Culture is king
These days, Gerstner sees the basis of IBM's
subsequent transformation as wholly cultural. When he joined, however, it was
not at all clear where the problem lay. In his first three months on the job,
he didn't spend "an hour" thinking about culture, although he learned
a lot about it without trying. There was the IBM culture of crisp white shirts,
the culture of hordes of administrative assistants, and the culture, most
debilitating, of the individual with a capital "I," of me-first for
every employee.
Underneath all the sophisticated
processes, Gerstner concluded, there is always the company's sense of values
and identity.
"It took me to age
fifty-five to figure that out. I always viewed culture as one of those things
you talked about, like marketing and advertising. It was one of the tools that
a manager had at his or her disposal when you think about an enterprise."
He added, "The thing I have
learned at IBM is that culture is everything."