IBM Redux : Lou Gerstner & the Business Turnaround of the Decade - Hardcover

Garr, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471491888 ISBN 13: 9780471491880

Publisher: Wiley, 2000

Synopsis

Here is the first unauthorized and in-depth look at IBM's recovery and the man

who is leading it, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

Since joining IBM in 1993, Lou Gerstner has presided over one of the most

remarkable comebacks in business history, taking IBM from an $8 billion annual

loss to a stunning $6billion profit in 1997 - as a result, Gerstner has become

a superstar of business, recognised three years consecutively by Vanity Fair as

one of the top American movers-and-shakers, although he remains an elusive and

guarded public figure.

Garr's account is drawn from more than 150 interviews and hundreds of pages of

documents, with unprecedented access to current and former IBM employees, and

has already received enthusiastic reviews (see reviews section - more to

follow).

About this title

Review:

Lou Gerstner, the man who flipped IBM's fortunes, has what a former colleague calls "a vertical vision of reality." That is, if things aren't moving upward, he's very unhappy. When he took over at IBM in 1993, they were moving downward at a frightening speed, and what he did to turn the company around will probably be studied in business schools in future generations. Until then, we have IBM Redux, by Doug Carr, a very entertaining and instructive look at Gerstner and the company he revived.

Carr, a former IBM speechwriter, possesses an insider's knowledge about the Gerstner years at IBM: the despair of watching the company sink into the tar pits of ever-deeper red ink; the ruthlessness of the early firings and other cost controls (one woman was downsized--"excessed" is the actual IBM euphemism--when she was eight and a half months pregnant and coming off a stellar performance review; another was given his termination papers while in a coma); the business decisions that led to the turnaround; and finally the elation of seeing the company reinvented as a nimble information-services provider.

This is far from a hagiography of Gerstner, however. Because Carr didn't have access to him, he relies on anecdotes from those who know Gerstner and have worked with him, and the result is a fascinating portrait of the CEO as a young man (one former high school football teammate recalls an errant pass from quarterback Gerstner that led to the teammate's career-ending knee injury); as a man in a hurry (the chapters on Gerstner's years at American Express and RJR Nabisco foreshadow his accomplishments at IBM); and finally as a seasoned businessman who succeeded in overhauling a company that few thought would survive intact. --Lou Schuler

About the Author:

Doug Garr is the author of IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade. His work has appeared in BusinessWeek, Fortune's Technology Review, GQ, Popular Science, Worth, New York, and MIT's Technology Review. Garr lives in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0471491888
• ISBN 13: 9780471491880
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384