Notes About "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" by Lou Gerstner

I finished reading “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” an autobiography of Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, and I can say without hesitation that it’s one of the best business books I’ve read in decades.

First, a quote that quite faithfully illustrates the spirit of the book:

“People who aren’t forced to deal with technology rarely make the effort to understand either its possibilities or its limitations. In the nuclear era, maybe that was all right. But for technologies as pervasive as the ones we’re dealing wich today, I believe we’ll need leaders in government, business, and policy-making roles who commit themselves to the challenge of lifelong learning in order to bring society into sync with the science.”

Here are some notes (quite a few actually!) I took while reading it.

1. Grabbing Hold

2. Strategy

3. Culture

Chapter 20 is by far the most important chapter in the book.

4. Learnings

Appendix B

Update, 2024-03-08

Quoted in this blog post, an excerpt of the book that is worth gold:

I said something at the press conference that turned out to be the most quotable statement I ever made:

“What I’d like to do now is put these announcements in some sort of perspective for you. There’s been a lot of speculation as to when I’m going to deliver a vision of IBM, and what I’d like to say to all of you is that the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” You could almost hear the reporters blink.

I went on: “What IBM needs right now is a series of very tough-minded, market-driven, highly effective strategies for each of its businesses— strategies that deliver performance in the marketplace and shareholder value. And that’s what we’re working on.

“Now, the number-one priority is to restore the company to profitability. I mean, if you’re going to have a vision for a company, the first frame of that vision better be that you’re making money and that the company has got its economics correct.

“And so we are committed to make this company profitable, and that’s what today’s actions are about.

“The second priority for the company,” I said, “is to win the battle in the customers’ premises. And we’re going to do a lot of things in that regard, and again, they’re not visions— they’re people making things happen to serve customers.”

I said we didn’t need a vision right now because I had discovered in my first ninety days on the job that IBM had file drawers full of vision statements. We had never missed predicting correctly a major technological trend in the industry. In fact, we were still inventing most of the technology that created those changes.

However, what was also clear was that IBM was paralyzed, unable to act on any predictions, and there were no easy solutions to its problems. The IBM organization, so full of brilliant, insightful people, would have loved to receive a bold recipe for success—the more sophisticated, the more complicated the recipe, the better everyone would have liked it.

It wasn’t going to work that way. The real issue was going out and making things happen every day in the marketplace.

…

Fixing IBM was all about execution. We had to stop looking for people to blame, stop tweaking the internal structure and systems. I wanted no excuses. I wanted no long-term projects that people could wait for that would somehow produce a magic turnaround. I wanted— IBM needed— an enormous sense of urgency.

1645 words (reading time ~8 minutes). Previous. Next.