I was depressed to realize that despite the powerful logic—that this services-led model was IBM’s unique competitive advantage—the culture of IBM would fight it.

For IBM, breaking with our proprietary past meant walking away from all the historic architectural control points.

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