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Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change |  |
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Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change | |
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement, bringing IBM back from the brink of insolvency to lead the computer business once again.Offering a unique case study drawn from decades of experience at some of America's top companies -- McKinsey, American Express, RJR Nabisco -- Gerstner's insights into management and leadership are applicable to any business, at any level. Ranging from strategy to public relations, from finance to organization, Gerstner reveals the lessons of a lifetime running highly successful companies.
媒体推荐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.
From AudioFile
The former CEO of IBM tells the story of his company''s amazing comeback from 1993 to 2001. Challenged by customers and employees worldwide and product-service lines that defied integration, Gerstner implemented solutions to turn the company into the integrated business giant it is today. Edward Herrmann''s pacing and understated connection with the material in this memoir makes the audio seem compact and relaxed. The writing is also outstanding, lacking excessive pride or self-congratulation, so you don''t have to elbow past the author''s ego to absorb the many CEO-level insights offered here. An essential volume for anyone interested in technology, large organizations, or IBM''s miraculous rebirth under Gerstner''s leadership. T.W. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Lou Gerstner, Jr., served as chairman and chief executive officer of IBM from April 1993 until March 2002, when he retired as CEO. He remained chairman of the board through the end of 2002. Before joining IBM, Mr. Gerstner served for four years as chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco, Inc. This was preceded by an eleven-year career at the American Express Company, where he was president of the parent company and chairman and CEO of its largest subsidiary. Prior to that, Mr. Gerstner was a director of the management consulting firm of McKinsey & Co., Inc. He received a bachelor's degree in engineering from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
网友对Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change的评论
郭士纳的自传，感受90年代IBM的重新崛起
转型说起来容易，做起来难。IBM做到了，过去和中国国企一样的IBM通过 Gerstner的领导实现了转型。
质量很好，价格便宜，不错
Below are key excerpts that I found particularly insightful in this book, detailing the turnaround that Louis Gerstner engineered at IBM in the 1990s:
1- "Thus began a lifelong process of trying to build organizations that allows for hierarchy but at he same time bring people together for problem solving, regardless of where they are positioned within the organization."
2- "I went on to summarize my management philosophy and practice: I manage by principle, not procedure. The marketplace dictates everything we should do. I'm a big believer in quality, strong competitive strategies and plans, teamwork, payoff for performance, and ethical responsibility. I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues. I sack politicians. I am heavily involved in strategy; the rest is yours to implement. Just keep me informed in an informal way. Don't hide bad information--1 hate surprises. Don't try to blow things by me. Solve problems laterally; don't keep bringing them up the line. Move fast. If we make mistakes, let them be because we are too fast rather than too slow. Hierarchy means very little to me. Let's put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position. Reduce committees and meetings to a minimum. No committee decision making. Let's have lots of candid, straightforward communications. I don't completely understand the technology. I'll need to learn it. but don't expect me to master it. The unit leaders must be the translators into business terms for me."
3- "After all the customer and employee and industry meetings, as well as weekend and air travel reflection, I was indeed ready to make four critical decisions: Keep the company together. Change our fundamental economic model. Reengineer how we did business. Sell underproductive assets in order to raise cash."
4- "I've had a lot of experience turning around troubled companies, and one of the first things I learned was that whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why."
5- "The sine qua non of any successful corporate transformation is public acknowledgment of the existence of a crisis. If e So there must be a crisis, and it is the job of the CEO to define and communicate that crisis, its magnitude, its severity, and its impact. Just as important, the CEO must also be able to communicate how to end the crisis--the new strategy, the new company model, the new culture. All of this takes enormous commitment from the CEO to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more."
6- "What drives IBM's unique complexity is twofold. First, every institution and almost every individual is an actual or potential customer of IBM. In The second complexity factor is the rate and pace of the underlying technology."
7- "All of our efforts to save IBM--through right-sizing i and reengineering and creating strategy and boosting morale and all the rest--would have been for naught if, while we were hard at work on the other things, the IBM brand fell apart. I have always believed a successful company must have a customer/market*lace orientation and a strong marketing organization. That's why my second step in creating a global enterprise had to be to fix and focus IBM's marketing efforts."
8- "We made four major changes to our compensation system...This was all about pay for performance, not loyalty or tenure. It was all about differentiation: Differentiate our overall pay based on the marketplace; differentiate our increases based on individual performance and pay in the marketplace; differentiate our bonuses based business performance and individual contributions; and differentiate our stock-option awards based on the critical skills of the individual and our risk of loss to competition."
9- "I wanted IBMers to think and act like long-term shareholders to feel the pressure from the marketplace to deploy assets and forge strategies that create competitive advantage. The market, over time, represents a brutally honest evaluator of relative performance, and what I needed was a strong incentive for IBMers to look at their company from the outside in."
10- "The skills required in managing services processes are very different from those that drive successful product companies. We had no experience building a labor-based business inside an asset-intensive company. We were expert at managing factories and developing technologies. We understood cost of goods and inventory turns and manufacturing. But a human-intensive services business is entirely different. In services you don't make a product and then sell it. You sell a capability. You sell knowledge. You create it at the same time you deliver it. The business model is different. The economics are entirely different."
11- "My point is that all of the assets that the company needed to succeed were in place. But in every case--hardware, technology, software, even services--all of these capabilities were part of a business model that had fallen wildly out of step with marketplace realities...The implications of this kind of leap to a company's economic model can be devastating. In IBM's case it meant the collapse of gross profit margins and the attendant changes we had to engineer to lower our cost structure without compromising our effectiveness. Yet the hardest part of these decisions was neither the technological nor economic transformations required. It was changing the culture--the mindset and instincts of hundreds of thousands of people who had grown up in an undeniably successful company, but one that had tor decades been immune to normal competitive and economic forces. The challenge was making that workforce live, compete, and win in the real world. It was like taking a lion raised for all of its life in captivity and suddenly teaching it to survive in the jungle."
12- "You've probably found, as I have, that most companies say their cultures are about the same things--outstanding customer service. excellence, teamwork, shareholder value, responsible corporate behavior, and integrity. But, of course, these kinds of values don't necessarily translate into the same kind of behavior in all companies--how people actually go about their work, how they interact with one another, what motivates them. That's because, as with national cultures. most of the really important rules aren't written down anywhere."
13- "In comparison, changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. Business schools don't teach you how to do it. You can't lead the revolution from the splendid isolation of corporate headquarters. You can't simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can't mandate it, :an't engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn't change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture."
14- "Thee work-a-day world of business isn't about fads or miracles. There are fundamentals that characterize successful enterprises anc successful executives. They are focused. They are superb at execution. They abound with personal leadership."
15- "At the end of the day a successful, focused enterprise is one that has developed a deep understanding of its customers' needs, its competitive environment, and its economic realities. This comprehensive analysis must then form the basis for specific strategies :hat are translated into day-to-day execution."
16- "Earlier in this section I mentioned that in every industry it is possible to identify the five or six key success factors that drive leadership performance. The best companies in an industry build processes that allow them to outperform their competitors vis-a-vis these success factors."
17- "This next generation of leaders--in both the public and private sectors--will have to expand its thinking around a set of economic, political, and social considerations. These leaders will be: Much more able to deal with the relentless, discontinuous change that this technology is creating. Much more global in outlook and practice. Much more able to strike an appropriate balance between the instinct for cultural preservation and the promise of regional or global cooperation. Much more able to embrace the fact that the world is moving to a model in which the "default" in every endeavor will be openness and integration, not isolation."
I asked a friend for business book recommendations and this was one of them. Even though it doesn't go into painstaking detail, Lou Gerstner gives you a pretty good idea what the function and role of a CEO is.
It gives you a broad overview of how he managed to change IBM's culture and strategy and the rationale for doing so. Some of the company restructuring he discusses are: changing and implementing strategy, image and brand revival, strengthening customer relationships, the buying and selling of key business segments, how to change a company's culture, operational changes and managing top level executives.
From reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon it is my understanding that he is unpopular with some former IBMers because he laid off a good chunk of its employees which he only gives terse recognition towards the beginning of the book. And when he does mention it he uses the clever euphemism "right-sizing" possibly as a defense mechanism to absolve himself of guilt from initiating mass layoffs. But as painful as they may be, layoffs are needed for struggling companies otherwise the entire company will be wiped-out.
So if you're looking for an introductory overview of a CEO's duties and responsibilities I would recommend this book. But don't expect any detailed explanation beyond that.
This book ilustrates in a direct and clear style, from inside, how the top global executives perform in the real life. It ilustrates how to play the real game in global business, changing the game rules, and leading a reingeneering process, which before this was an unclear concept. It shows how all the academic and theoretical tools learned in the top business schools are still valid and useful. I guess, this is one of the "must read" books for junior level executives who aspire to become global leaders, not only in technology but also in services.
Who was the best manager of the latter part of the 20th century? Jack Welch lost about $200 billion for his shareholders from 1995 until he retired, while Louis Gerstner turned around and undoubtedly saved IBM. Today IBM's market cap exceeds GE's and the company did not need a federal government bailout to survive the financial meltdown of 2007/2008, the way GE did. Of these two Gerstner seems to me to be a true managerial success, as opposed to a media fed phenomenon.
IBM shareholder have been rewarded while GE shareholders have seen a steady decline in the value of their shares. In this book Gerstner lays out his thinking and strategy and the actions he took upon being named CEO at IBM in the early 1990s. Even though he had little expertise in computer technology, he had the customer perspective as well as decades of managerial experience and training. The result is a book that is clear and understandable without the bravado and acronyms. This is a refreshing description of a major turnaround by the man who led it.
For experienced managers this is a great read.
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