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.

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.

The implications of this kind of leap to a company’s economic model can be devastating. In IBM’s case it meant the collapse of gross profit margins and the attendant changes we had to engineer to lower our cost structure without compromising our effectiveness.

Yet the hardest part of these decisions was neither the technological nor economic transformations required. It was changing the culture—the mindset and instincts of hundreds of thousands of people who had grown up in an undeniably successful company, but one that had for decades been immune to normal competitive and economic forces.

IBM over the past ten years has begun to develop the ability to handle a very high level of internal complexity and even apparent contradiction. Rather than hiding from conflict or suppressing it, we’re learning how to manage it, even benefit from it. This equilibrium can be achieved only when an enterprise has a very sure sense of self.

Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game - it is the game,” Gerstner says. “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 parts of its DNA.”

Chris Lofgren, chief executive of Schneider National, the large transportation and logistics company believes that “culture is a foundation upon which you build your long-term strategy. If you build a strategy that isn’t consistent with the culture, it isn’t going to work.