Below are key excerpts that I found particularly insightful in this book, detailing the turnaround that Louis Gerstner engineered at IBM in the 1990s:1- "Thus began a lifelong process of trying to build organizations that allows for hierarchy but at he same time bring people together for problem solving, regardless of where they are positioned within the organization."2- "I went on to summarize my management philosophy and practice: I manage by principle, not procedure. The marketplace dictates everything we should do. I'm a big believer in quality, strong competitive strategies and plans, teamwork, payoff for performance, and ethical responsibility. I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues. I sack politicians. I am heavily involved in strategy; the rest is yours to implement. Just keep me informed in an informal way. Don't hide bad information—1 hate surprises. Don't try to blow things by me. Solve problems laterally; don't keep bringing them up the line. Move fast. If we make mistakes, let them be because we are too fast rather than too slow. Hierarchy means very little to me. Let's put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position. Reduce committees and meetings to a minimum. No committee decision making. Let's have lots of candid, straightforward communications. I don't completely understand the technology. I'll need to learn it. but don't expect me to master it. The unit leaders must be the translators into business terms for me."3- "After all the customer and employee and industry meetings, as well as weekend and air travel reflection, I was indeed ready to make four critical decisions: Keep the company together. Change our fundamental economic model. Reengineer how we did business. Sell underproductive assets in order to raise cash."4- "I've had a lot of experience turning around troubled companies, and one of the first things I learned was that whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why."5- "The sine qua non of any successful corporate transformation is public acknowledgment of the existence of a crisis. If e So there must be a crisis, and it is the job of the CEO to define and communicate that crisis, its magnitude, its severity, and its impact. Just as important, the CEO must also be able to communicate how to end the crisis—the new strategy, the new company model, the new culture. All of this takes enormous commitment from the CEO to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more."6- "What drives IBM's unique complexity is twofold. First, every institution and almost every individual is an actual or potential customer of IBM. In The second complexity factor is the rate and pace of the underlying technology."7- "All of our efforts to save IBM—through right-sizing i and reengineering and creating strategy and boosting morale and all the rest—would have been for naught if, while we were hard at work on the other things, the IBM brand fell apart. I have always believed a successful company must have a customer/market•lace 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."8- "We made four major changes to our compensation system...This was all about pay for performance, not loyalty or tenure. It was all about differentiation: Differentiate our overall pay based on the marketplace; differentiate our increases based on individual performance and pay in the marketplace; differentiate our bonuses based business performance and individual contributions; and differentiate our stock-option awards based on the critical skills of the individual and our risk of loss to competition."9- "I wanted IBMers to think and act like long-term shareholders to feel the pressure from the marketplace to deploy assets and forge strategies that create competitive advantage. The market, over time, represents a brutally honest evaluator of relative performance, and what I needed was a strong incentive for IBMers to look at their company from the outside in."10- "The skills required in managing services processes are very different from those that drive successful product companies. We had no experience building a labor-based business inside an asset-intensive company. We were expert at managing factories and developing technologies. We understood cost of goods and inventory turns and manufacturing. But a human-intensive services business is entirely different. In services you don't make a product and then sell it. You sell a capability. You sell knowledge. You create it at the same time you deliver it. The business model is different. The economics are entirely different."11- "My point is that all of the assets that the company needed to succeed were in place. But in every case—hardware, technology, software, even services—all of these capabilities were part of a business model that had fallen wildly out of step with marketplace realities...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 tor decades been immune to normal competitive and economic forces. The challenge was making that workforce live, compete, and win in the real world. It was like taking a lion raised for all of its life in captivity and suddenly teaching it to survive in the jungle."12- "You've probably found, as I have, that most companies say their cultures are about the same things—outstanding customer service. excellence, teamwork, shareholder value, responsible corporate behavior, and integrity. But, of course, these kinds of values don't necessarily translate into the same kind of behavior in all companies—how people actually go about their work, how they interact with one another, what motivates them. That's because, as with national cultures. most of the really important rules aren't written down anywhere."13- "In comparison, changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. Business schools don't teach you how to do it. You can't lead the revolution from the splendid isolation of corporate headquarters. You can't simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can't mandate it, :an't engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn't change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture."14- "Thee work-a-day world of business isn't about fads or miracles. There are fundamentals that characterize successful enterprises anc successful executives. They are focused. They are superb at execution. They abound with personal leadership."15- "At the end of the day a successful, focused enterprise is one that has developed a deep understanding of its customers' needs, its competitive environment, and its economic realities. This comprehensive analysis must then form the basis for specific strategies :hat are translated into day-to-day execution."16- "Earlier in this section I mentioned that in every industry it is possible to identify the five or six key success factors that drive leadership performance. The best companies in an industry build processes that allow them to outperform their competitors vis-a-vis these success factors."17- "This next generation of leaders—in both the public and private sectors—will have to expand its thinking around a set of economic, political, and social considerations. These leaders will be: Much more able to deal with the relentless, discontinuous change that this technology is creating. Much more global in outlook and practice. Much more able to strike an appropriate balance between the instinct for cultural preservation and the promise of regional or global cooperation. Much more able to embrace the fact that the world is moving to a model in which the "default" in every endeavor will be openness and integration, not isolation."
Эту книгу мне рекомендовали давно и теперь я понимаю почему. "Кто сказал, что слоны не умеют танцевать?" Луи Герстнера - почти автобиографическая книга. Только повествование идет не об отдельном человеке, а о компании IBM в то время, когда решался вопрос, оставаться ли ей на рынке или умирать.Луис Герстнер пришел в компанию IBM генеральным директором и председателем совета директоров в 1993 году. На тот момент компания напоминала полумертвого динозавра, которого пинали все, кому не лень. И не простого динозавра, а эпилептика, который лихорадочно дергался, так как каждое подразделение жило своей жизнью и проводило свою политику на рынке. К тому времени IBM уже пережила пик своей славы, который базировался на популярности мейнфреймов, и понемногу теряла рынок в борьбе с персональными компьютерами и серверами других производителей. Появление большого количества ИТ компаний поменьше, которые откусывали куски рынка, на котором традиционно сильна была IBM, сподвигло тогдашнее руководство пойти по пути выпиливания некоторых департаментов в отдельные компании, что должно было улучшить их конкурентное преимущество. Но фактически это служило пинками под бок медленно умирающей материнской компании, и не выводило эти отдельные компании в топы продаж. С другой стороны внутри самой IBM в управлении на уровне департаментов появилась практика руководствоваться не глобальными интересами компании, а создавать себе возможность для успешного отделения. В том числе и за счет конкуренции между разными департаментами. Так что к моменту появления Герстнера в качестве руководителя компании, IBM представляла собой огромное чудовище, которое разваливалось на глазах, и отдельные части пытались убить друг друга.А вот дальше и идет описание того, как человек, который пришел в технологический бизнес со стороны и знает о нем только с точки зрения клиента, пытается все исправить.Если глобально и коротко, то вернуть былую мощь IBM получилось за счет:- консолидации и централизации стратегии и управления;- концентрации на ключевых направлениях деятельности и избавлении от побочных;- перевод концепции бизнеса с продуктов на комплексные решения и сервисы;- изменение внутренней культуры компании.Учитывая то, что решения принимались в 90-х, книга написана в 2002, а я читал это все в 2011, то общее впечатление конечно интересное. Многие технические решения, которые были приняты в рамках изменения концепции компании, изменили не только саму IBM, но весь мир ИТ. И с точки зрения второго десятилетия XXI-го века все это кажется едва ли не самоочевидным. Но тогда это был прыжок выше головы, и он у них получился. Изменение внутренней культуры - еще одна задача, которая в любом случае подразумевает большое сопротивление сотрудников. А если этих сотрудников около 300 тысяч - это еще та задачка. Немаловажен еще фактор времени: с одной стороны, времени очень мало и если не успеем - то все, а с другой стороны - легче всего принимать медленные изменения. С этой стороны книга читалась почти как драматический детектив, финал которого известен заранее и интересны в первую очередь способы разрешения вопросов.Закончить хочу цитатой из книги:Вопрос не в том, могут ли слоны победить муравьев. Вопрос в том, умеет ли данный конкретный слон танцевать. И если да, то муравьям лучше покинуть зал.Оригинал рецензии: Умеют ли слоны танцевать?
What do You think about Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround (2002)?
One of the most compelling thing about a self told story is it is very difficult to make it to the point. Louis Gerstner has pulled the correct strings in pointing out what happened, what needed to be done and what he did. It is a really interesting read especially people under going management training to look at the broader picture. The book talks about things like organisation culture, gravevine, strategy vs tactics vs vision. It talks about small organisations and big organisations. It talk about big elephants and small ants and whether as IBM (read an elephant) can dance. IBM, a legacy (of the Watsons) something that truly depicted the true American growth story was in need of transformation ans Louis Gerstner can to the rescue. The book mentions that Gerstner was called to rip apart IBM and sell it off in pieces but he looked at the problem differently and brought a change !!!! ( at a time when competitors used to say - "IBM? They are not dead. They are irrelevant.")
—Kaustubh Kirti
I was interested in following IBM after Warren Buffett bought the stock aggressively. This book recounts the turnaround episode after Louis Gerstner joined as CEO in 1993 to save IBM from the brink of collapse. What brought a once mighty company to the brink of collapse? Warren Buffett mentioned the ABCs of corporate decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. You could certainly see all 3 traits of corporate cancer metastasize within IBM in the early 1990s. Louis Gertnser's analysis of what brought about the cultural malaise at IBM was instructive - how did tens of thousands of employees at a once dominant and powerful firm grow soft, risk averse and slow? (1) Marketing myopia and being trapped by the legacy success of System/360; and (2) the impact of an antitrust suit filed by the US Department of Justice against IBM in 1969.Gerstner's recount of his frantic 1st year as CEO as he raced to stop the cash haemorrhage at IBM was exciting. It was as if the reader was observing the turnaround of IBM from the cockpit of the CEO as Louis Gerstner tried to pilot the giant corporation away from a fatal crash. Part 2 of the book was on setting the strategic direction of IBM for the next decade of Gertner's term as CEO: keeping IBM intact; pushing services and setting the agenda for e-business. In Part 3 of his book, Gerstner shares his perspective on the most important and challenging aspect of the turnaround - the cultural transformation at IBM under his leadership.'Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?' provides useful insights on corporate turnarounds and one learns from the playbook of a legendary CEO. I enjoyed it along with Iacocca's autobiography on saving Chrysler from the brink of bankruptcy. Post script 2015, IBM finds itself in need of another strategic turnaround. It is still an open question whether current CEO Ginni Rometty can galvanise the organization and help it ride the new tech wave in cloud computing, Big Data and artificial intelligence. http://www.forbes.com/2002/11/11/cx_l...
—Sanford Chee
Truth be told, I don't have much use for C-level executives. Most of what I see about them involves obscene levels of compensation, on an annual basis, personal secretaries and use of expensive corporate assets, like company planes. The company can be laying off middle-class people like me, but the executives pocket obscene amounts of money, vacation at their beach houses and generally live a very disconnected life from the rest of us. They're the counter-example to the notion that the USA has a classless society.Fine. Maybe e reading a book about an arguably-successful CEO will change my opinion.A ship, when a good one with a fine crew, needs a captain. Someone who can look the situation over and make a binding decision. Anyone familiar with Star Trek knows that Spock and Scotty and Riker are all capable people. But imagine how situations would've been different without the "barge in and take command" behavior of James Kirk or the wise, patient leadership of Jean-Luc Piccard. These captains take charge and, for better or worse, suffer the consequences of the choices THEY make.So maybe IBM needed a Kirk after too many years of having a Piccard in charge.Honestly, I don't think either of those fictional leaders would've known what to do with IBM of the early 90s. Are we SURE this is Planet Earth? Because it sounds a LOT like some kind of alien world.Here's an organization so completely hamstrung with bureaucracy and obsession with titles you'd think it was an 18th Century royal court in some obscure European nation. People who've been promoted to a certain level refusing to do certain roles because it was beneath their title. People taking titles with them to new roles where, arguably, they "outranked" the people they were reporting to. People who don't delegate their responsibilities (because doing so would diminish their prestige) and have armies of assistants who actually do all the work while the leader just "presides," usually not even needing to give their official "yea" or "nay."Where, if someone attempts to champion some new initiative, it requires sign-off from multiple tiers of leaders, frequently in multiple different fiefdoms. And failure, by any one of them, to provide approval in a timely manner can stop the whole thing in its tracks.This organization is having their a** handed to them by the market, but these people worked long and hard to achieve this position, so they're going to hang onto it.Until someone else gets put in charge and proceeds to shake up the kingdom. And, to his credit, Lou Gerstner did exactly that.He saw the rise of e-business. Indeed, they were the main organization championing that concept. He also saw the dot-com bubble. At its core, too many people seemed to think the "e-" stood for "easy." We put up a website and people send us money, even though we don't really do any work. We have an IPO and give ourselves massive numbers of shares. Other people bid up the value of those shares, we cash out and go on a permanent vacation. Easy.At its core, e-business is just business over a different medium. And real business is hard work.He correctly calls out investment bankers as the people who "organized the the party and supplied the booze" for the fiasco that was the dot-com bubble. The investors supplied (and promptly lost) the money and the tech entrepreneurs supplied the talent and the reputations. The investment banks ended up with all the money. Everyone else lost pretty much everything. Sound familiar?Apparently, where C-level executives are concerned, a great leader is someone who recognizes BS and has the ability to put a stop to it. And get people and an organization to stop wasting time and money and do what they need to do. The path he put IBM on has served it rather well: services are where the money is. His successors have continued down that path to the present day. Where they're laying off their experienced people and offshoring so much of the work that it's nearly impossible to find anyone to talk to about getting your contracted services fixed and working properly. Sounds like they need another guy like this to come along and seriously alter their course again.
—Tony
