100 Years Young

I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it bases all its policies and actions. Next, I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And finally, I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life said Tom Watson, chairman of IBM in1962, and son of its founder.

The small unit that started with manufacturing clocks, scales, cheese slicers, quickly moved with times, and got into making punched card tabulator, typewriters, vacuum tube calculators, magnetic tapes, disk drives, the memory chip, FORTRAN, fractals, ATMs, mainframes, mini-computers, PCs, supercomputers, services, software, and analytics, to become perhaps the worlds first MNC.

No other organization had made the kind of impact that IBM didon the world at large as well as on United Statesas the nation rapidly became a global power, technologically, economically, and socially.

Obviously IBMs beliefs, as mentioned by Watson was actually about the companys identity and core values, what defined it, what made it different, and therefore what it offered in the market. If these core values could be worked out, IBM would be able to handle and leverage any change that came its way.
Masters of change management, as it has proved to be, IBM in 1990s realized that a monolith MNC might not be able to react, or move at all, because different countries and markets had their own peculiarities. The response was to create country specific IBMs across the world.

And now as the world becomes a global village, IBM has a new direction, and it wants to be a globally integrated enterprise. Its top leaders are now being sent to work with communities, NGOs and local leaders in emerging markets. To learn from them and to tell them about how to make their cities smarter.

IBM did not hesitate from investing in a research lab at the height of the Great Depression, work with the struggling US government to build the Social Security System, and back new computing models such as mainframes, and later on the PC.

In the spirit of Tom Watsons 1962 speech, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano started a project some years back to discover the core values of IBM using on-line meetings where IBM employees from across the world discussed a range of issues. In the process, Palmisano discovered that one cant impose values from the top. He then asked IBMers to work out their own values. Values they will believe in and embrace.

Would IBM have achieved what it has today if the companys focus had not always been on defining, building, and re-working on their core values. Its difficult to disagree.