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.

Here was a man [Dennie Welsh] who understood what customers were willing to spend money on, and he knew what that meant—not just the business potential for IBM, but the coming restructuring of the industry around solutions rather than piece parts.

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 can understand the joke that was going around IBM in the early 1990s: “Products aren’t launched at IBM. They escape.