This page highlights studies of IBM.

It covers - -

• early history
• its decline
• and revival

     early history

Thomas J Watson Jr (with a little help from Peter Petrie) wrote Father, Son & Co: My Life at IBM & Beyond (New York: Bantam 1990), of interest in its own right and for its perspective on the Lou Gerstner turnaround at Big Blue. It might be read in conjunction with Kevin Maney's The Maverick & His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr and the Making of IBM (New York: Wiley 2003).

Geoffrey Austrian's Herman Hollerith (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1982) is a definitive study of the punch card king. The cards as a cultural artefact are memorialised in Steven Lubar's 1991 paper 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate': A Cultural History of the Punch Card.

Watson Jr understandably concentrates more on the famous 'Think', IBM's corporate socialism - a considerable achievement amid the 1930's dustbowls and dole queues - and IBM's marketing prowess than on company songs with lyrics such as

our voices swell in admiration
of TJ Watson proudly sing
He'll ever be our inspiration
to him our voices loudly ring.

or his father's profound resistance to the development of electronic computing. Watson Sr's A Business & Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM (New York: McGraw Hill 2003) is an interesting example of the literature.

Emerson Pugh's Building IBM: Shaping an Industry & its Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press 1995) is outstanding academic history of Big Iron's early days. With its companion volumes - IBMs 360 & Early 370 Systems (1991), Memories That Shaped An Industry (1984) and IBMS's Early Computers (1984) - it offers insights into the company, technology and US business in the first half of last century. There are insightful comments in Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) edited by David Mowery & Richard Nelson.

Before The Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created 1865-1956 (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) by James Cortada is essential reading.

Edwin Black's IBM & The Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany & America's Most Powerful Corporation (London: Little Brown 2001) is a hard-hitting investigation. Our statement regarding that work is here.

     commercial decline

Franklin Fisher's IBM & the U.S. Data Processing Industry (New York: Praeger 1983) is an economic analysis at the height of the bust-IBM wars, worth a visit to your library.

Broken Promises: An Unconventional View of What Went Wrong at IBM (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1996) by Daniel Quinn Mills blames corporate arteriosclerosis for the decline in IBM's fortunes, arguing that the mixture of jobs for life and proprietary systems was nearly fatal.  A perspective is provided by Sanford Jacoby's Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since The New Deal (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1997) and Nikki Mandell's The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890-1930 (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 2002).

The earlier Blue Magic: The People, Power & Politics behind the IBM Personal Computer (London: Grafton 1989) by James Chposky & Ted Leonsis was deferential, concentrated on corporate politics and barely recognised the rise (and rise ... and rise) of Darth Gates and Deathstar Microsoft. The Quality Journey: How Winning the Baldridge Sparked the Remaking of IBM (New York: Dutton 1993) is a triumphalist tome by Joseph Boyett, Stephen Schwartz & Roy Bauer - the world according to just-in-time and quality circles. 

Paul Ceruzzo's A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998) in discussing the IBM anti-trust litigation notes that

... both sides, with all their highly paid legal and research staffs, utterly and completely missed what everyone has since recognised as the obvious way that computing would evolve ... one expert witness testified that "it is most unlikely that any major new venture into the general purpose computer industry can be expected.  As late as 1986 one Justice Department economist, still fuming over dismissal of the case, complained that "IBM faces no significant domestic or foreign competition that could threaten its dominance".  

Robert Heller's The Fate of IBM (London: Little Brown 1994) and Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM & the Future of Global Technology (New York: Times 1994) by Charles Ferguson & Charles Morris caught the company at its nadir, with speculation among the business press that IBM was toast and its new CEO would be arranging for a tasteful corporate burial. That speculation was wrong, although the corporate socialism is now sleeping with the fishes after the group shed 180,000 staff. 

     and revival

Doug Garr's IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner & the Business Turnaround of the Decade (New York: Harper 1999) was for us more engaging than Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons & Turnaround Tactics of IBM's Lou Gerstner (New York: McGraw Hill 1999) by Robert Slater. After the heady days of the 1970s the turnaround from losses of $20 billion began in a wave of panic, with one executive reputedly being given his termination notice while in a coma ... a cultural revolution for an organisation that was one of the first to provide group life insurance, survivor benefits and paid vacations. 

Gerstner's autobiography Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround (New York: HarperCollins 2002) is reminiscent of Michael Eisner's self-regarding Work in Progress (New York: Random 1998).

For Lenovo see The Lenovo Affair: The Growth of China’s Computer Giant and Its Takeover of IBM-PC (New York: Wiley 2006) by Ling Zhijun


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