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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
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
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.
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.
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