All of this takes enormous commitment from the CEO to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more. No institutional transformation takes place, I believe, without a multi-year commitment by the CEO to put himself or herself constantly in front of employees and speak in plain, simple, compelling language that drives conviction and action throughout the organization.

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.

We got there in stages because, while you can force anything down the throat of an organization, if people don’t buy into the logic, the change won’t stick.

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 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.