Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround (Hardcover)

~ Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (Author) "On December 14, 1992, I had just returned from one of those always well-intentioned but rarely stimulating charity dinners that are part of a New..." (more)
Key Phrases: mainframe prices, mainframe sales, United States, American Express, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gerstner quarterbacked one of history's most dramatic corporate turnarounds. For those who follow business stories like football games, his tale of the rise, fall and rise of IBM might be the ultimate slow-motion replay. He became IBM's CEO in 1993, when the gargantuan company was near collapse. The book's opening section snappily reports Gerstner's decisions in his first 18 months on the job-the critical "sprint" that moved IBM away from the brink of destruction. The following sections describe the marathon fight to make IBM once again "a company that mattered." Gerstner writes most vividly about the company's culture. On his arrival, "there was a kind of hothouse quality to the place. It was like an isolated tropical ecosystem that had been cut off from the world for too long. As a result, it had spawned some fairly exotic life-forms that were to be found nowhere else." One of Gerstner's first tasks was to redirect the company's attention to the outside world, where a marketplace was quickly changing and customers felt largely ignored. He succeeded mightily. Upon his retirement this year, IBM was undeniably "a company that mattered." Gerstner's writing occasionally is myopic. For example, he makes much of his own openness to input from all levels of the company, only to mock an earnest (and overlong) employee e-mail (reprinted in its entirety) that was critical of his performance. Also, he includes a bafflingly long and dull appendix of his collected communications to IBM employees. Still, the book is a well-rendered self-portrait of a CEO who made spectacular change on the strength of personal leadership.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Effective, to the point...Louis V. Gerstner Jr deserves his place in the management hall of fame." (Financial Times )

"[Gerstner] entertains as he educates." (New York Times Book Review )

"[Lou Gerstner] has the substance of a genuine and ... interesting story." (Wall Street Journal )

"The best business book I've ever read." (Imus in the Morning )

"A well-rendered self-portrait of a CEO who made spectacular change on the strength of personal leadership." (Publishers Weekly )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Collins (November 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060523794
• ISBN-13: 978-0060523794
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (123 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #273,450 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Who says elephants can't write?, December 2, 2002

By A Customer

It is strangely ironic that, after doing his best to suppress all negative communication within IBM, it should be the reader feedback on amazon.com that alerts Gerstner to what the world at large really thinks of him. Ever since 1994 the newsreading public has been conned into a set of beliefs about IBM and Gerstner, simply through IBM's vice-like control of all media that wanted a share of IBM's ad spending. It is bizarre that he expects us to read through a critical employee e-mail on pages 81-82 of his book, when he admits that he couldn't even spare the time to reply to it himself.

Gerstner was the IBM CEO with a worse revenue record than John Akers, the man he replaced. The only way Gerstner could find to grow revenue was by buying firms like Lotus. He turned what was a fantastic company to work for into a an ordinary one. He writes in the book that he transformed the company into a firm where the most able got the most rewards. In fact he converted it into a firm where the most aggressive individuals, like Gerstner, win through. He destroyed IBM's employee benefits schemes across the world, claiming they were unaffordable at the time of IBM's darkest hour. Perhaps they were at that time, but Gerstner's greatest sin was that he never returned any of the benefits to the employees when business improved, except through a silly bonus scheme that in my experience never motivated anyone. The result is that IBM has become a company that people still want to have on their CV, but those who join in mid-career almost never stay more than two years.

Gerstner groped around and never really found the right idea for growing revenue. His shift to services meant that he took his eye off all the products in the IBM catalogue, and IBM architectures have become an irrelevance in a world now dominated by Windows, TCP/IP, Linux, Solaris and Oracle. He used the AS/400 as a cash cow when a very aggressive pricing scheme could have seen the system create the market that Windows NT instead built. Gerstner has said the Internet saved IBM, but frankly it did a lot more for rivals like Microsoft and Sun.

There's a part of me that makes me think this book is one huge, ironic joke -- the guy only pretends to be unaware of the impact of his decisions on others. He boasts about a turnaround that never was and advocates management behaviour that no-one should accept.

That would be fine if it were confined to the pages of this book. But unfortunately the impact of Gerstner is written large across the lives of many, many individuals who crossed his path, both inside and outside IBM. The blight cast over their lives means that, when they get the chance, they usually don't recommend IBM products. Gerstner just doesn't understand that.

These pages on amazon ought to be required reading for anyone foolish enough to think they want a career in IBM.

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A classic in self-deception, November 29, 2002

By A Customer

The title of this book says it all: elephants don't naturally dance, it takes years of cruel training to make them do it, and in the end, there aren't many customers for the show.

IBM's revenue record in Appendix C of this book also says it all: Gerstner has the worse revenue growth record of any IBM CEO, and that is despite the the Internet boom, despite the ERP boom, and despite the acquisition of such big players as Sequent, Lotus and Tivoli. Some turnaround, mate!

More than once in this book Gerstner cites the pleas of others: "You owe it to America to take this job." It's hard to see what he has done for America during his nine-year tenure... Where once there were many readers who wanted to learn about SNA, CICS, RPG/400 and other IBM inventions, today there seem to be no IBM technologies that a sufficient number of people are interested in to propel a manual even in to the bottom of the amazon bestseller list.

For the story of Gerstner's tenure at IBM is really the story of IBM's hollowing out, of an extraordinary sell-off of IBM's assets to the short-term benefit of shareholders, of whom Gerstner was one of the biggest. As one of the IBM UK CEOs during Gerstner's reign, Barrie Morgans, said of Gerstner's skill at cutting costs and inability to boost sales: "Well, anybody can slash and burn." Gerstner says on page 87 that the dismissal of the EMEA head, Hans-Olaf Henkel, was for subverting his memos to employees. It wasn't: Gerstner got rid of Henkel because Henkel dared to tell Gerstner that one of his strategies wouldn't work.. There is no reference here to the classic case, Churchhouse v IBM, which was heard in a US court.

Gerstner also dismisses, in a page or two, the needs of employees in terms of benefits and pensioners. He simply says they were unaffordable; and yet he has no difficulty in negotiating an extraordinary compensation package for himself. And of course, as one of IBM's biggest shareholders, the more he could screw down the employees' packages, the more he himself benefitted. Never in IBM history had their been such a huge disparity between the compensation of the CEO and that of the lowest worker.

The truth is that Gerstner sees himself as an elite -- ever the McKinsey consultant (and by the way, there were McKinsey consultants crawling over IBM throughout the 1990s, yet he fails to give them much credit in the book)...

47 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saving IBM from Itself, November 18, 2002

By A Customer

While at IBM Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. developed a reputation of aloof arrogance. One would not suspect this from reading his book, in which he gives generous credit to the tens of thousands of people who created the company and to many others, some by name, who helped to save and resurrect it.

As a former IBM executive who took early retirement twenty years ago, just as the company's bureaucracy was beginning to strangle the organization, I was fascinated to learn how that bureaucracy spread and the extremes to which it went, creating a culture thst led to decisions (if any) by committee, conspiratorial compromise, and self-protective behavior. This is not the IBM I had known. Even more interesting is the rapidity with which Louis Gerstner diagnosed the sickness of the company and the speed and persistence with which he administered tough medicine.

Despite IBM's near-terminal condition Gerstner saw it correctly not only as a business enterprise but as a "national treasure" that was well worth the collossal efforts needed to restore it.

Unlike Jack Welch's adolescent "Jack: Straight from the Gut", this book focuses on the processes of leadership and management, strategic choice, and the decision process. But it speaks also to the essential importance of corporate culture, at IBM a way of life that is based on values rather than just on being first.

As a recovering IBMer I salute Mr. Gerstner for his remarkable achievements and as a reader applaud him for this exceptional contribution to the business book genre.

Don't miss it.