Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?

Rarely do we find good friends who make a significant difference in our lives and careers. Even rare are bright friends who give us great books, which can deeply enrich our knowledge and thinking. I am fortunate to find both categories of friends at various stages in my life so far. Most recently Durga Prasad, Mangesh, and Nag gave me three good books to read as I left Dallas and embarked on my journey at Kellogg. The first book I read was "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" by Louis V. Gerstner.

Lou Gerstner was the Chairman and CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, and led its turnaround from the brink of insolvency to the leader in the IT business. Gerstner starts the book with the discussion on how he came about to be chosen as the CEO to lead in the spring of 1993 when most business pundits had written off IBM as one of those fading giants whose time has long passed in the business world. He then discusses a series of critical management and fiscal decisions he had to make to first stem the decline of IBM and then how he had to strategize IBM's revival.

The book provides wonderful insights into the leadership challenges and hard resistance one encounters when trying to transform the culture and thinking and to shift the direction of an institution. Especially, since IBM was perceived to be that huge elephant moving slowly in the technology business world, where the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and other companies were fast changing the rules of the game.

One of the profound questions that the book addresses was, "when the culture at IBM was responsible for its immense growth and unchallenged leadership position in the decades of 50s, 60s, 70s, and in the early 80s, why was the same culture and management style leading to its recent decline?". The book extensively discusses how IBM was founded and built by the legendary Thomas J. Watson Sr., and how his equally legendary son Thomas J. Watson Jr. propelled IBM to the top through the making of mainframe computers. The success of the mainframes made IBM the technology company without a competitor and brought the major share of its revenue. The technological contribution of IBM to the growth of America (and also the world) made people recognize it as a "national treasure". How many non-governmental and/or for-profit institutions can really find themselves being called the pride and treasure of a nation?

But then what happened? Why did IBM start to decline even while it was unarguably still the leading supplier of the mainframes and other technology products. The book provides an astute analysis on how the perception, thinking, and the approach on the customer needs did not adapt to the changes in the market conditions and competitive forces; how the school of thought "build the technologies and the customers will come", which worked during the no-alternative era of mainframes, was continued to be believed at IBM even after the advent of vigorous campaign by Microsoft and Intel (jointly called Wintel!!) that the future is all about desktop computing. While CTOs and technologists at the most of the customer companies of IBM at that time understood and believed that the campaign about desktop computing is not completely true and that the backend computing has much more to offer in the future, IBM's lackadaisical approach to counter the Wintel's campaign did not help things much and eroded its customer base.

Gerstner talks about how he set out to transform the culture to make it more customer centric and orient the thinking to "understand what the customer needs and then build the technologies"; the book provides a detailed account of all the external challenges and internal resistance he faced in trying to bring this change - this is a must read for all of us who know that the most difficult thing for a leader is to bring change in people and in their thinking (but mostly don't know how to achieve that).

Personally, I could also make a connection with the above discussion in the book with my chronic belief that to attain success it is imperative to adapt to one's continuously evolving surroundings and be prepared for any sudden and significant shift in one's situation (in fact, this is the theme of the other book "Who Moved My Cheese" that I recently read on Neelima's behest).

The book also discusses how IBM came about coining the term "e-business", and talks in detail about the future of the e-business. "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" is a must read for all the technologists as well as the managers. And, no wonder I found it very engaging and enriching as it appealed to both the technologist and the MBA candidate in me.