CHAPTER 7
Leading from the Top
Example 1 – IBM's Innovation Governance Model: A Succession of CEOs Oversees “Continuous Transformation”
In the previous two sections, we have looked at the innovation roles of the board and the top management team, respectively, as well as describing 10 different innovation governance models. Now it is time to look at some real company examples to see how they have applied these models. As we saw in Chapter 5, according to our survey of 113 companies the two most commonly used innovation governance models – accounting for almost half of all responses – were the top management team, or a subset, and the CEO. We explore them in more detail by looking at Corning in Chapter 8 and IBM in this chapter.
At IBM, it is the CEO who is in ultimate charge of innovation – and has been for most of the company's history. The CEO as the innovation czar is often found in companies where a charismatic founder plays the role, and in this IBM is no exception. Thomas J. Watson Sr. ruled IBM for almost four decades until just a few weeks before his death in the early 1950s, when his son Thomas J. Watson Jr. took over as CEO. The company saw several more decades of success, becoming one of the most prosperous companies in the world and attracting the attention of the government for its near-monopoly of the computer industry. Although it defeated the government's antitrust suit, it did not deal with what we might describe as internal cultural issues of arrogance and self-satisfaction and came close to losing everything in the years from 1985 to 1993 under CEO John Akers.
The tenure of outsider Lou Gerstner brought IBM back from the brink, and its current model of governing innovation – influenced no doubt by the legacy of the Watsons followed by a succession of successful CEOs – was crafted and adopted by IBMer Sam Palmisano when he took over the reins from Gerstner. By the end of its centenary year in 2011, IBM was a worldwide corporation with revenues of $106.9 billion, total assets of $116.4 billion, and 433,362 employees.
Like many companies in which innovation is governed by the CEO, the importance of innovation is very clear. The CEO controls the content of innovation, but not the processes. IBM's collaborative culture, reinforced by internal as well as customer-focused social networking practices, provides an environment in which it is possible for employees to work together effectively without always needing explicit rules.
The Gartner Group has referred to IBM's innovation governance model as managed anarchy, and we have seen IBMers nod their heads in agreement. This expression is an apt description of CEO-level governance at IBM, but it does not imply a lack of discipline.1 At IBM, governance is supported by key executives in businesses, functions, and departments who make a point of behaving, collectively and individually, as true innovation leaders and role models. In addition, over the years IBM has implemented a solid set of innovation processes that guide tasks and decisions all the way from front-end exploration to commercialization and product line management.
Big Blue2
IBM started life in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R), which manufactured and sold commercial scales, tabulators, and punch card machines. Watson Sr. joined C-T-R in 1914 as general manager. By 1924 the company had expanded its markets worldwide and built manufacturing facilities in Europe, and in that year the name was changed to International Business Machines Corporation. At some point in the last century, the company became known simply as IBM. The company was also known by the nickname Big Blue, some say in reference to its logo or to the blue covers of its mainframe computers, others to the dark blue suits that its employees used to wear.
Success Leads to Complacency
According to Steve Hamm, co-author of a book about IBM and now in the company's communications department, “in the late 1980s, IBM had become complacent about its position in the computer industry and rapidly lost business.”3
Many readers will remember Big Blue in the 1970s and 1980s as a conservative company with an impressive market position and a dress code that stipulated what its employees should wear to work. Its success in the computer industry was legendary. Its sales force focused on the C-suite and sold mainframe solutions that served whole companies. IBM was committed to “selling iron” as Polaroid had been committed to “burning film.” In that environment, even though it successfully launched its PC in 1981, the “mainframe bureaucracy asserted itself” and the IBM personal computer failed to achieve its market potential.
Among IBM's customers it was typical for employees to feel that they were safe with IBM. In other words, if what they bought did not work they would not be blamed if it was an IBM product; choosing a product from another manufacturer – even if it was cheaper and perhaps better – would not be worth the risk in case the product failed. The IBM sales force could count on repeat sales from existing customers.
Having led and profited from the many changes in what would come to be called the IT market, IBM found itself in “back-to-back revolutions” that “transformed the way customers viewed, used and bought technology.”4 These revolutions, of course, were the simultaneous rise of the PC and of client servers, which changed radically where IBM needed to do business: IBM's sales force had previously focused on marketing corporate applications across the whole business; now it had to shift its model to dealing with people on a more individual or departmental level.
Internally, there was a breakdown in the collaborative decision making that had been successful for years, as senior executives began to compete against one another, using a practice known internally as “nonconcurrence.” This had started as a way of avoiding “groupthink” but had become a way for individuals and groups to ignore decisions and do what they pleased.5
In 1969 the government had sued the company because of antitrust issues. For 13 years after that, according to IBM process architect Paul Aspinwall, “We were always asking, ‘Are we doing something the courts will get us for?’ ”6 As a result, IBM went through a period in which it was never acceptable to make a mistake. Hamm quotes a former executive vice president: “The culture was: Be careful what you're doing. Be careful what you're saying. Be careful what you're writing. People may be watching. Fortunately we got past that!”7
The antitrust suit was eventually dropped in 1982 – “on the same day that a judge ordered the breakup of AT&T” following its antitrust suit.
By the early 1990s, as a result of complacency and increased competition from more nimble competitors, the company was almost on its knees. In 1991 it recorded its first loss, of $2.8 billion, which was more than doubled the following year – the biggest ever corporate loss. In an attempt to cut costs, the CEO, John Akers, had instigated layoffs – unheard of in the company's history – and divided the company into 13 autonomous units. Analysts fully expected the company to be split up. IBM's vast R&D spend of $55 billion over the previous 10 years had not borne fruit.
IBM Hires an Outsider CEO
Against this backdrop, Akers resigned in 1993 and Louis V. Gerstner Jr. was brought in from outside to fix the problem. His solution included addressing IBM's then dysfunctional culture, as well as shifting to open-source software and creating a focus on services. In addition to his consumer orientation and his expertise in strategy, Gerstner, the first leader who had not come up from the IBM ranks, was a classic fixer (see Chapter 2). He cut costs, for example by reducing the company's real estate footprint, and focused on the existing product line. Perhaps most importantly, he avoided splitting the company, recognizing that its ability to provide integrated solutions was “one of IBM's enduring strengths.”
In 2000, IBMer Samuel J. Palmisano was named president and COO, and two years later became CEO. His big challenge would be to pursue the transformation effort and to deliver on the potential that his predecessor had uncovered. By the time Gerstner stepped down, IBM Global Services, which he had created in 1996, was worth $30 billion dollars.
Palmisano said of Gerstner: “Without him, I don't think we would have survived. We needed someone with that tough mind and analytic skill.”8
IBM's Model of Innovation through “Continuous Transformation”
Since its founding, the company has survived periods of near disaster, surfing the winds of change in its core field of business information and shifting its technologies, its offerings and its profit models to meet emergent opportunities and challenges. Unlike companies such as Polaroid, which spectacularly failed to deal with the onset of digital technology, IBM has managed to weather the storms of seemingly overwhelming changes in both markets and technologies.
IBM's History of Innovation
Watson Sr. ruled IBM for almost four decades until just a few weeks before his death in the early 1950s, when Thomas J. Watson Jr. took over as CEO. The decade of the 1950s saw a number of technological transformations, including the introduction of FORTRAN, a new random access storage system (RAMAC), and a computer based on the vacuum tube (IBM 701) which greatly expanded the computer's usability in business applications. Watson Jr. served as CEO until 1971 and on IBM's board until 1984.
Foreshadowing, and indeed participating in, the vast changes that IBM would experience, Watson Jr. stated: “I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those [core] beliefs as it moves through corporate life.”9 The System/360, introduced during Watson Jr.'s tenure, was a real game-changer in the computer industry. Palmisano called it the boldest bet in IBM's history.
When Gerstner started at IBM, faced with an unwieldy, oversized and underfunded organization, it might have seemed like an easy solution to split the company up and sell parts of it off. However, he resisted the temptation to do so – in what Steve Hamm describes as “the signature decision of his tenure.”10 Gerstner helped prepare IBM to achieve a leadership position in the emerging world of the internet and network computing. He was also responsible for two extremely counter-intuitive decisions that have paved the way for IBM's success in the 21st century: the move to open standards and the move to providing services.
Dennis Elenburg, a technical representative at IBM, says the following in his review of Gerstner's book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?:11
Gerstner points out that some integrator, fundamentally acting in a service role, controls every major industry. This was the basis for building IBM Global Services. Another shrewd Gerstner insight is that every major industry is built around open standards. It was this realization that led IBM Software to enable and build on open standards in a network-centric world, and Gerstner provides a compelling argument for abandoning proprietary development and embracing software standards (e.g., J2EE and Web Services). In fact, Gerstner argues that the most valuable technology companies are OEM suppliers who leverage their technology wherever possible; therefore, IBM must actively license its technology in order to be successful.12
Innovation at IBM Touches its Core
While many other companies remain glued to a product-oriented approach, IBM has been able to transform its core identity with respect to business models and market offerings and has provided different kinds of products and services for many different customers and markets.
By 2012, the company's major operations were organized in five business segments representing markets and offerings, only one of which existed in the previous century: Global Technology Services and Global Business Services (which the company collectively calls Global Services); Software; Systems and Technology; and Global Financing. Four worldwide organizations play a key role in serving clients: sales and distribution; research, development and intellectual property; enterprise transformation; and integrated supply chain.
The company's commitment to innovation – aided by the insight and instinct of many of its CEOs – has enabled IBM to pursue innovation in directions that were unfamiliar, foreign, and sometimes seemingly downright dangerous. Ginni Rometty, CEO since 2012, espouses a model of continuous transformation: “IBM is an innovation company. Both in what we do and in how we do it, we pursue continuous transformation – always remixing to higher value in our portfolios and skills, in the capabilities we deliver to our clients and in our own operations and management practices.”13 At an IBM Investor Briefing in February 2013, she reiterated that the company had chosen the route of change instead of the route of commoditization and described the three “strategic beliefs” that would “guide IBM into the decade ahead”: (1) relentlessly move/remix to higher value; (2) include emerging new areas of computing; and (3) look for new markets/new clients.
Rometty was echoing her predecessor, Sam Palmisano, who announced in 2004: “As I described to you last year, we've made our choice: IBM is an innovation company.” He then reflected on the job ahead, for him and for his successors: “Of course, declaring something like that is easy. It has taken a great deal of discipline to execute.”14
Let Go to Grow
IBM's pursuit of new identities in the 21st century was carefully crafted, thought through, and researched. Palmisano was not hoping simply to survive the radical changes that were occurring all around. He created a leadership position to accomplish the desired transformation, and to do it in a way that would enable ongoing transformation.
Senior vice president Linda Sanford was the first head of IBM's Enterprise Transformation. In her book Let Go to Grow: Escaping the Commodity Trap, co-authored with Dave Taylor, Sanford outlines the approach that IBM and other companies need to take to succeed in the global digitized age.15 On the very first page, the authors articulate an important part of IBM's strategy – to take existing and potential partners, including competitors, along with it: “You need to open up your business by building and participating in value webs, where value is built by a number of companies coordinating their individual capabilities.”
Sanford and Taylor emphasize the importance of collaboration. This has clear implications for how IBM will understand governance. No longer, they insist, does it work for leaders to declare the direction and say, “Follow me.” Instead, “leadership is about listening, about letting go of control and creating a shared sense of collaboration for the greater good of the firm.”16
Shared values and collaboration do not, however, mean that “anything goes.” It does not mean that IBM employees are all free to pursue whatever ideas they may have. On the contrary, this increase in collaborative innovation demands rigor in governance. The companies that Sanford and Taylor deem to have “set the pace for profitable growth show the primacy of coordination.” In the companies whose cases are explored in their book, “workers are never left in doubt about top management's priorities and their own responsibilities to support them.”17
Advocating for Innovation in the Ecosystem
Palmisano's belief that innovation is critical for the continued success of his own company led him to participate in, and in several instances to form, groups like the Council on Competitiveness through which he could explore approaches to innovation with others, develop new ideas, and also spread his beliefs about innovation more widely. His participation in such groups gave even more credibility to the way he used his position as CEO as a bully pulpit for innovation.
In a speech to the Council on Competitiveness Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in October 2003, Palmisano declared that “simply put, innovation: spawns new industries, fuels economic growth, creates countless high-value, high-paying jobs, and raises the standard of living for people around the globe. Now more than ever, innovation is occurring within a global – not just a national – ecosystem, with multiple points of intersection among business, government and academia.”
Governance as “Managed Anarchy”
For governance to work as managed anarchy, the entity being managed must meet certain criteria. It must have embedded in it strong and focused productivity, shared values, and robust decision-making practices – in other words, the organization must be able for the most part to operate successfully on its own, without the oversight of top management. When everyone knows what to do and does what is needed, there is less need for hands-on management.
Creating a Culture in which Anarchy Can be Managed
Palmisano expressed the need for management that works with the diversity of IBM's global business:
Think of our organizational matrix. Remember, we operate in 170 countries. To keep it simple, let's say we have 60 or 70 major product lines. We have more than a dozen customer segments. If you mapped out the entire 3D matrix, you'd get more than 100,000 cells. You'll drive people crazy trying to centrally manage every one of those intersections.
So if there's no way to optimize IBM through organizational structure or by management dictate, you have to empower people while ensuring that they're making the right calls the right way. You've got to create a management system that empowers people and provides a basis for decision making that is consistent with who we are at IBM.18
To provide such a basis, Palmisano – like the Watsons and Gerstner before him and Rometty after – saw a key to this puzzle as the conscious creation of the culture of the corporation. Watson Sr. believed in information and in thinking. From this core belief – both “fervent and unformed,” Steve Hamm tells us – Watson “doggedly aimed to build an organization that self-consciously embodied his mantra, ‘Think’.”19
The conscious and careful creation of corporate culture, which Hamm suggests was a radical notion in Watson's day, persists as IBM's CEOs today seek to shape the corporation so that its employees will make “the right calls the right way.”
Palmisano transformed IBM “into a single globally-integrated enterprise that focused on serving enterprises in 170 countries.” He got rid of the 11 member Corporate Executive Committee (CEC), replacing it with teams whose members were responsible for leadership of parts of IBM's “faster-moving widely dispersed organization.”20
Social Networking at the Core
Early in his tenure, feeling that the core values that had driven IBM for decades had become stale, Palmisano staged a “ValuesJam.” IBMers were invited to participate in a 72-hour online brainstorming session to rethink the company's values.
According to Hamm, “the jam got off to a rough start. Critics deluged the forum with negative comments.”21 Some senior executives wanted to shut the session down. But they persisted and “over time the tone changed and became constructive.” The values that emerged – dedication to every client's success; innovation that matters, for our company and for the world; and trust and personal responsibility in all relationships – bear a certain resemblance to the Watsons' basic beliefs of respect for the individual, customer service, and excellence. The exercise has been credited with building senior management commitment to innovation and to re-creating a sense of purpose for IBM.
It is not possible to understand IBM's innovation governance as managed anarchy without reflecting on the extent to which IBM is what the Gartner Group, in a book by Bradley and McDonald, calls a “social organization.” Such organizations “don't simply succeed here and there in using social technology. Instead, they embed mass collaboration in who they are and how they work. It's part of the way they do business; it's how they think.”22
IBM is an information management company, so perhaps it is no surprise that while many mature companies are struggling to make sense of the value of opportunities provided by the internet, social networking, and so on, IBM harnessed them early and not only provides them to customers but also uses them internally.
Social Networking Leads to Bottom-up Innovation
A number of collaborative tools and initiatives allow and encourage every employee to engage in innovation. ThinkPlace enables IBM employees to share, discuss, and refine innovative ideas. Jams, including IdeaJam, enable brainstorming focusing on critical business, technology, or social issues among globally distributed groups. BlogCentral facilitates internal conversations.
On the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) participants can post, critique, and improve concepts that have moved beyond the “idea stage.” WPTS (Worldwide Patent Tracking System) enables employees to submit inventions for patent consideration. In 2012 IBM received a record number of patents – almost 6500 – putting it at the top of the US patent list for the 20th consecutive year with a grand total of nearly 67,000 patents. The patents apply to inventions in the domains of analytics, big data, cyber-security, cloud, mobile, social networking, and software defined environments, as well as industry solutions for retail, banking, healthcare, and transportation.
IBM's programs also reach beyond the company. FOAK (First of a Kind) was established in 1995 under Gerstner. It provided a platform for collaborative relationships between leading clients that wanted to become early adopters of cutting-edge technologies and IBM scientists wishing to conduct research in the marketplace. Under Palmisano, IBM also became a leader in several ecosystem groups, which are not limited to IBM participation. They include employees, customers, business partners, independent software vendors, universities, venture capitalists, community leaders, and others. Participation in these groups helps IBM to stay in touch with what is happening in innovation and also to advocate for innovative practices. One such group, the National Innovation Initiative, advocates an agenda to make the United States the most fertile and attractive environment for innovation.
Embedding Discipline within Anarchy
At IBM innovation falls into four distinct categories: markets and offerings; business/enterprise models; operations; and sustaining enablers. Clarifying this is important to governance in two ways: (1) it helps IBMers know where to target their efforts; and (2) it widens the field of innovation so that more and different efforts can be undertaken.
IBM has a traditional product development process that is used within the businesses. The development process – IPD, or integrated product development model – was first implemented several decades ago and is updated whenever IBM finds an internal improvement or whenever it discovers improvements that have been implemented by peer companies. The group of projects that are under way at any one time is overseen by a portfolio management team within the relevant business. Riskier, more radical projects – ones that typically address new markets, new business models, and/or new disruptive technologies – are placed in the Emerging Business Opportunities framework where they are judged against six criteria: strategic alignment, cross-IBM leverage, new source of customer value, $1 billion+ revenue potential, market leadership, and sustained profit potential. If they meet these criteria they are moved into development, where their progress is subject to the framework of the IPD.
Like other companies with effective innovation governance models, IBM has carefully articulated and implemented processes for bringing products and services to market. In addition, it has an effective discipline for managing and resourcing the development pipeline and portfolio. In other words, there is a structure to ensure that decisions that are made concerning innovation and new opportunities can be acted on.
In response to a Forbes interviewer's question about how IBM balanced short-term and long-term financial goals, Palmisano's answer was, “We don't run IBM in quarterly cycles even though there's tremendous pressure to do that, to give quarterly guidance within a penny. You certainly have to make your numbers. But I just feel it is wrong for the long term to run a company like that. That's why, in 2002, we came up with our 2010 roadmap. That way, IBM could communicate to its investors about the long term … it [also] tells our people, here are the growth plays and here is your role in it.”23 To tie such a long-term investment outlook with the role of innovators within the company can help to align two forces that are at odds in many companies and is an important aspect of innovation governance.
In IBM's ongoing transformation journey, it has exited the commodity businesses, strengthened its position in services and open systems, and acquired over 60 companies that can forward its innovation agenda. Innovation governance at IBM is built on a corporate culture and history that elevates innovation to a high place and oversees the implementation of practices that will help to engage every employee as well as IBM's ecosystem. This part of the job is usually identified as the “soft part” and takes place at the front end of innovation. At the same time, the governance system makes sure that the later stages are effectively and efficiently carried out, so that the commitment to discovering new opportunities can be translated into valid market entries.
Learning from IBM
IBM provides us with an example of high-level and long-standing commitment to innovation. Throughout much of its history IBM has practiced what it preaches – that innovation, not just invention, is key to the company's very existence, and that innovation will not be held back by the company's existing structures, practices, and models. The company takes a hands-off approach to innovation. It does not want to micro-manage, Paul Aspinwall told us. Watson made it clear that there was nothing wrong with wild ducks that flew out of formation. Gerstner managed only his direct reports; he counted on them to manage the people who reported to them. Following this formula, IBM's board works only with the CEO.
IBM has always had tremendous respect for the ability and intelligence of its employees. Even now, when rapid staff turnover has become more the cultural norm in most companies, IBM has a record of employee longevity. This connects with recognizing the importance of an innovation culture that encourages employees to participate in identifying and developing new opportunities.
There are at least three important messages that we can take from the story of innovation governance at IBM. These are:
- IBM's commitment to and focus on a culture that promotes innovation;
- the CEO's involvement in building methods and opportunities for employees to participate; and
- a belief in the inevitability of change and the role of corporate values in addressing change.
A Culture that Promotes Innovation
From the very first days of the company's existence, most of IBM's CEOs have appreciated the importance of a culture of innovation. A focus on culture may have been a radical notion in the Watsons' day, as Hamm suggests, but the hands-on approach to building culture by the top levels of the company is unusual even today. Too often we hear that “culture” is the province of the HR department, or that it can be trusted to sporadic events or projects, often organized by outside consultants.
IBM's “near-death experience” in the last century can be seen in part as the result of leadership turning its attention away from a culture of innovation. The highly conservative nature of IBM's workforce, down to the adoption of dress codes, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the company that Palmisano describes: “You have to be willing to change your core, and you have to be ahead of the shift.”24 Through their commitment to and belief in the importance of an empowered workforce, many IBM CEOs created an environment that sustains and supports a culture of innovation.
Building Methods and Opportunities for Employees to Participate
We have returned again and again to the social networking programs and practices that connect IBM's employees throughout the world. They are at the core of IBM's approach to innovation. That they are also at the core of IBM's products and services surely made the transformation to a “social organization” imperative. We should remember, however, that it was not until the arrival of Gerstner that the company was able to connect the dots and in so doing to find the path to real transformation.
To build a “social organization” is to build an organization where innovation is “emergent.” As Bradley and McDonald put it: “Emergence is what allows collaborative communities to come up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems; it is the source of innovation.”25 This means that leadership will not be able to call all the shots. It means that anarchy must be managed, not eliminated or ruled. In such a company, leaders must be willing to follow as the ducks fly out of formation.
At the same time, as we have stressed, leaders must encourage structures of discipline. They cannot simply stand back as groups throughout the organization come up with and pursue innovative ideas. Part of what governance means, and a significant part of what IBM's leaders have encouraged, are structures such as the integrated product development model, which give decision makers a basis for making choices about where the company's resources will be directed.
The Inevitability of Change
Watson Jr.'s statement that “if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself” has proved to be remarkably apt. Almost a hundred years later, IBM is still changing. In her first year as CEO, Ginni Rometty, began implementing a five-year strategy to use new markets like cloud computing and business analytics software to achieve revenue growth of $20 billion by 2015. Asked what she had learned from Palmisano, she responded: “IBM must keep evolving. What he always says is, ‘Nothing is inevitable.’ She went on to explain, ‘Whatever business you're in – it doesn't matter – it's going to commoditize over time. It's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value’.”26
Notes
1 See, for example, 2012 IBM Annual Report, in which CEO Virginia Rometty points to “the discipline of our management systems” as a key contributor to IBM's overall success. From IBM website. Source: http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2012/bin/assets/2012_ibm_annual.pdf.
2 Much material in this section is from an IMD case study by John Weeks and Jean-Louis Barsoux, “Rebooting IBM,” Case no. IMD-4-0318, 2010; and from Maney, K., Hamm, S. and O'Brien, J.M. (2011). Making the World Work Better: The Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company, IBM Press (hereafter MWWB), as well as several consultants who worked with IBM during this period.
3 This quote and others in this section from MWWB, pp. 158ff.
4 From IBM website. Source: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1990.html.
5 See Weeks and Barsoux, Rebooting IBM, Copyright 2010, Case no. IMD-4-0318.
6 Interview with Paul Aspinwall, 2013. Used with permission.
7 Steve Hamm and Jeffrey, M. O'Brien, MWWB, IBM Press, 2011.
8 MWWB, p. 209.
9 MWWB, p. 148.
10 Ibid, p. 208.
11 Gerstner, L.V. (2002). Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Harper Business.
12 IBM website. Source: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/2071.html.
13 2012 IBM Annual Report. Source: http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2012/bin/assets/2012_ibm_annual.pdf.
14 2004 IBM Annual Report. Source: ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/annualreport/2004/2004_ibm_annual.pdf.
15 Sanford, L.S. and Taylor, D. (2006). Let Go to Grow: Escaping the Commodity Trap. Pearson Education.
16 Ibid, p. 134.
17 Ibid, p. 157.
18 MWWB, p. 166.
19 Ibid, p. 138.
20 From Harvard Business Review blog, “Sam Palmisano's Transformation of IBM” by Joseph L. Bower. January 20, 2012, www.hbr.org.
21 MWWB, p. 161.
22 Bradley, A.J. and McDonald, M.P. (2011). The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees, Harvard Business Review Press, p. 7.
23 Karlgaard. R. (2011). IBM Turns 100: An Interview with CEO Sam Palmisano, June 15.
24 MWWB, p. 141.
25 Bradley and McDonald, p. 15.
26 “IBM's Ginni Rometty looks ahead,” Fortune, Jessi Hempel, 9/20/12.