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Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change (Hardcover)
by Louis V. Gerstner
| Category:
Turnaround, Corporate Restructuring, Change, Leadership |
| Market price: ¥ 288.00
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¥ 268.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
One of the most astounding successful turnaround cases in the entire business history. Required reading for executives and managers. |
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Author: Louis V. Gerstner
Publisher: Collins
Pub. in: November, 2002
ISBN: 0060523794
Pages: 384
Measurements: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00016
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- MSL Picks -
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?
Who says an arrogant guy can't write a helpful book?
There are a lot of people who don't like this book. Some don't like it, because they perceive Lewis V. Gerstner as arrogant. Some don't like it, because his tenure at IBM saw thousands of people lose their jobs. Some don't like it, because they don't think there is anything new here. I like this book.
I like the book, because it is one of the most cogently and personally presented stories I've seen of a major corporate turnaround by the person who was in the CEO's job at the time. Here's a quick outline of the story.
Gerstner became Chairman and CEO of IBM in April, 1993. At that time, IBM, once the icon of American management, was in big trouble. The deathwatch was on. The conventional wisdom among the pundits was that IBM needed to be broken up and sold off piece by piece to create lots of small businesses that would create income for shareholders.
This was the heyday of the dot com boom. Smaller, networked computers were expected to rule the future. Big mainframe computers, the stuff that IBM sold, were supposed to be the troglodytes of American business, and heading for extinction.
Gerstner came to IBM after being a McKinsey consultant and after a successful eleven-year career at American Express, and four years as Chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco. He describes what he calls "the courtship" that brought him to IBM in the beginning of this book.
The company he took over was once seen as the very model of the best in management. When I was starting out in business some thirty-five years ago, we looked to IBM as an exemplar of all that was good, effective and profitable. In 1982, Peters and Waterman featured IBM in "In Search of Excellence," with a long list of references in the index.
But by the time Gerstner took over many of the things that had made IBM great had fossilized. Many of the practices that had been touchstones had turned into radioactive rocks.
Gerstner started off with three critical challenges. He needed to stop the hemorrhaging of cash and stabilized the company. He needed to learn enough about the business and the people he had walked into to make good strategic choices. And he needed to put together a strategy to turn IBM around.
This book tells us about how he did all of those things. It does so candidly and that's one of the reasons I like the book.
While lots of people see Gerstner as arrogant, I found him, at least in this book, to be humble. That doesn't mean that he didn't think he had a lot to offer and had made lots of good decisions. It does mean that he understood that many of his decisions didn't work out the way he thought, and some of his ideas weren't the best. Those get play, too, and that's rare in a book like this.
I also appreciated the refreshing style of the book. It was not written with a ghostwriter or co-author. Gerstner did it himself. The language may not be the language that a professional writer would have chosen. But it is the language that's common to businesspeople everywhere, and that makes this a good read.
The big advantage of this is that we get a real view inside the head of someone who led a successful corporate turnaround. We don't get a view that's filtered through a collaborator.
Because Gerstner wrote the book, it's short on some of the details that might be here if a business historian or journalist did the writing. For my money, that's OK, because this is a real inside view.
This book is for you if you want a lucid discussion of a difficult turnaround process by the CEO who did the CEO's job. It is all of that and a good read besides. (From quoting Walter Bock, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, corporate strategists, entrepreneurs, government and nonprofit leaders, professionals, and MBAs.
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Lou Gerstener, Jr., served as chairman and chief executive officer of IBM from April 1993 to March 2002, when he retired as CEO. He remained chairman of the board through the end of 2002. Before joining IBM, Mr. Gerstner served for four years as chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco, Inc. This was preceded by an eleven-year career at the American Express Company, where he was president of the parent company and chairman and CEO of its largest subsidiary. Prior to that, Mr. Gerstner was a director of the management consulting firm of McKinsey & Co., Inc. He received a bachelor's degree in engineering from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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From the Publisher:
In 1990, IBM had its most profitable year ever. By 1993, the computer industry had changed so rapidly the company was on its way to losing $16 billion and IBM was on a watch list for extinction.
Then Lou Gerstner took hold of the company and demanded the managers work together to re-establish IBM's mission as a customer-focused provider of computing solutions. Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? tells the story of IBM's competitive and cultural transformation. In his own words, Gerstner offers a blow-by-blow account of his arrival at the company and his campaign to rebuild team and give the workforce a renewed sense of purpose. In the process, Gerstner defined a strategy for the computing giant and remade the ossified culture bred by the company's own success.
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement. Taking readers deep into the world of IBM's CEO, he offers his hard-won conclusions about the essence of what makes a great company run.
In the history of modern business, many companies have gone from being industry leaders to the verge of extinction. Through the heroic efforts of a new management team, some of those companies have even succeeded in resuscitating themselves and living on the shadow of their former stature. But only one company has been the pinnacle of an industry, fallen to near collapse, and then, beyond anyone's expectations, returned to set the agenda. That company is IBM.
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Gerstner on Turnaround: "Heading into IBM, I would have bet huge sums of money that these frenetic early months would be the hardest work of my professional career. What happened through the second half of the 1990s would define whether IBM was going to be one more pleasant, safe, comfortable – but innocuous – participant in the IT industry, or whether we are once again to be a company that matters."
Gerstner on Strategy: "Good strategies start with massive amounts of quantitative analysis, hard, difficult analysis that is blended with wisdom, insight, and risk taking. Truly great companies lay out strategies that are believable and executable. Good strategies are long on detail and short on vision."
Gerstner on Culture: "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."
This was basically my coming-out event – my first public discussion of what I had learned and planned to do at IBM. I worked hard on what I would say, but given IBM's longtime image of starchy formality, I decided to speak without notes or even a podium. No props. Nothing to lean on. Just me and what I had to say.
I said something at the press conference that turned out to be the most quotable statement I ever made:
"What I"d like do now is put these announcements in some sort of perspective for you. There's been a lot of speculation as to when I'm going to deliver a vision of IBM, and what I'd like to say to all of you is the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision."
I went on: "What IBM needs right now is a series of very tough-minded, market-driven, highly effective strategies for each of its businesses – strategies that deliver performance in the marketplace and shareholder value. And that's what we're working on."
"Now, the #1 priority is to restore the company to profitability. I mean, if you're going to have a vision for a company, the first frame of that vision better be that you're making money and that the company has got its economics correct."
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An American reader, USA
<2006-12-22 00:00>
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance: Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround is a very well written account of how Lou Gerstner was able to steer IBM away from the brink of bankruptcy in 1993 back to profitability and growth. It is the story of IBM's amazing strategic and cultural transformation within a very short period of time from the man who is responsible for being the chief decision maker during this process. Who Says Elephants Can't Dance is a basically a very thorough case study in crisis management. It contains an impressive collection of keen observations about the challenges of operating a very large corporation, a set of fundamental lessons on how to create and execute business strategies and a lot of common sense.
The first thing that impressed me about the book was its very direct and concise style. Apparently, Gerstner wrote this book without the aid of a coauthor or a ghost-writer, so it is truly a first-hand story. Gerstner does not waste any of the reader's time. Each chapter has a very clear goal of what he is trying to communicate, and he gets to the point right away. I am usually disappointed by non-fiction authors that make excessive use of repetition in an attempt to drive important points home. Gerstner knows how to say it only once but precisely and lucidly.
The second notable aspect of the book was the modesty of the author. His humbleness starts from the very first page of the book:
This book is dedicated to the thousands of IBMers who never gave up on their company, their colleagues, and themselves. They are the real heroes of the reinvention of IBM Gerstner continues to give proper credit to the people who were responsible for some of the most critical decisions throughout the rest of his book. It is refreshing to see that a person with respect for others and an emphasis on ethics can still rise to the top position in one of the largest companies in the world and succeed in this age of megalomaniac CEOs and backstabbing corporate cultures.
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? is required reading material for executives or people who are contemplating a career in corporate management. Though Gerstner's tone is surprisingly down to earth, he presents a set of strategies that are crucial for running a successful business. Gerstner shows that there is no magical formula for success. The basic tools are a lot of common sense, focus, execution and dedication. Many of the concepts presented in this book are likely to be beneficial not just inside the context of managing a large technology corporation but also for the leaders of any organization with culture, efficiency and execution problems. |
Hobbie Bryan, USA
<2006-12-22 00:00>
Lou Gerstner has written an interesting first person study of how organizations can become plagued by inertia, and fall out of step with their industry. As an outsider, Gertsner was immediately able to spot troubling cultural behavior and ask questions about IBM's products, strategy, and way of conducting business that insiders did not. Some of the most interesting material deals with trying to change both strategy and behaviors once he recognized that they were leading IBM towards potential ruin.
The turnaround at IBM has been quite a success story, and Gerstner definitely deserves his share of the credit. In the information technology business, becoming set in your ways can be the a kiss of death, and he explains in an easily readable style how he helped wake up big blue, while others would have preferred to fly it into the ground rather than change.
Still, I wondered if as an outsider, he 'missed something' regarding the cultural at IBM. Clearly tying results to compensation, and removing power and status as key elements of the rewards system created a more market and profit focused company. But while 'Built to Last' outlines the importance of loyalty and continuity in first class companies, this trait seems to be looked down upon in the tech sector (not just at the pre-Gerstner IBM, but also more recently at HP and PeopleSoft.)
In this regard, I enjoyed Andy Grove's book "Only the Paranoid Survive" a bit more, as he discusses fostering a winning culture at Intel that has kept them on top for quite a while, despite competing in an industry that requires constant innovation. You get the feeling that Gerstner was more of a Mr. Fixit...focused on the short-term turn-around. It would have been interesting to hear him talk more about the long-term strategies for IBM to remain competitive, and particularly how to use IBM's size as an asset rather than liability.
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An American reader, USA
<2006-12-22 00:00>
IBM: Incredible Bunch of Morons.
IBM: Incredible Bunch of Meat-Heads.
IBM was once a Product-Based company. Now, in 2005, it is a Service-based company. Basically, it has nothing to sell.
What is a Corporation? Have you ever talked to or had lunch with a corporation. A Corporation is a legal fiction created out of thin air. To survive, it has to have Product-Service, Service-Product to sell to the world.
What is IBM selling theses days. What do you use from IBM daily. Not much of anything.
Great companies have great Revolutionary Products that change the world. That's True for Xerox, Apple, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Google. A corporation has to have a Product-Service we use on a daily basis.
IBM lost the relational database business to Oracle, IP networking to Cisco, Unix servers to SUN, and the PC hardware business to Dell.
Then what does IBM have to sell. Not much of anything, IBM is now a service company with a group of technicians fixing servers and PC.
True, Real companies have products to sell. What engineers and technicians now are selling are the Brain-Skills of the workers. IBM does not own Brains. They can leave at any time. IBM is going the way of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) or WANG to irrelevance.
Gerstner represents what wrong with U.S. executives. All sales, marketing, finance and public relations. It all "Hot Air" and no Products.
What ever happened to great Products? The English-major who flunked calculus can do the bird-brain, no-brains marketing.
Gerstner middle name was "Frozen Six (6) Months. NO Difference" IBM went from somebody in the tech world to a no-body. All it has now is bunch of techies running around with screwdrivers.
True. Under Gerstner's leadership, IBM went from a great products- company to a service-company. Hence, a company of relevance to a company of no-relevance. |
Sachin Gaikwad, USA
<2006-12-22 00:00>
Folks familiar with the theory of Black Holes might know that once a Star outgrows a certain mass, it has a tendency to collapse under its own gravity and become a black hole. This is the kind of state where IBM was in 1993. IBM had outgrown under its own success and was about to dis-integrate and collapse and thereby leave a huge black hole in the world of Information Technology. This book is all about how Lou V Gerstner single handedly saved IBM from its near collapse.
In this book, Lou Gerstner has done an nice job of providing rare insights into the issues(and their causes) that were ailing IBM in pre-1993 era. And how he systematically & methodically addressed those during his nine years at IBM from 1993(when he became CEO of IBM) to 2002 (when he retired from IBM).
Lou Gerstner's narration about his first day as IBM CEO who was left knocking on the doors of IBM is telling of the IBM culture at that time. In 1993, when Lou Gerstner took IBM's reins, IBM had become a collection of small, small fiefdoms where every head of the Business Unit was selfishly guarding his own interest and dreaming of becoming a CEO by going IPO someday. IBM mainframe business was failing. The world seemed to be moving towards Client Server architecture. Instead of being customer focused, IBM was becoming internally focused. IBM stock was plummeting. Stock holders were getting impatient. All in all, there was chaos within the company.
Against this background and against the common wisdom/expectations, Lou Gerstner sticked to his guns and decided on keeping IBM together. He meticulously regrouped IBM by providing one single leadership at the top. Magically reversed the core IBM mainframe business by cutting prices and becoming customer focused. Synergized the IBM messaging division by providing single message to all the world. Intelligently put his bet on Services, Software and eBusiness. Realigned the employee incentive system to encourage the culture that promotes customer oriented actions. All of which paid off tremendously. If Stock Market is any barometer, the IBM stock rose from sub $10 to $140 under the leadership of Lou V Gerstner.
This all may seem trivial but considering the disappearance of big companies like AT&T, the turnaround of company with IBM's size and stature just seems amazing!
This book is really, really good. If at all, the only complaint I have is that it does not talk about any of Lou's failures. The book not only provides good business lessons, it also provides good personal lessons. Specially Lou's passion for winning is infectious.
Overall an excellent, excellent read ... |
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