Big Blue's PC business is gone long live IBM
Last Friday I chatted to two former colleagues who had, between them, spent over 70 years on the FT. They had come into the office for the annual pensioners' lunch. The lunch is an opportunity for retired journalists to meet, and for those still here to shake hands with mentors who guided them through their early years.
Not many people work for the same company for that long these days. Not many companies survive long enough to allow them to. In his book The Living Company, Arie de Geus, a former Shell executive, said that a third of the companies in the 1970 Fortune 500 list had disappeared 13 years later. The average life expectancy of a multinational company a Fortune 500 company or its non-US equivalent was 40 to 50 years.
To some, this is a sign of capitalism's vitality. Those companies that do not have the strength to survive are supplanted by those that have. It is creative destruction to be celebrated. Mr de Geus disagreed. There was something valuable about companies that held on for longer.
He was right. Companies that continue for decades, or centuries, contribute to societies in the same way that enduring marriages, extended families and stable neighbourhoods do. They pass on wisdom, they teach the young how to behave and they strengthen social bonds when so much of modern life conspires to prise them apart.
Of course, if economies are not to stagnate, new companies have to spring up and old ones have, occasionally, to disappear. But we all lose something when old companies go. If you doubt that, imagine how we would feel if Harvard or Oxford universities disappeared. All that scholarship, all that history, all those alumni memories gone. Companies are no different.
That is why we should learn from the survival of IBM, which, as part of its continuing transformation, last week sold its personal computer business to Lenovo of China. When Louis Gerstner was approached to become chief executive of IBM in 1993, he reckoned the company had a one-in-five chance of surviving. He decided to take the job anyway. In his memoirs, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, he recalls that the IBM management at the time believed the company should be broken up. After taking over as chief executive, he decided against that.
Mr Gerstner famously said at his first press conference that “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision”. He was, however, already starting to develop one, which was based on the company's parts staying together. The break-up strategy for IBM was based on the view that the computer industry was fragmenting. Large suppliers such as IBM were, the break-up advocates pointed out, being beaten by nimbler competitors.
But Mr Gerstner's central insight was that the faster technology developed, the more suppliers there were, the more confusing the offerings became, the more companies would look for people who could put it all together for them. Hence Mr Gerstner's drive towards computer services and consulting.
He did not abandon hardware. Many at IBM argued that the mainframe computer was dead and that the company should put all its energies into personal computers. Mr Gerstner resisted this: new mainframe technology boosted IBM's sales. With PCs, he was less successful. IBM had not paid enough attention to PCs from the start, allowing Intel to provide the microprocessors that went into them and Microsoft the operating system.
Under Mr Gerstner, IBM handed the manufacture of most of its PCs tothird parties. “It's a spotty record at best, and I am not terribly proud of it,” Mr Gerstner said in his book. Last week's sale of the PC business to Lenovo does not bring that story entirely to an end: Lenovo's PCs will carry the IBM brand for five years.
That is not without risks. It was the strength of that brand that allowed Mr Gerstner to save IBM by turning it into a company largely based on technology services. As a customer of IBM before he joined the company, he knew what that brand stood for: reliability, dependability, security.
The problem with those qualities, he saw, was that they had ossified. Employees no longer remembered why they behaved the way they did. When, wearing a blue shirt, Mr Gerstner arrived for his first IBM meeting, he found everyone wearing white shirts. Why white shirts? They all thought it was IBM uniform. In fact, the original IBM instruction was to dress the way the customers did. In those days, the customers wore white shirts. When they changed their shirt colours, IBM did not. It was Mr Gerstner's great achievement to shake the company up, while preserving what it stood for.
In his study of long-living companies, Mr de Geus found they had several common characteristics. One was that they were cohesive, with a strong sense of identity. The second was that they were sensitive to their environment. “As wars, depressions, technologies and political changes surged and ebbed around them, they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, tuned to whatever was going on.”
IBM had the first of Mr de Geus's characteristics; it needed Mr Gerstner to remind them of the second. As his successor, Samuel Palmisano, says in the December issue of the Harvard Business Review: “We were so successful for so long that we could never see another point of view. And when the market shifted, we almost went out of business.”
It is a lesson to all thoseestablished companies that find themselves under threat from the internet, from cheap manufacturing in the developing world or from newer competitors at home. They need to think about what they are best at, what their skills are and what new, more easily defensible businesses they can apply them to.
It is something they owe not just to current employees but to previous ones, who deserve to be able to come back and see that their achievements have been built on rather than destroyed.
长寿的蓝色巨人
上周五，我与以前两位同事聊天。他们两人在《金融时报》的工龄加起来超过70年。他们是来出席公司的年度退休员工午餐会的。这个午餐会为退休记者们提供了一个会面机会，也为那些仍在这里工作的人提供了机会，能与早年指导过他们的导师握手致意。
如今已没多少人会在同一家公司工作这么长时间了，事实上也没有多少家公司能生存那么久。阿里?德赫斯(Arie de Geus)在他的著作《长寿公司》(The Living Company)中表示，在1970年财富500强企业名单中，有三分之一的企业13年后消失了。德赫斯曾是壳牌公司(Shell)的管理人员。跨国公司、财富500强公司或其非美国同行的平均预期寿命是40到50年。
在有些人看来，这是资本主义活力的一个标志。那些没有生存活力的企业被那些有活力的取代了。这是值得庆贺的创造性毁灭。但德赫斯先生不同意这一观点。他认为存在时间较长的公司确有其过人之处。
他是对的。持续存在数十年乃至几个世纪的企业对社会的贡献，与经久的婚姻、大家庭，以及稳定的邻里关系一致。它们传承智慧，教导年轻一代如何举止得体，加强社会纽带，尽管现代生活在许多方面有断开社会纽带之嫌。
当然，若要不让经济停滞，那么新公司就该不断涌现，而老公司就该时不时消逝。但在老公司关门的同时，我们也就失去了一些东西。如果你对此心存疑问，不妨想象一下，一旦哈佛或牛津大学消失，我们会有什么感受。所有那些学识、那些历史、那些同窗的记忆都消失了。企业的情况也没什么不同。
这就是我们为什么该从IBM的生存中获取经验。上周，IBM将其个人电脑业务卖给中国的联想集团(Lenovo)，这是IBM持续转型过程的一部分。1993年，当有人找到郭士纳(Louis Gerstner)，让他出任IBM首席执行官时，他估计公司有五分之一的生存机会。不管怎么说，他决定接受这份工作。在他的回忆录《谁说大象不能跳舞？》(Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?)中，他回忆道，当时的IBM管理层相信，公司应当被分拆。在接掌公司首席执行官之职后，他决定反对那样做。
在上任后的第一次记者招待会上，郭士纳曾说过一句著名的话：“IBM眼下最不需要的东西就是远景”。但他当时已经开始在打造远景了，而基础就是公司各个部分团结在一起。IBM的分拆策略是基于这样一个观点，计算机行业正在细分化。这一战略的提倡者指出，像IBM这样的大型供应商正被更敏捷的竞争对手打败。
但郭士纳先生的主要见解则是，技术发展得越快，供应商就越多，产品系列就越发会把人搞糊涂，也就会有更多公司需要有人来整合这些产品。因此郭士纳先生便开始推动IBM向电脑服务和咨询方向前进。
他没有放弃硬件。IBM中有很多人认为，大型计算机已经没有市场，公司应当把全部精力放到个人电脑上。郭士纳先生抵制了这一观点：新的计算机主机技术推进了IBM的销售。他在个人电脑方面不大成功。IBM从一开始就没有给予个人电脑业务足够的重视，而允许英特尔(Intel)提供个人电脑中的微处理器，并让微软(Microsoft)提供操作系统。
在郭士纳先生的领导下，IBM将大部分个人电脑的生产业务交给了第三方。“往好的方向说，这是一段功过参半的记录，我并不十分以此为荣，”郭士纳先生在他的书中写道。上周将个人电脑业务出售给联想之举，并未让这个故事完全结束：联想将使用IBM品牌5年。
这么做并非没有风险。正是凭借IBM品牌的力量，郭士纳先生才能通过将IBM转变成一家以技术服务为主的公司而拯救IBM。在加入公司前，郭士纳先生是IBM的顾客，因而知道这个品牌代表着什么：可信、可靠、安全。
他认为，那些品质存在的问题是：它们已变得僵化。员工不再记得自己的行为方式为何要这样。当郭士纳先生身着蓝色衬衫第一次参加IBM会议时，他发现每个人都穿着白衬衫。为什么要穿白衬衫呢？他们都认为白衬衫就是IBM的制服。事实上，IBM最初的指引是，顾客穿什么，员工就穿什么。以前顾客都穿白衬衫。但后来顾客改变了衬衫的颜色，IBM却没有变。郭士纳先生最大的成就是，保留公司所代表的东西，同时彻底改变公司。
德赫斯先生在对长寿企业所做的研究中发现，这些企业有一些共同特点。其一是它们有凝聚力，有强烈的认同感。第二是它们对周围环境很敏感。“随着战争、经济不景气、科技和政治变化在它们周围潮涨潮落，它们似乎总是善于保持敏锐的触觉，把握正在发生的事。”
在德赫斯先生所说的特点中，IBM拥有第一个，但需要德赫斯先生向他们提醒第二个。作为郭士纳的继任者，塞缪尔?帕尔米萨诺(Samuel Palmisano)在《哈佛商业评论》12月刊上说：“我们在那么长时间里一直那么成功，以致于我们永远也不会从另一个角度去看。而当市场出现转变时，我们几乎破产。”
对于所有老牌企业来说，这都是一个教训。这些企业突然发现自己面临互联网、发展中国家廉价制造业，或国内更新竞争对手的威胁。它们需要想一想，自己最擅长什么，自己拥有哪些技能，它们可以把这些技能用于哪些更容易抵御竞争的新业务。
他们不仅该将这点归功于在任员工，还要归功于前任雇员，他们有资格回来看到自己取得的成就得到发扬，而不是被毁了。
