IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade - Softcover

Garr, Doug

3.56

34 ratings by Goodreads

9780887309441: IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887309445 ISBN 13: 9780887309441

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

An inside look at one of the greatest business stories of our day: Lou Gerstner's dramatic transformation of IBM from a dying company into a nimble giant

When Lou Gerstner took the helm at IBM in 1993, the company was headed toward bankruptcy. Six years later Big Blue was back and better than ever: its stock at an all-time high; its coffers filled with cash; and its market capitalization a healthy $169 billion. How did Gerstner do it?

With unprecedented access to current and former IBM employees, and drawing upon more than 150 interviews and hundreds of pages of documents, journalist Doug Garr offers the first in-depth took at the IBM miracle and the man who made it happen. From the complete overhaul of the company's image and culture to the takeover of Lotus and the development of network technology, Garr vividly illustrates Gerstner's operating methods, management philosophy, and vision. Fastpaced and fascinating, IB14 Redux provides rare insight into the world of information services and offers prescient advice on what IBM and its competitors need to do to keep on thriving in the twenty-first century.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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 title" may belong to another edition of this title.