Table of Contents
Wake Up Call5
Refocus and Restore6
This is an analysis of the culture at IBM and the impact that it has had on their success. Corporate culture is significant in that it “influences the behavior of everyone within an organization and, if carefully crafted, can have a significant positive effect on organizational success” (Certo and Certo, 2006, p. 423). Louis Gerstner proved this at IBM during his tenure from 1993 to 2002 when he revived IBM by refocusing on their culture. Roots
The International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation can be traced all the way back to the late 19th century. The U.S. population was experiencing explosive growth. The U.S. Census Bureau realized that manual-counting methods could no longer fulfill its constitutional obligations, so they sponsored a contest to find a more efficient way of tabulating census data. The contest was won by Herman Hollerith, the son of a German immigrant and a statistician for the Census Bureau. Hollerith is generally regarded as the father of the modern computer for his invention of a tabulating machine that used electric current to sense and interpret the location of holes in punch cards and keep a running total of the data. With the success of his tabulating machine, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 (Wikipedia - Hollerith, 2006). Fifteen years later, renowned businessman Charles R. Flint brought together Hollerith’s company, along with the International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (IBM Highlights, 2001, p. 6). Thomas J. Watson, a former executive of the National Cash Register Company, was hired by the board of the...