That was a difficult time for me. I love building businesses, not disassembling them. However, we all have an opportunity to learn in everything we do. I came away from this experience with a profound appreciation of the importance of cash in corporate performance—“free cash flow” as the single most important measure of corporate soundness and performance.

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.

Our messaging allowed our customers to see benefits and value that were not being articulated by our competitors. The concept of e-business galvanized our workforce and created a coherent context for our hundreds of products and services.

I have always been an advocate for use of plain language that one’s customers easily understand, whether it be for invoices, contracts, or simple correspondence. So I decided to begin the end of widespread in-house terms.

23: FOCUS - YOU HAVE TO KNOW (AND LOVE) YOUR BUSINESS

“History shows that truly great and successful companies go through constant and sometimes difficult self-renewal of the base business. They don’t jump into new pools where they have no sense of the depth or temperature of the water.