Reprint: R0412C
Lou Gerstner’s was a hard act to follow. As CEO in what were arguably IBM’s darkest hours, Gerstner brought the company back from the brink. After nearly ten wrenching years, in which the big-machine manufacturer remade itself into a comprehensive software, hardware, and services provider, business was looking good. So the challenge for Sam Palmisano, when he took over as CEO in 2002, was to come up with a mandate for a second act in the company’s transformation.
His primary aim was to get different parts of the company working together so IBM could offer customers “integrated solutions”—hardware, software, services, and financing—at a single price. As part of this effort, he asked all of IBM’s 320,000 employees, in 170 countries, to weigh in on a new set of shared corporate values.
Over a 72-hour period, thousands of IBMers throughout the world gave Palmisano and his executive team an earful in an intranet discussion dubbed “ValuesJam,” an often-heated debate about the company’s heart and soul. Twenty-four hours into the exercise, at least one senior exec wanted to pull the plug. The jam had clearly struck a chord with employees, but it was a dissonant one, full of rancor and discontent.
Palmisano let the discussion continue, and the next day, the mood began to shift. The criticism became more constructive. Out of the million words generated by the jam grew a set of values that, as Palmisano explains in this interview, are meant to guide the operational decisions made by IBM’s employees—and, more important, to serve as Palmisano’s mandate to continue the reinvention of the company.
Corporate values generally are feel-good statements that have almost no effect on a company’s operations. What made—what makes—you think they can be more than this?
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