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The Maverick and His Machine
At age 40, Watson was thrown a curve ball that, like that first sentence says, nearly ruined him. In fact, it sent him so low that this shaped his character more than anything that had happened to him earlier in his lifetime. It sent him to the lower depths and resulted in him being given the reigns of an equally down-in-the dumps loser business just to get rid of him. He was banished to a corporate Siberia. He was considered a loser, and given a loser's position in a loser's business.
It's at this point that he reshaped and remade that company into what is today known as IBM. The blue suits and white shirts that were the uniform of IBM men became so because he wore one every day. There was no written rule that employees had to wear them; they did it because he did it. That says something: he led by example and his employees admired him.
Just as an aside, it seems that Watson's big thing was that things didn't happen (or went wrong) because people didn't think hard enough. To encourage employees to think he had big "THINK" signs put all over the company. This evolved into "Think" buttons, and employees were even allowed and encouraged to kick back and think. Eventually, small notepads were emblazoned with "Think" and they were called "Thinkpads." Hence, the name of the laptop.
THINK, by the way, is the reason that the company created so many technological innovations.
Now, just because Watson started IBM and largely shaped it into one of the most successful companies in the world doesn't mean he was a saint. Some of the most interesting parts of the book have to do with his home life and how he treated his wife and kids. It seems that he was somewhat of a manipulator who knew how to shape people by breaking them and remaking them.
One story about his son (who would later become CEO of the company) shows Watson's mean streak. It seems that, early in the younger Watson's career, after dinner together at home, the elder asked him what his impression was of one of his executives.
The younger Watson dutifully answered, seeking to impress his father with his skill at observing people. The elder paused and then berated the young man for daring to form an opinion about a seasoned executive who had years of experience behind him. Who did the young man think he was to judge someone who had been in the business since before he was born?
While this isn't the stuff of Ward Cleaver, Watson was, all the same, a courageous and enterprising individual who took risks and (most of the time) succeeded. Especially engrossing is the episode during the depression when IBM was in danger of bankruptcy and shutting its doors. Watson, contrary to what most intelligent people would do, gave a rousing talk to his top executives, telling them that instead of cutting back on manufacturing and personnel, they should increase both.
Luckily (for Watson), a few months later, Pearl Harbor happened and, with the sharp increase in troops, materials and logistics, the U.S. government needed "calculating machines" and needed them fast. While major competitors like NCR and Burroughs had to ramp up production to meet demand, IBM, with its ready stockpile of machines won the contract and delivered, saving them from possible bankruptcy.
There is a lot more I could say about the book but because I don't want to spoil anything, I won't go into it here. However, if you're a Big Blue fan (and I am), you might want to follow up this read with Lou Gerstner, Jr.'s book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance. It's a great read about how, for the second time in its history, the company was saved from becoming history.
You can purchase The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
... you might want to read Father Son and Company by Tom Watson Jr., who took over IBM after his father. Great book, managers could learn a thing or fifteen from Father and Son alike.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Another interesting read here is 'IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation' by Edwin Black. The title says it all, sort of.
OK, so I admit that absolutely nothing about this book drew my attention EXCEPT the name of the author, Kevin Maney. Any devotee of his columns in USA Today knows his ability to tell a story. Yes, I knew I should be intrested in the life of Tom Watson -- he was, after all, one of the first "celebrity CEOs," although the term hadn't been invented. But I never thought I would be so fascinated by a man and his story.
This is a must read for anyone who wants to get a sense of what real leadership is all about. Watson was leading before there were books on leadership and studies on communictation. He was managing corporate culture before there were words for it. He saw his company -- and his employees -- through transitions that go well beyond mainframe vs. PC. When his technologies were rendered obsolete, he simply invented new ones.
Anyone with aspirations to lead should read this book. It's so action-packed that you may forget it's a true story. But it is. And I can't wait to see the movie.
Yes and No. Yes, IBM has a very strict culture inside of it, (which may have changed since the early 1990s, when salesment started wearing *gasp* polo shirts to conventions, when previously they /always/ wore suits), but for geeks who are put into management positions, IBM management sk1llz rock and can teach you a lot. Watson was a hard *ss but he actually cared about what happened in his plants and with his salesmen, whatever their position in his company. A lot of their policies and be adapted to team leadership skills. So while a lot of people see IBM as a stuffy suit organization (which I will not disagree with) there are a lot of good things that can be learned from them.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
It is unfortunate that Mr. Watson's views, perspectives, and ideals will be lost forever if the company continues on its current path of behavior. The company is not operated as it once was during the thriving 50's, 60's and 70's. Some portions of the company *are* innovative and forward looking, but much of the company is reigned by dinosaurs that prefer politics to innovation and change. Working here sounds like a wonderful opportunity, but it is not an opportunity, it is merely a job. We are pushing for new innovation, for example, for help systems on the web to be based on the Eclipse platform and XML. We are told by the dinosaurs that HTML 4.0 is good enough, and that we don't really understand that XML stuff anyways.
They wonder why the attrition rate is so high among the younger crowd.
My two cents: look for a younger company with younger management with open minds.
StyleChief
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! -M. Python
The Swiss wer'e not nearly so neutral as they'd like you to beleive during WWII - their "neutrality" gave them a lot of room to really fsck over the Nazi's as bet they could without getting caught.
And collect the gold of exterminated Jews in the process.
Watson was a salesman, and was at one point NCR's top salesman, working for Patterson, the head of National Cash Register. The whole Patterson/NCR story is worth understanding. NCR's entire top management was convicted of criminal antitrust violations. Their tactics make Microsoft look like small timers. NCR built defective duplicates of competing cash registers and sold them to make the competition look bad. Their sales reps were instructed on how to sabotage competing cash registers.
The electric cash register was invented in Dayton to prevent theft.
The traffic light was invented in Cleveland.
Kettering brought the electric starter.
The self-contained refigerator was also from dayton.
Others? the parachute. movie projection. air bags. artificial heart, artificial kidney.
The book the original poster refers to is painstakingly researched and basically correct. Not only did IBM supply machines to the Nazis, profit from it, and do everything they could to keep the German subsidiary (and its profits) under control, but Watson himself was quite an admirer of Hitler and praised him endlessly during the thirties. Not that he was unique in this regard among American businessman, but it is something that must be considered when the man is being venerated as some kind of computing icon.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Sorry, no.
Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. The Wannsee conference, where the Nazis decided on the genocide of the Jews, was on Jan 20, 1942.
I worked at IBM from 1989 to 1994, in the mainframe OS development area, in Poughkeepsie and Kingston, NY. In that time, my area went from a shirt-and-tie environment for everyone to an place where my boss's boss would wear jeans.
IBM was not homogenous in that respect. Our offices were in a diverse area, near manufacturing, final roll-out facilities (a room bigger than a football field, filled with mainframes running test suites--very cool), and an executive suite, and there were many and varied cultures.
IBM was always most disciplined about its public face. As a place to work, it was bureaucratic, but full of geeky challenge. I like more creative opportunity in my work, but I have less now than I did then.
It wasn't a bad place to be a geek. One of our favorite games was to imagine how much damage you could do with malicious code. I worked with a guy who managed the security setup piece after a user logged in, and we always joked about putting various backdoors in. I had a friend who worked with a power supply system, which regulated cooling, power, in the bipolar chips. He could have brought down every mainframe in the world of a particular model at some preset time. Whole lot of molten silicon.
Sounds like geeks to me.
'In knowledge is power, in wisdom humility.'
For what it is worth, my father tells me there was no corporate culture of anti-semitism at IBM when he went there in the late fifties. He advanced rapidly and never encountered prejudice from the younger Tom Watson or any of his superiors. This was the exception rather than the rule in corporate America at that time. By contrast a large (now mega) financial institution whose offer he had previously accepted actually called to un-hire him after they discovered he was a Jew. He wasn't phased because he had his sights set on Big Blue anyway. In his opinion, IBM was the best of corporate America, and that was where he wanted to be.
He worked on Mercury, Gemini and some military programs (including triple redundant proto-mini-computers for B52s) while he was there. Although he loved the company, he left in 1966 to form a startup selling prepackaged accounting software to financial institutions. AFAIK his company was the first to sell software as a commodity rather than a service.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
IBM didn't start with Thomas Watson. IBM was originally the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (CTR) Company, founded by Charles Flint in 1911. CTR was made up of three acquisitions:
The latter is most important; it was founded and owned by Herman Hollerith, who invented the electric tabulating machine made famous by the 1890 U.S. Census. Thomas J. Watson wasn't hired as CTR's president until 1915, and the name change did not come until 1924.
Book suggestion: Austrian, Geoffrey D. Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Spekkio Master of War
Even discounting the fact that SPARC and POWER are far more open than x86 stuff, and that x86 stuff is popular enough to be even easier to work with than IBM proprietary stuff, I was referring to operating systems. It took a government decision to make IBM license MVS, and even so they kept changing hardware specifications to kill third-party hardware plugin vendors. MVS to this day is a dog to work with because it has even its own character set and codification with even a different sorting than ASCII or Unicode.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
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