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Summary: Right leader at the right time for the right corporation
Review: Gerstner arrived at IBM at the right time with all the right leadership qualities required for an ailing company like IBM. His story is an illustration of how leaders can serve as change agents. Morale of the story - inspite of the recession and the ailing economy, corporate America still has leaders like Gerstner, Fiorina, Gates, Dell and many others who can steer the economy in the right direction during tough times.
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Summary: Memoirs of An Arrogant Genius
Review: Gerstner is arrogant but with good reason. He knew what to do and did it, however unpopular it was. He was brought in to save this company (and protect its shareholders) from the foibles of the career IBMers who, without malice, were destroying what the Watsons had created. He wasn't there to protect jobs or careers. Gerstner rightly saw that IBM should not be a welfare program for "loyal" employees; it had to be a productive and profitable enterprise and he did what was necessary. Good for him. Genius is always hard to pin down but I have no doubt that this man is a genius and "Elephants" gives great insight into his thinking and actions. (But it also makes clear that, as Shakespeare might say of Lou, "The milk of human kindness does not flow through his veins.)
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Summary: Valuable for the lessons
Review: Gerstner's tale of how IBM turned its behemoth-self around and is, today, still riding high, is a lesson for all students of enterprise. The valuable parts of the book are the processes Gerstner lists in the efforts to harness good parts of corporate culture (respect for individuals, devotion to excellence) and to minimize the harmful aspects of a hothouse atmosphere where stagnation is the inevitable result. The proof is in the pudding; companies that didn't follow these steps are stilled mired in their own tracks; IBM is flying. The author has a section on "knowing and loving your business." This is a fundamental that seems obvious, but it's forgotten so often with tragic consequences. IBM faced the brink of disaster and came back stronger than ever.
My favorite take-away phrase from this book was "Measure and Reward the Future--Not the Past." Powerful stuff. You may have heard all this before, but it bears repeating. Recommended.
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Summary: Dances With Elephants
Review: IBM should thank its lucky stars that Louis Gerstner, Jr. was there to save the day. His strategic and complex scheme to save the country was utter genius. In his book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance", Gerstner explains how he took IBM by the throat and shook its economical and technological foundations until a dramatic metamorphosis occurred. I liked the fact that Gerstner went solo to write this book because that helped me to understand what he was thinking when he made his different choices. Everything from reintegrating the IBM management team to unveiling IBM's e-business idea was so precise in a book that lacks length (being under 300 pages long). This book will inspire anyone with the hopes of being management material. It's definitely worthy of a five-star rating.
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Summary: Compelling First Person Account of Change Management
Review: Lou Gerstner has written an interesting first person study of how organizations can become plagued by inertia, and fall out of step with their industry. As an outsider, Gertsner was immediately able to spot troubling cultural behavior and ask questions about IBM's products, strategy, and way of conducting business that insiders did not. Some of the most interesting material deals with trying to change both strategy and behaviors once he recognized that they were leading IBM towards potential ruin.
The turnaround at IBM has been quite a success story, and Gerstner definitely deserves his share of the credit. In the information technology business, becoming set in your ways can be the a kiss of death, and he explains in an easily readable style how he helped wake up big blue, while others would have preferred to fly it into the ground rather than change.
Still, I wondered if as an outsider, he 'missed something' regarding the cultural at IBM. Clearly tying results to compensation, and removing power and status as key elements of the rewards system created a more market and profit focused company. But while 'Built to Last' outlines the importance of loyalty and continuity in first class companies, this trait seems to be looked down upon in the tech sector (not just at the pre-Gerstner IBM, but also more recently at HP and PeopleSoft.)
In this regard, I enjoyed Andy Grove's book "Only the Paranoid Survive" a bit more, as he discusses fostering a winning culture at Intel that has kept them on top for quite a while, despite competing in an industry that requires constant innovation. You get the feeling that Gerstner was more of a Mr. Fixit...focused on the short-term turn-around. It would have been interesting to hear him talk more about the long-term strategies for IBM to remain competitive, and particularly how to use IBM's size as an asset rather than liability.
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Summary: What's next?
Review: Not only can Lou Gerstner run a business, he also writes a credible, well-crafted account of what he did. Despite many ex-IBM reviewers who despise him and a certain amount of ego that has to show through in a book like this, it feels like Lou had the analytic skills, strategic vision and ability to execute that made him the right guy at the right time for a very tough job.That said, he lost some credibility with me in his chapter on "The System". Lou shows his distaste for government regulation then proposes an income tax revision that would tax away short term profits, a classic example of suggesting the system be micro managed with narrowly based regulation at a time when simplification and true reform are vital. And in case you didn't pick up his contempt for investment bankers earlier, this is the chapter where he really lets them have it. Ironically just after the book came out he signed on as the part-time Chairman of the Carlyle Group. Which leads to the strongest impression the book left on me: Lou's true success will be measured by history that still has to be written. Mr. Gerstner will now sit on top of a company that lives off of a military-industrial behemoth that's bigger than ever forty plus years after Ike warned us of it. If he can do big things to make that system work for the greater good, he'll be a hero of the 21st Century. If, however, he is just renting out his Rolodex, "Elephants" could turn out to be another on the long list entitled, "buy the book, short the author."
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Summary: I wish the author had time to make those "connections".....
Review: One should start reading this book from chapter 27 "IBM- a farewell".
Here the author muses how he wished he had more time to make the connections from the old to the new.
I worked at IBM from 1992 through 2000 and I felt that this above failing of CEO had repercussions throughout the whole organization. IBM indeed became very successful company under his leadership but I often felt that while going after quarterly numbers we were missing the long term, big picture. We also were getting little soulless.
Was Lou's tenure good for IBM? In the short term: yes, but in the long run, we have to resort to famous words of Zhou Enlai which he used assessing French Revolution.."It is too soon to say."
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Summary: A big case study on renovation
Review: The first part of the book is full of satire and is amusing. The rest four parts lack this satire and are a little bit boring. The book not presents a case study of a company innovation but describes the history of IBM in nineties. For example, the author explains in detail why OS/2 was cancelled and why did they buy Lotus and didn't buy other companies. It's very exciting to read how the CEO has diagnosed the problems of the company and which solutions did he find. I would also recommend "Leading the Revolution" by Gary Hamel. It is a very serious examination on how companies innovate and why should they do it, with lots of remarkable examples. Gary Hamel uses plain friendly language. The books of Chris Argyris about organizational learning are also about innovation. Although the language style is "academical", the books are interesting and somewhat unique.
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Summary: How Lou and the Big Blue did the Lambada
Review: Who Says Elephants Can't Dance: Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround is a very well written account of how Lou Gerstner was able to steer IBM away from the brink of bankruptcy in 1993 back to profitability and growth. It is the story of IBM's amazing strategical and cultural transformation within a very short period of time from the man who is responsible for being the chief decision maker during this process. Who Says Elephants Can't Dance is a basically a very thorough case study in crisis management. It contains an impressive collection of keen observations about the challenges of operating a very large corporation, a set of fundamental lessons on how to create and execute business strategies and a lot of common sense. The first thing that impressed me about the book was its very direct and concise style. Apparently, Gerstner wrote this book without the aid of a coauthor or a ghost-writer, so it is truly a first-hand story. Gerstner does not waste any of the reader's time. Each chapter has a very clear goal of what he is trying to communicate, and he gets to the point right away. I am usually disappointed by non-fiction authors that make excessive use of repetition in an attempt to drive important points home. Gerstner knows how to say it only once but precisely and lucidly. The second notable aspect of the book was the modesty of the author. His humbleness starts from the very first page of the book: This book is dedicated to the thousands of IBMers who never gave up on their company, their colleagues, and themselves. They are the real heroes of the reinvention of IBM Gerstner continues to give proper credit to the people who were responsible for some of the most critical decisions throughout the rest of his book. It is refreshing to see that a person with respect for others and an emphasis on ethics can still rise to the top position in one of the largest companies in the world and succeed in this age of megalomaniac CEOs and backstabbing corporate cultures. Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? is required reading material for executives or people who are contemplating a career in corporate management. Though Gerstner's tone is surprisingly down to earth, he presents a set of strategies that are crucial for running a successful business. Gerstner shows that there is no magical formula for success. The basic tools are a lot of common sense, focus, execution and dedication. Many of the concepts presented in this book are likely to be beneficial not just inside the context of managing a large technology corporation but also for the leaders of any organization with culture, efficiency and execution problems.
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Summary: Worth your time and then some...
Review: Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround by Louis V. Gerstner Jr. is insightful, entertaining, and full of valuable historical perspectives into the computer revolution. There are also many management approaches throughout the book that may seem like common sense to some of us, but clearly need to be re-evaluated by many mid and top-level executives. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and light-hearted details of the first part of the book; and found the second part of the book that detailed the major steps taken in restructuring to be equally compelling. I definetly recommend this to anyone in the computer industry, anyone at an executive level of any company, and to those who just enjoy reading!
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