Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change by Jr. Louis V. Gerstner Read Free Book Online

simplification, implement a hard-hitting communication program to reposition the mainframe and workstations, and underscore that the mainframe is an important part of the CIO’s information portfolio.”
    As I think back on the three or four things that really made a difference in the turnaround of IBM, one of them was repositioning the mainframe. And nobody pointed it out sooner or more clearly than my brother Dick.
    He also gave me a few tips that he labeled “brotherly advice”: WHO SAYS ELEPHANTS CAN’T DANCE? / 35
    • Get an office and home PC. Use PROFS (the internal messaging system); your predecessor didn’t and it showed.
    • Publicly crucify shortsighted proposals, turf battles, and back-stabbing. This may seem obvious, but these are an art form in IBM.
    • Expect everything you say and do to be analyzed and interpreted inside and outside the company.
    • Find a private cadre of advisors who have no axes to grind.
    • Call your mom.
    Over the next few months I would have liked more advice from Dick, but there was a very watchful group of people at IBM waiting to see if I was setting him up as my own force behind the throne. I didn’t want to do that to him or to me. We talked several times, but briefly, and not with the impact his first meeting had on me and the company.
    On April 13 I interviewed Jerry York at IBM’s office in New York City. Jerry was then Chief Financial Officer at Chrysler Corporation and was one of two candidates I was seeing that week for the CFO
    job. It was a truly memorable interview. Jerry arrived in a starched white shirt and a blue suit, everything crisp and perfect—West Point style. He was not coy and did not pull any punches. He basically said he wanted the job and then proceeded to outline a series of things that he thought needed to be done as soon as possible. I was impressed by his frankness, his lack of guile, and his candor, as well as his analytical capabilities. It was clear to me that he was tough—very tough—and just what I needed to get at the cost side of IBM. I spoke to another candidate later that week, but I decided Jerry was the right person. He joined us on May 10.
    I also saw Gerry Czarnecki, a candidate for the HR job. Gerry was an operations executive at a bank but had been an HR professional years before. Over the next couple of weeks we met several times, both by phone and in person. Although I liked Gerry’s energy and his directness, I wasn’t certain he was prepared to go back into the HR func
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    tion. He said, “Probably not anywhere else, but to be part of the turn-around of IBM, I’m prepared to do it.”
    That turned out to be one of the few hirings that didn’t work out as planned during my early years at IBM. It soon became clear to me that it was proving very hard for Gerry to go back and lead the professional HR community. Within four months he appeared to be acting and sounding more like a vice CEO. It wasn’t that Gerry’s ideas were wrong—in fact, he was a major proponent of substantial cultural change. However, the organization wasn’t going to accept from Gerry what it would accept from me. He burned his bridges with his colleagues very soon and he left IBM within a year of his hiring.
    Of course, my top priority during those first few weeks was meeting privately with each of the senior executives. A few of them had prepared the ten-page briefing I had requested; most of them offered a more ad hoc analysis of their businesses. In all the meetings over those several weeks, I was sizing up my team, trying to understand the problems they faced and how they were dealing with them, how clearly they thought, how well they executed, and what their leadership potential really was.
    The person I relied on most during those early days was Paul Rizzo. As I said earlier, he had been called back from retirement by the board to help John Akers. Paul had been a senior executive at IBM for twenty-two years. After