> I couldn't name one specific person at IBM who's responsible for their success One (very) specific person: Louis V. Gerstner. Like Jobs, he saved his compan

> I couldn't name one specific person at IBM who's responsible for their success One (very) specific person: Louis V. Gerstner. Like Jobs, he saved his company. Unlike Jobs, he was very much an outsider, but this apparently was what IBM needed to push change, given their hidebound culture. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner,_Jr.#IBM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner,_Jr.#IBM "Gerstner is credited with saving IBM from going out of business in the early 1990s. In his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, he describes his arrival at the company in April 1993, when an active plan was in place to disaggregate the company. The prevailing wisdom of the time held that IBM's core mainframe business was headed for obsolescence. The company's own management was in the process of allowing its various divisions to rebrand and manage themselves — the so-called "Baby Blues." Gerstner reversed this plan, realizing from his previous experiences at RJR and American Express that there remained a vital need for a broad-based information technology integrator. His decision to keep the company together was the defining decision of his tenure. The subsequent refocusing on the IT services business (which grew to nearly 50% of the IBM's revenues), the embrace of the Internet as a business phenomenon, and a broad effort to revive the company's culture are widely seen as having resulted in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in business history."