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Just finished reading Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround by former IBM CEO Louis V.Gerstner. He was the CEO of then struggling IBM during the period from 1993 to 2002. Since the book was written by Gerstner himself (not some ghost co-author) it was an interesting read, I quite enjoyed the book.

As you can see from the graph to the right, during his tenure at IBM Gerstner did a good job. When he retired in 2002, IBM’s share prices were ten-fold higher than when he joined IBM in 1993.

Turning around huge organization like IBM is not an easy task, and as Gerstner says the most difficult part was changing the organization culture.

The book generally covers the events from his recruitment to his retirement. However the events do not follow strict chronological order, it’s written more like a story - telling important ones and skipping some. His strategies were mostly bold, clear, open, well communicated to everyone and most importantly based on common sense. Here is one such example from the book, excerpt:

Over the prior decade, IBM had amassed a large and important fine-art collection, most of which was stored in crates out of sight from anyone. Some of it did show up now and again in a public gallery in the IBM tower on 57th Street in Manhattan. We had a curator and a staff who maintained this collection. In 1995 the bulk of it was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $31 million. Unfortunately, the sale was condemned by many people in the art world. For some reason, these people felt that it was fine for IBM to fire employees and send them home, as long as we kept some paintings in a gallery in New York City for people to view them occasionally.

As he writes in the book, there was a lot of resistance in the organization when he was implementing various strategies e.g discontinuing nonperforming products, selling of non-core businesses, changing the organizational structure from regional to product based, changing the organizational culture from “inside-out” to “outside-in” i.e customer oriented etc.

So, the book talks about how and what Gerstner did to overcome these resistances and successfully implement his strategies. Thus saving the Big Blue.

I highly recommend the book if you are interested in strategic management. This was not meant to be a full review of the book. I just wanted to give you a brief overview of the book. I hope you found it helpful.