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.

In the end we gained more than a software company. Culturally we proved that we could keep some organizational distance and allow a fast-moving team to thrive. Perhaps most important, the hostile acquisition sent a clear signal inside and outside IBM that we were out of survival-mode status and serious about reclaiming a position of influence in the industry.

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 came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management—any management system, in fact—can set you on the right path and can carry you for a while. But no enterprise—whether in business, government, education, health care, or any area of human endeavor—will succeed over the long haul if those elements aren’t part of its DNA.

I suspect that many successful companies that have fallen on hard times in the past—including IBM, Sears, General Motors, Kodak, Xerox, and many others—saw perhaps quite clearly the changes in their environment. They were probably able to conceptualize and articulate the need for change and perhaps even develop strategies for it. What I think hurt the most was their inability to change highly structured, sophisticated cultures that had been born in a different world.