THINK Again is about IBM, its leaders, its employees, its shareholders, its customers, its supportive societies, and one-hundred years of their unique interactions. IBM has had its great, good, and bad moments; and, in this century, some of its ugliest. But there is still hope.
THINK Again is about IBM, but it IS NOT a technical book; "mainframe" is the most technical term used. THINK Again discusses IBM's finances, but it IS NOT a financial book; "goodwill" is the most complex financial term used to discuss the company's twentieth-century creation of good goodwill, and its twenty-first-century over-production of bad goodwill. It IS a book about one of America's greatest corporations: a business that deciphered the seemingly, impenetrable human equation to build an enthusiastic, engaged and passionate workforce that produced ever-higher revenue and profit productivity for eighty-five years.
THINK Again is about IBM's leaders and the risks they have taken. It is about a chief executive officer who personally sacrificed to deliver promised benefits to his employees. It is about a corporation that contributed to the survival of democracy during one of democracy's darkest hours-World War II. It is about the twentieth century's greatest investment gamble that delivered the mainframe. It is also about a corporation that in the twenty-first century has lost its institutional memory: it no longer understands the essence of the human business equation-that an enthusiastic, engaged and passionate employee is a productive employee. This failure has caused a disastrous, seventeen-year work slowdown unlike anything in IBM's history; not because of a labor union but from a natural human response to poor human resource practices. To find prosperity in its second century, IBM will need a new leader who will execute a business-first strategy that returns value to all the corporation's stakeholders.
About the Author: PETER E. GREULICH spent thirty years serving IBM customers in a variety of roles: administrator, systems engineer, worldwide sales instructor, salesman, and as worldwide brand, product, and market managers. He is a Seeking Alpha contributor and a Bulldog Drummond author who uses Bulldog's Uncommon Sense Principles to pursue corporate truths.
In his examination of IBM's century of CEO leadership, he has uncovered an uncommonly simple financial truth: human relationships matter.
