Rating: 
Summary: Lou Meets The "Bolsheviks"
Review: I got what I was looking for in this book - Mr. Gerstner's personal view on the challenges he met at IBM and what he did to protect its new life from what he called IBM's Bolsheviks. He is very forward about the fact this is from his view point. He even wondered up front if anyone would want to read about his day at the office! In particular, the section on culture should be required reading in any graduate level class. His practical and experienced view supports what the theorists have been telling us for some time - culture is the driving force to the organization. As a book, it's a short read since a significant portion of it are the appendixes. While his prose comes across as personable, his own description of himself does make him come across as someone who may have been a very cool cookie having to take the hard stand. What's most interesting is the history he reveals of a company which became arrogant and distant from its customers - that "history" is being played out right now by Microsoft. When you read about how IBM managed its pricing with its contribution to poor sales prior to Gerstner's arrival, you can't help but wonder if Bill Gates is paying attention since he's doing close to the same thing with his new licensing policies. Yes, we repeat history if it's not studied, and for a direct, to the point account of near death experience IBM had, this is a good read. I gave it one star less than five because towards the end (the last 40 pages or so) it began to get a bit repetitive with themes he already had in the earlier part.
Rating: 
Summary: Honest and Impressive
Review: It is interesting to see the difference in reviews between those who stayed at IBM and have benefitted and those who didn't. This book is not self-aggrandizing or disengenuous. Sure, he is taking credit, but he is also sharing credit with his fellow IBMers. By any objective standard or measure, what Gerstner accomplished during his tenure at IBM is of historic and lasting importance. His clear and direct style both as a leader and author are refreshing and the lessons in this book are sorely needed in a business world that has been poisoned by snake-oil artists, reckless financial management, moral lapses, and just plain sick leadership. Bravo Louis Gerstner, and long live your legacy at IBM!
Rating: 
Summary: ABUSING THE ELEPHANT
Review: I have not and will not buy this book. Gerstner's approach was pure abuse, such as the way some animal trainers get wild animals to perform. Gerstner was able to rid IBM of company loyalty, sacrifice investment in future products for immediate profitability, and bloat the salaries of a select few while making "the most important resource" totaly expendable. He is a perfect example of the greedy CEO's who only understand how to pad their personal assets at the sacrifice of the corporation and its employees.
Rating: 
Summary: For the REAL IBM story, read "Soldier of Fortune 500"
Review: Sorry, but the CEO of any company is always so totally out of touch with the guys on the street it isn't funny. Compare IBM of 20 years ago with what it is today. Years ago you got a job with Big Blue and you were set for life. Not today. I'm always amazed at the books written by CEO's of companies that are anything but success stories. Read "Soldier" and find out what really happened.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I hoped for
Review: I was eager to read this book since my career at IBM spanned the Gerstner era. I liked the first three parts describing what problems he had when he started at IBM and what he did about them. The later parts I found less interesting and the copies of internal memos at the back put me to sleep just like they did when I worked at IBM. I think a real history would be a lot more interesting.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for all of IBM's competitors
Review: IBM is still in awe of Gerstner. In the 1990s, the board voted to award him ridiculously excessive retirement benefits -- such as the use of a company jet whenever he wants -- so you can bet that his words will continue to be treated like tablets of stone for years to come, much as those of the two Thomas Watsons used to be.The joy for all of IBM's competitors, and perhaps dismay for IBM's partners and employees, to be found here are threefold: 1. That IBM will continue to run its entire operation as a portfolio, getting in and out of businesses as soon as they seem unattractive, which in IBM-speak means one, or at most two years of declining sales. This is almost the exact opposite of Microsoft's approach. To succeed in the IT industry, you need to show exceptional commitment to your customers and partners -- to demonstrate that they can safely invest in your products because you're still going to be in that business for five, if not many more, years. 2. That IBM will continue to believe that open is good and proprietary is bad. Before Gerstner, IBM believed in open, standard interfaces between products; now in Gerstner's world, it says it believes in open standards within products. One wonders how long it will take IBM to realise that if it pursues this belief to its logical conclusion, everything proprietary will be stripped out -- in other words, there will be no added value in IBM products that you can't get anywhere else. 3. That IBM continues to believe its best strategy is as an integrator of other firm's piece-parts rather than as a creator of the best piece-parts itself. More than once in the book, Gerstner says this is where he believes the IT industry is headed. He needs to look back at IBM's history. IBM kicked off the desktop PC industry by being the integrator that brought together the piece-part suppliers Intel and Microsoft. What is happening now? The original integrator, IBM, is slowly withdrawing from the desktop market, while Intel and Microsoft increasingly dominate the processor and operating system markets. I strongly disapprove of much of what Gerstner has left IBM with. However, unlike one reviewer here, I cannot criticise him for avoiding the topic of IBM's WWII involvement with the Nazis. There is a common feeling among the IBMers I talk to that, though the involvement was awful and reprehensible, it cannot be blamed on today's IBMers, none of whom worked for the company during 1939-1945, and none of whom have gained from that terrible episode.
Rating:
Summary: A light read with not a lot of depth
Review: As an IBMer who joined in the mid-1990s, I enjoyed the book as a light read and an accurate account of the cultural transformation which has touched all of us insiders in some fashion or other. I found particularly entertaining a short "IBM lingo" section, with many sayings that I had assumed were part of the everyday business vocabulary. However, I would have liked more depth and detail throughout Mr. Gerstner's account. Overall the book feels a bit light in many areas, with few references to anecdotes, actual examples, and names of actual people (other than the few who are praised). As a result, the narrative does feel a bit detached and fails to grab the reader emotionally... You can't really feel the "passion" and the "struggle" that must have permeated Mr. Gerstner's day-to-day life as he was moving to transform the company. I would recommend the book, particularly since it can be easily digested over a couple of weekends and makes for an interesting and entertaining read.
Rating: 
Summary: How a bully destroyed IBM
Review: In order to appreciate the essence of Gerstner, I would recommend you first read chapter #12 ('A brief history of IBM'). It's actually much more about the IT industry, or at least Gerstner's understanding of it. The man admits more than once that he came to IBM knowing nothing about IT, but that he should pen a chapter so littered with errors when leaving IBM is truly lamentable. For example, contrary to what he writes, IBM aimed the PC at businesses, not 'hobbyists and students', right form the outset. Contrary to what he writes, IBM was not a 'one-product company' in 1984: highly profitable products like the System/34, the Selectric typewriter and the Displaywriter had been around for years; even the IBM PC had been around for three years. It confirms what many in the industry suspected: that Gerstner never understood IBM's product lines. That's the main reason why he gave so few interviews -- it was virtually impossible to find a journalist who knew less about IBM's products than he did. If it was to be an open-ended interview, by the time the journalist got to the third question in any line of inquiry, Gerstner would be embarrassed and humiliated. He could do the occasional Comdex keynote speech, but there you don't have to take any questions, and anyway your speechwriters draft the text for you. Anyone wondering why the immensely successful AS/400 line fared so poorly under Gerstner will be none the wiser. He mentions it just once in the book, and then it is just in passing, in a list of products in an appendix. Gerstner complains in this book about other 'outspoken' CEOs like Gates, Ballmer and Ellison, but frankly he could never dare to take them on in open debate, because his understanding of any of the technical issues was so poor. In this book, he says that every decent CEO must be intimately acquainted with the finances of his or her company, but I cannot believe that a decent CEO should be so distant from the company's own products. Maybe if Gerstner hadn't spent so much time on public education and non-executive directorships in unrelated companies, he would have had more time to understand the product issues that drive strategy in the IT industry. So what does a bully do when he arrives at a company dominated by products and technology architectures? Answer: the only way he could begin to level the playing field -- i.e. to reduce the daily embarrassment -- between himself and the existing IBM directors was to shift the focus away from products. That's why Dennie Welsh's plan to massively expand IBM's services empire became so attractive. And it's why the whole e-business thing became so attractive to Gerstner in the mid-1990s. But IBM benefitted little from its e-business mindshare; by then IBM just didn't have the products, and so the main beneficiaries of the Internet boom were Sun and Microsoft. Gerstner admits in this book that, under his direction, IBM now plays the IT markets on a portfolio basis, quickly getting in and out of businesses as the hoped-for profits come and go. But, in the face of Microsoft, this approach is a disaster for any company with long-term aspirations. Microsoft is known for its tenacity, for trying again and again with new generations of products until it dominates markets -- witness the desktop market, the office suite market and the handheld markets. Currently Microsoft is playing the ERP market as a 10-year game. IBM now gives up on a market after two years; Microsoft almost never gives up. Which is the more successful? Indeed there are some who say that the installation of Gerstner was a Microsoft plot to destroy IBM from within -- to get IBM to ditch OS/2 and all its other proprietary architectures, under the "open systems" banner, in order to hand over the highly lucrative server market to the company that realised that to create value, you have to offer differentiated, proprietary products protected by patents. We'll never know how many Microsoft shares Gerstner held; certainly he dumped much of his IBM stock over the years. This book proves what we already knew: that Gerstner is neither an entrepreneur nor a technocrat. He is a destroyer, not a builder. When your company is in trouble, you need someone like Gerstner for 2-3 years to take the really tough decisions about which businesses and assets to sell off. But it is too much to expect such a person to continue at the helm when rebuilding and rapid growth is needed. Gerstner stayed at IBM about three years too long -- his dismal revenue record in Appendix C shows this.
Rating:
Summary: On the Backs of Employees
Review: Little Lou did his "magic" by cutting employee medical care, cutting employee retirement benefits, cutting employee vacation time, and finally... cutting employees! He stopped training and investing in people. If you didn't have current skills, you were fired and someone younger and more naive was hired, for a while...
Ya, what a genius!
Rating:
Summary: 'Lessons Learned' Chapters are Very Strong
Review: One caveat: Lots of these reviews are really reviews of "do I like Lou Gerstner?" and not the ideas he offers in his book. My review is about the book and whether its arguments are useful to business people. On that basis alone, I rate it highly. I thought his chapters on lessons learned are quite good, especially where he distinguishes between vision and strategy. In my opinion, he offers a lot of great insight on this in a small amount of text. I couldn't get a clear picture of whether people were treated with dignity in the downsizings. On one hand, I've heard some pretty cold stuff outside of Lou's book. On the other hand, I worked at IBM in the late '80s as an intern and the culture was DEEPLY complacent and isolated from the real world. I suspect that the reality is somewhere in-between but the "numbers guys" argue one extreme while the people who paid the price argue just as forcefully the opposite extreme. I also think his chapters on being willing to challenge the conventional wisdom were valuable. I remember when Gerstner went to IBM and the conventional wisdom really WAS that Gerstner should become a high-tech hipster who could talk client/server acronyms, should 'harvest' the 390 business, and break the company into a bunch of 'baby blues.' I think it underestimates his (and clearly IBM's) accomplishments to not acknowledge it took serious decision clarity and courage to go against that conventional wisdom at the time -- especially given the financial pressures on the firm. So the bottom line is I think the book offers good insight for how to think clearly about your business, what your franchise really is, what your opportunities really are, and how to make clear decisions based on trusting a clear thought process that filters out lots of background noise.
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