Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company Paperback – January 1, 2011

This is a marvelous history of the IBM evolution and contributions to the world, done in a very absorbing way. It is an essential book for every IBMer, current and former, to own. Am so proud to have been a part of its history.

With the help of the amazon.com, amazon.de and amazon.uk information services, [...] archives, [...] and [...] I have identified, researched and studied more than 100 books, hundreds of articles about IBM, IBM competitors and the IT history as well as the IBM Annual Reports 1986-2010 prior to the publication of "Making the World Work Better" (2011) - a cumbersome book title without mentioning IBM on the front cover. I was curious what the pre-ordered book would offer.Sam Palmisano in his foreword emphasizes "The date of this volume's publication, June 16, 2011 is a meaningful one for IBM. On it, we celebrate our centennial as corporation....there is much to learn from IBM's experience."Emerson W. Pugh, in my mind the best IBM historian, opened his excellent book "Building IBM" in 1995 with the following statement: "No company of the twentieth century achieved greater success and engendered more admiration, respect, envy, feat, and hatred than IBM."I fully agree that there is much to learn IN IBM as well as FROM IBM's experience: working in IBM - a unique global corporation - with excellent IBM colleagues and IBM partners for demanding IBM customers, studying and understanding the deep roots and history of IBM result in many very valuable lessons in the following areas: entrepreneurship, leadership with business culture and business ethics, human resource management responsibilities, relentless innovation, strategy development and execution, business and technology management, risk taking, salesmanship, market coverage, customer relationship cultivation, coping with competitive dynamics, business partnerships, global view, adhering to business principles and practices, taking care of corporate social responsibilities etc. etc. IBM lessons are superior to some dry business management theories taught in business schools and business books by scholars and so called gurus. Providing the best possible solutions and services for IBM customers are part of the IBM DNA. IBM employees knowing the IBM history can better identify themselves with the company and represent the company outside than those who only work for the company to earn a living. IBM corporate executives and their managers are responsible for taking care for the various stakeholder interests in a balanced way with a long term view.This book - Making the World Work Better - covers the following areas:Pioneering the Science of Information: sensing, memory, processing, logic, connecting, architecture.Reinventing the Modern Corporation: the intentional creation of culture, creating economic value from knowledge, becoming global, how organizations engage with society.Making the World Work Better: seeing, mapping, understanding, believing, acting.It is very interesting, written in a lively, journalistic style; readers find excellent pictures, photos, graphs, interesting background information even for insiders, it contains a spectrum of IBM's outstanding achievements, the "IBM Way", mistakes made in the past etc. etc. The three writers were fed with excellent material provided by IBM and IBM's huge archive. See "IBM Icons of Progress" on IBM's Website.Sam Palmisano of Gerstner: "Without him, I don't think we would have survived. We needed somebody with that tough mind and analytical skill." For further details I refer to Gerstner's excellent book "Who Says Elephants can't dance".Gerstner of Palmisano: "What Sam has done is the hardest thing to do - to take a successful platform and continually evolve it; Sam took a successful company and made it far more successful.""IBMers like to think that the work they do is important to the world. There is the ethic of progress guiding how we think," said James Cortada, a member of the IBM Institute for Business Value and the author of dozens of books and articles on the history and management of information technologies.On the pages 329-338 you find 351 notes providing a rich set of references to further sources.One historic detail on page 39 raises some doubts: "On July 6, 1911, Hollerith agreed to sell his Tabulating Machine Company to financier Charles Flint for $2.312.100, and the company became part of Flint's Computing Tabulating-Recording-Company." This statement is misrepresenting the process resulting in the creation of CTR.There is no such statement in the autobiography of Charles R. Flint "Memories of an Active Life" (1923), who describes himself as "The Father of Trusts", bestowed on him by the Chicago newspapers ... continuing "...in the light of thirty years' experience, during which time I have acted as organizer or industrial expert in the formation of twenty-four consolidations, let me review the general advantage of this form of industrial economy....In 1911 I made a departure from the practice of bringing about consolidations of allied interests, that is by consolidating the manufacturers of similar but not identical products. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. is of this class; and although it is not the largest of the consolidations in which I have acted as organizer, it has been and is the most successful. At the outset of this organization, I pointed out to the Guarantee Trust Co. that proposed `allied consolidation', instead of being dependent for earnings upon a single industry, would own three separate and distinct lines of business...On the several but not joint responsibility of my syndicate subscribers, the Guaranty Trust loaned over $4.000.000....The Company started with an aggregate bonded indebtedness of $6.500.000 three times its then net current assets.G. D. Austrian, in Herman Hollerith (1982), quotes Roebling writing to Hollerith: "Mr. Flint is a gentleman I have known for good many years, and his business is putting together industrial consolidations."IBM describes Charles R. Flint as follows:"Charles R. Flint was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the forerunner of IBM. A businessman and financier, Flint brought together in 1907 the principals of three companies -- the International Time Recording Company of Endicott, N.Y.; the Computing Scale Company of America, of Dayton, Ohio; and the Tabulating Machine Company of Washington, D.C. -- to propose a merger. Talks and detailed planning among the parties continued until June 6, 1911, when the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) was incorporated as a holding company controlling the three separate firms. Flint remained a member of C-T-R's board of directors until his retirement in 1930."In a nutshell: Hollerith did not sell to Flint, it was a complicated financially engineered consolidation of companies with shareholders, of which Flint was not the owner but the orchestrator.Therefore, this book does not replace studying prior books about IBM and the IT history, e.g. by Samuel Crowther (1926), Thomas Watson Sr., in Men-Minutes-Money published in 1934, Herman H. Goldstine (1972), G.D. Austrian, Thomas Watson Jr., Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., James Cortada (1993), Emerson Pugh, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Alfred D. Chandler, Richard S. Tedlow etc. etc. Kevin Maney, one of the authors, wrote the excellent book about Thomas Watson, Sr., "The Maverick and his Machine" published in 2003.In 1995 Emerson Pugh explained in Chapter 2 - Origins of IBM - on Page 28:"It is traditional in IBM to honor Watson by equating the founding of the company with his arrival as general manager of CTR." Under Note 23 on page 336 you find: "The view that IBM was founded when T.J. Watson, Sr., became general manager of CTR in 1914 is broadly accepted. For example, the anticipated announcement of the appointment of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., as chief executive of IBM was reported by the New York Times on 26 March 1993, p.1D as follows: "Mr. Gerstner, 51, who is chairman of the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corporation, would be the sixth chief executive in the 79-year history of the International Business Machines Corporation, and the first picked from outside the company's ranks."In fact, I remember that IBM under John F. Akers celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1989!Pugh continues on Page 28: "From a historical perspective, however, the founding of IBM might better be dated to the founding of Hollerith's business. Although other candidates for the `founding event' exist, winning the contract in late 1889 to process data from the upcoming census literally put Hollerith in business."Thus, the year of 2014 is the next big opportunity to celebrate IBM's rich history: 100th anniversary of Thomas Watson, Sr., joining CTR and 100th birthday of Thomas Watson, Jr., Jan. 14th, 1914!This is my favorite year of the birth of IBM, because it was Watson Sr. who had the IBM vision and was the longest of the long-term thinkers as Tedlow formulates correctly in chapter 10 headlined "The Watson Way".We should never forget that the success of IBM has always been produced by generations of hundreds of thousands IBMers with their families who were proud of being with IBM, who sacrificed a lot to contribute, who gained tangible and intangible benefits being with this company. Time and again, starting with the almost forgotten man Arthur K. Watson, we encounter IBMers in IBM's history who considered themselves not being appropriately rewarded or respected. Arthur K. Watson's performance and contributions are described in [...]. The pressure on IBM's workforce was culminating during the downsizing from 405.000 to 301.000 employees during the Akers term and further down to 220.000 year end 1994 during the Gerstner term, an incredible reduction by 185.000 IBM employees within less than a decade. IBM made huge investments in separation allowances to support these dramatic reductions. However, we must not forget, that companies like Wang Laboratories, Digital Equipment and eventually Compaq disappeared or were acquired.Lou Gerstner wrote to all IBM employees on April 6, 1993, six days after his start: "I can only assure you that I will do everything I can to get this painful period behind us as quickly as possible, so that we can begin looking to our future and to building our business. I want you to know that I do not believe that those who are leaving IBM are in any way less important, less qualified, or that they made fewer contributions than others. Rather, we ALL owe those who are leaving an enormous debt of gratitude and appreciation for their contributins to IBM." Gerstner and his team brought IBM back into a leading and respected position; when he left year end 2001 IBM was back to a workforce of 320.000 employees.Today the IBM workforce comprises more than 430.000 women and men.

This narrative provides insight into IBM and how it has adapted to the changing environment of business and the needs of business during a century of many changes that have seen other similar companies come and go. What makes IBM a different company.

As a former employee of IBM, I thought that the book covered the background and history of the company very well. It also explained why it evolved the way it did and where it expects to be going in the future.

It was bias to Research to the detriment of important developments in the various development division. For example Researcher Bob Denard did not invent the DRAM, but did invent one part of it the "one transistor, short term memory cell" (about 16 ms of storage time). On the other hand Steve Goldstein and Steve Beaman invented the dynamic memory refresh circuits that made good use of the Denard cell. Only Denard is mentioned in the book. Also the mainframes that followed on the S/360 were developed almost exclusively by the product divisions and produced the most reliable an unhackable system in the world. Not any mention of that in the architecture section.

Great book published by IBM. As an IBM shareholder, I feel this book is a must-have to get the fundamentals of IBM company.

This book's publication, by IBM Press, was timed to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (C-T-R) Company by financier Charles Flint on June 18, 1911. Thomas Watson Sr. joined C-T-R in 1914, the company's name was changed to International Business Machines in 1924, and the rest is history. Indeed, that's what this book is--a history of the events surrounding and accompanying IBM, written by three journalists IBM "reached out to," who have covered IBM and its industry for a number of years. Basically, this book chronicles IBM's technical and management development and its many accomplishments over the years. If you're a dedicated IBMer, this book should make you proud. If you've been an IBM critic over the years, you should look elsewhere for ammunition, because you won't find much here. If you are a technology layperson with an interest in the company and its impact, I think you'll enjoy these 320-plus pages of IBM's story.The book is well-written and easy to read. The three authors have backgrounds writing for publications like Business Week, USA Today, Fortune and Wired, so there's no overly technical stuff. As you'd expect to see in magazines such as these, there are plenty of photos, some of which are bound to bring back memories for many readers: (very) old computers, "IBM cards," big tape drives, typewriters, early PCs, etc.There is a short forward written by Sam Palmisano, the current chairman and CEO, and then the book is broken into three parts corresponding to the three authors. Although others may come to a different conclusion, I found the first part, by Kevin Maney, to be the most interesting. Maney develops the stories associated with much of IBM's advancement of information processing technology. He groups his part of the book into six categories:1. Sensing: The mechanisms by which information gets into computers.2. Memory: The way computers store and access information. Anyone past puberty has seen enormous strides in this area.3. Processing: The core speed and capabilities of computers. Ditto on the enormous strides.4. Logic: The software and languages computers use. Anyone remember ALGOL? Or what FORTRAN stood for?5. Connecting: The ways computers communicate with us (and other machines).6. Architecture: The ways advances come together to create new systems.Again, I found Maney's part of the book the most interesting. On the other hand, if I were a business major, I think I might have preferred Steve Hamm's part, "Reinventing the Modern Corporation," because Hamm develops the long and interesting story about IBM's intentional creation of a major business culture. If you know anything about this company, you know what I mean. Hamm address topics like:1. How does a company define and manage itself?2. How does an organization create value?3. How does an organization operate in a global economy?4. How does an organization engage with society?Okay, now the third and last part of the book, by Jeffrey O'Brien. If I were a long-time, loyal IBMer, this might be my favorite part of the book. O'Brien covers numerous examples of how IBM has affected the world we live in. This part of the book reminds me of all those "I'm an IBMer" commercials you see on TV nowadays. To be fair, IBM has done a lot, and it's no surprise that the company wants to celebrate (through this book) some of its accomplishments.In short, this book is both an excellent history and a celebration of the successes of one of the most influential companies in history. If you want to know more--given an understanding of the book's objectives--then it certainly merits your consideration.

我々世代の人間から云うと、IBMは、まさに天下のIBMと考える会社でした。僕は、若かりし当時コンシューマ機のCompaq presarioや直販のDellのどちらかを買おうかと真剣に悩んだものです。後々調べた所、当時のpresarioは高性能で評判が良かったのですが、情報がなく、Dell inspironを購入する事になったのです。IBMはthinkpadを当時も出していて、確かに店頭には置いてあったのですが、あまり詳しい事情は知らずに買ってしまったのが本当のところです。thinkpadの歴史を紐解くと、今知っていることは、例えば、弁当箱からinspireされた考え方。キーボードがパンダグラフ上に開くアイディア、発想。700系の当時は、Appleも意識していたのか、とか、兎にも角にも、IBM、及びthinkpadに対する関心はひじょうに高いのです。逸話と云えば、初めて宇宙ステーションに持ち込まれたのは、thinkpadだったという事実。この本を読んだ後は、また感想も変わるでしょう。何故か中古の冊子と云うのが何ともいえない次第。古本が悪いとは書いていませんが、気になる書籍は、可能であれば新品で手にしたいもの。という事で、我々世代のITに関する意識や知識は色々だと思います。閑話休題SONYもPC/AT互換機を、VAIOが出る以前に、製造していたんですね、確か。それが高価で高価で、何故、そんな事を知っているかと云うと、当時、真剣にTorinitornsのディスプレイを購入しようとカタログを集めている過程で、SONYにPC/AT互換機が存在する、って知ったのかな、確か。そのPC用に、また高価なディスプレイが付随指定して、これは業務用？民生機ではなかった気がします。そういう、業務用機材、業務用に造られた機器は丈夫で、耐久性が高く、性能もよい。但し、一般的な使用用途を考慮してるわけではない、とか。こういう話題について、対話が可能な相手がいたら、さぞ楽しいでしょう。私は、こう考える、これは、このような解釈をしてはどうか、この考え方には一理ある、がしかし、少し見方や視点を変えてみてはどうか、等。対話や議論が、更に自分の知見やものの見方考え方を変えていってくれるかもしれないと思います。PS:thinkpad,及び、IBMに関しては、曖昧な記憶なので、また後日加筆訂正するでしょう。では、失礼。多分、なかなか手に入らない本を手にした気がします。熟読後、また寄稿することになるでしょう。sincerely yours by cooper-way.com

being an ex IT programmer on IBM it revived good memories of my experience. The chronology is great and it took me back in time.

With the help of the amazon.com, amazon.de and amazon.uk information services, [...] archives, [...] and [...] I have identified, researched and studied more than 100 books, hundreds of articles about IBM, IBM competitors and the IT history as well as the IBM Annual Reports 1986-2010 prior to the publication of "Making the World Work Better" (2011) - a cumbersome book title without mentioning IBM on the front cover. I was curious what the pre-ordered book would offer.Sam Palmisano in his foreword emphasizes "The date of this volume's publication, June 16, 2011 is a meaningful one for IBM. On it, we celebrate our centennial as corporation....there is much to learn from IBM's experience."Emerson W. Pugh, in my mind the best IBM historian, opened his excellent book "Building IBM" in 1995 with the following statement: "No company of the twentieth century achieved greater success and engendered more admiration, respect, envy, feat, and hatred than IBM."I fully agree that there is much to learn IN IBM as well as FROM IBM's experience: working in IBM - a unique global corporation - with excellent IBM colleagues and IBM partners for demanding IBM customers, studying and understanding the deep roots and history of IBM result in many very valuable lessons in the following areas: entrepreneurship, leadership with business culture and business ethics, human resource management responsibilities, relentless innovation, strategy development and execution, business and technology management, risk taking, salesmanship, market coverage, customer relationship cultivation, coping with competitive dynamics, business partnerships, global view, adhering to business principles and practices, taking care of corporate social responsibilities etc. etc. IBM lessons are superior to some dry business management theories taught in business schools and business books by scholars and so called gurus. Providing the best possible solutions and services for IBM customers are part of the IBM DNA. IBM employees knowing the IBM history can better identify themselves with the company and represent the company outside than those who only work for the company to earn a living. IBM corporate executives and their managers are responsible for taking care for the various stakeholder interests in a balanced way with a long term view.This book - Making the World Work Better - covers the following areas:Pioneering the Science of Information: sensing, memory, processing, logic, connecting, architecture.Reinventing the Modern Corporation: the intentional creation of culture, creating economic value from knowledge, becoming global, how organizations engage with society.Making the World Work Better: seeing, mapping, understanding, believing, acting.It is very interesting, written in a lively, journalistic style; readers find excellent pictures, photos, graphs, interesting background information even for insiders, it contains a spectrum of IBM's outstanding achievements, the "IBM Way", mistakes made in the past etc. etc. The three writers were fed with excellent material provided by IBM and IBM's huge archive. See "IBM Icons of Progress" on IBM's Website.Sam Palmisano of Gerstner: "Without him, I don't think we would have survived. We needed somebody with that tough mind and analytical skill." For further details I refer to Gerstner's excellent book "Who Says Elephants can't dance".Gerstner of Palmisano: "What Sam has done is the hardest thing to do - to take a successful platform and continually evolve it; Sam took a successful company and made it far more successful.""IBMers like to think that the work they do is important to the world. There is the ethic of progress guiding how we think," said James Cortada, a member of the IBM Institute for Business Value and the author of dozens of books and articles on the history and management of information technologies.On the pages 329-338 you find 351 notes providing a rich set of references to further sources.One historic detail on page 39 raises some doubts: "On July 6, 1911, Hollerith agreed to sell his Tabulating Machine Company to financier Charles Flint for $2.312.100, and the company became part of Flint's Computing Tabulating-Recording-Company." This statement is misrepresenting the process resulting in the creation of CTR.There is no such statement in the autobiography of Charles R. Flint "Memories of an Active Life" (1923), who describes himself as "The Father of Trusts", bestowed on him by the Chicago newspapers ... continuing "...in the light of thirty years' experience, during which time I have acted as organizer or industrial expert in the formation of twenty-four consolidations, let me review the general advantage of this form of industrial economy....In 1911 I made a departure from the practice of bringing about consolidations of allied interests, that is by consolidating the manufacturers of similar but not identical products. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. is of this class; and although it is not the largest of the consolidations in which I have acted as organizer, it has been and is the most successful. At the outset of this organization, I pointed out to the Guarantee Trust Co. that proposed `allied consolidation', instead of being dependent for earnings upon a single industry, would own three separate and distinct lines of business...On the several but not joint responsibility of my syndicate subscribers, the Guaranty Trust loaned over $4.000.000....The Company started with an aggregate bonded indebtedness of $6.500.000 three times its then net current assets.G. D. Austrian, in Herman Hollerith (1982), quotes Roebling writing to Hollerith: "Mr. Flint is a gentleman I have known for good many years, and his business is putting together industrial consolidations."IBM describes Charles R. Flint as follows:"Charles R. Flint was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the forerunner of IBM. A businessman and financier, Flint brought together in 1907 the principals of three companies -- the International Time Recording Company of Endicott, N.Y.; the Computing Scale Company of America, of Dayton, Ohio; and the Tabulating Machine Company of Washington, D.C. -- to propose a merger. Talks and detailed planning among the parties continued until June 6, 1911, when the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) was incorporated as a holding company controlling the three separate firms. Flint remained a member of C-T-R's board of directors until his retirement in 1930."In a nutshell: Hollerith did not sell to Flint, it was a complicated financially engineered consolidation of companies with shareholders, of which Flint was not the owner but the orchestrator.Therefore, this book does not replace studying prior books about IBM and the IT history, e.g. by Samuel Crowther (1926), Thomas Watson Sr., in Men-Minutes-Money published in 1934, Herman H. Goldstine (1972), G.D. Austrian, Thomas Watson Jr., Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., James Cortada (1993), Emerson Pugh, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Alfred D. Chandler, Richard S. Tedlow etc. etc. Kevin Maney, one of the authors, wrote the excellent book about Thomas Watson, Sr., "The Maverick and his Machine" published in 2003.In 1995 Emerson Pugh explained in Chapter 2 - Origins of IBM - on Page 28:"It is traditional in IBM to honor Watson by equating the founding of the company with his arrival as general manager of CTR." Under Note 23 on page 336 you find: "The view that IBM was founded when T.J. Watson, Sr., became general manager of CTR in 1914 is broadly accepted. For example, the anticipated announcement of the appointment of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., as chief executive of IBM was reported by the New York Times on 26 March 1993, p.1D as follows: "Mr. Gerstner, 51, who is chairman of the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corporation, would be the sixth chief executive in the 79-year history of the International Business Machines Corporation, and the first picked from outside the company's ranks."In fact, I remember that IBM under John F. Akers celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1989!Pugh continues on Page 28: "From a historical perspective, however, the founding of IBM might better be dated to the founding of Hollerith's business. Although other candidates for the `founding event' exist, winning the contract in late 1889 to process data from the upcoming census literally put Hollerith in business."Thus, the year of 2014 is the next big opportunity to celebrate IBM's rich history: 100th anniversary of Thomas Watson, Sr., joining CTR and 100th birthday of Thomas Watson, Jr., Jan. 14th, 1914!This is my favorite year of the birth of IBM, because it was Watson Sr. who had the IBM vision and was the longest of the long-term thinkers as Tedlow formulates correctly in chapter 10 headlined "The Watson Way".We should never forget that the success of IBM has always been produced by generations of hundreds of thousands IBMers with their families who were proud of being with IBM, who sacrificed a lot to contribute, who gained tangible and intangible benefits being with this company. Time and again, starting with the almost forgotten man Arthur K. Watson, we encounter IBMers in IBM's history who considered themselves not being appropriately rewarded or respected. Arthur K. Watson's performance and contributions are described in [...]. The pressure on IBM's workforce was culminating during the downsizing from 405.000 to 301.000 employees during the Akers term and further down to 220.000 year end 1994 during the Gerstner term, an incredible reduction by 185.000 IBM employees within less than a decade. IBM made huge investments in separation allowances to support these dramatic reductions. However, we must not forget, that companies like Wang Laboratories, Digital Equipment and eventually Compaq disappeared or were acquired. Lou Gerstner wrote to all IBM employees on April 6, 1993, six days after his start: "I can only assure you that I will do everything I can to get this painful period behind us as quickly as possible, so that we can begin looking to our future and to building our business. I want you to know that I do not believe that those who are leaving IBM are in any way less important, less qualified, or that they made fewer contributions than others. Rather, we ALL owe those who are leaving an enormous debt of gratitude and appreciation for their contributions to IBM." Gerstner and his team brought IBM back into a leading and respected position; when he left year end 2001 IBM was back to a workforce of 320.000 employees.Today the IBM workforce comprises more than 430.000 women and men.