY BIGGEST SOFTWARE BUSINESS
â... the fight for desktop superiority, pitting IBMâs OS/2 operating system against Microsoftâs Windows. It was draining tens of millions of dollars, absorbing huge chunks of senior managementâs time, and making a mockery of our image. And in the finest IBM fashion, we were going to fight to the bitter end.
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He said the basic research unit was not affordable and needed to be downsized. He was quite concerned about IBMâs software business, mainframe business, and midrange products. As I look back at my notes, it is clear he understood most, if not all, of the business issues we tackled over the ensuing years. Whatâs striking from my notes is the absence of any mention of culture, teamwork, customers, or leadershipâthe elements that turned
out to be the toughest challenges at IBMâŚ
I went home with a deepening sense of fear. Could I pull this off? Who was going to help me?
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 IBMâs 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 suppliersâmore minnows in an ocean.
I think it would have been absolutely naĂŻveâas well as dangerousâif 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. Iâve 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.
Opening up our stack (and our minds) to others had many positive effects on IBM. It cut our losses and improved our integrated offerings to customers. And it freed up resources to invest in the future. Huge sums of money and huge quantities of brainpower have been redeployed from wall-banging futility to exciting new work in areas such as storage systems, self-directing computers, bioinformatics, and nanotechnology.
This kind of wrenching cultural change doesnât happen by executive fiat. As I found, I couldnât flip a switch and alter behaviors. It was, by any measure, the hardest part of IBMâs transformation, and at times I thought it couldnât be done.