Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change (34 page)

As I’ve already noted in the discussion of the current crisis on confidence in business in general, integrity will matter more than ever before.

276 / LOUIS V. GERSTNER, JR.

Yet I think it’s typically the case that people who aren’t forced to deal with the technology rarely make the effort to understand either its possibilities or its limitations. In the nuclear era, maybe that was all right. But for technologies as pervasive as the ones we’re dealing with today, I believe we’re going to need leaders in government, business, and policy-making roles who commit themselves to the challenge of lifelong learning in order to bring society into sync with the science.

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.

As someone who’s just spent a decade inside the high-tech industry, I can say with confidence that its technologies are magnificent creations. But never believe that the technologies themselves come to us as self-contained answers. They are not mystical solutions to the most difficult and most important problems—like bias, poverty, intolerance, and fear—that have been with peoples and societies for all time. Those problems yield only to the most intensely human solutions—the kind that are devised by people of free will and self-determination, who possess the ability to choose and to decide, to think and to reason, and to apply the tools at their disposal to generate the greatest benefits, for the greatest number of people.

Appendix B

Financial overview of the IBM Transformation
The charts in this Appendix summarize IBM’s operational and financial performance for the years 1992-2001.

278 / LOUIS V. GERSTNER, JR.

International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Revenue ($ billions)

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International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Net Income ($ in billions)

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International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Earnings per Share-Diluted

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International Business Machines Corporation and subsidiary
Companies

Cash Flow from Operations ($ in billions)

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International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Return on Stockholders’ Equity

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International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Employees

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International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Stock Price

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International Business Machines Corporation and Subsidiary
Companies

Revenue ($ in billions)

Index

account control

accountability

administrative assistants

Advantis

advertising:

agency consolidation

brand revival

Charlie Chaplin commercials

e-business campaign

Ogilvy & Mather

“Solutions for a Small Planet,”

Advertising Age

Akers, John

Amdahl

American Express:

acquisitions by

compensation in

customer service in

Gerstner’s exit

Gerstner’s experience

Harvard Business School cases on

Travel Related Services

American Express Card

annual report

antitrust scrutiny

AOL Time Warner

288 / LOUIS V. GERSTNER, JR.

application software

Associated Press

AT&T

autonomic computing

Barbarians at the Gate
(Burroughs and Helyar)
Barron’s

Basic Beliefs

Black, Cathie

Bossidy, Larry

Bouchard, Tom, foreword

BUNCH

Burdick, Walt

Burke, Jim

Burroughs, as competitor

Burroughs, Bryan

Business Week

California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) Carnegie, Andrew

Carroll, Paul

cash flow:

importance of

centralization VS. decentralization

CEOs (Chief Executive Officers):

leadership

qualities

visibility

CEO (Chief Financial Officer), search for

Chenault, Ken

chip lithography

CIOs (Chief Information Officers)

Cisco

Citibank

client/server

Clinton, Bill

CMOS technology

Coca-Cola

WHO SAYS ELEPHANTS CAN’T DANCE? / 289

Comdex trade show, Las Vegas

community service

Compaq Computer

compensation

benefits

bonuses

differentiation in

of IBM executives

incentive programs

performance-based

stock ownership

variable pay

Computer Associates

Computer Wars
(Morris and Ferguson) Congress, U.S.

connectivity

contention system

Control Data

convergence

corporate culture

bureaucratic

changing

codification of

community service in

performance-based

Corporate Executive Committee (CEC)

Corporate Management Board

corporate marketing

corporate officerships

Cummins, Isabelle