IBM Executives' Books

Date Published: June 4, 2021
​Date Modified: June 29, 2024

When all the powers of the executive's office would seem to ensure a limitless view, it must be hard for an executive to accept that his or her perspective may be obscured.  She has the authority, the access, and the ability to gather information simply by commenting on her need for it. Junior executives, managers, staff and consultants line up before her for their moment in the sun.

But she must be ever on her guard, watching for advisers—sycophants--who say what is easy to hear rather than what needs to be heard, for counselors who place blame rather than accept it, for predecessors concerned with their legacy rather than the business, and for electronic surveys of employee thoughts that cannot replace hearing them in person.

​Otherwise she is riding in a fog.

IBM Executive Books for Research

 The View from Above: Executive Insights

Ruth Leach Amonette: Among Equals

Among Equals: A Memoir of Ruth Leach Amonette is an autobiography of Ruth Leach, the first woman IBM Corporate Vice President. It is an excellent book that carries a woman's perspective on IBM in the 20th Century under the leadership of Watson Sr. I found her perspective refreshing and blunt. Which is how her career at IBM got started.

In 1935, Mrs. Amonette (as Miss Ruth Leach) was the first woman and only one of five IBM corporate vice presidents. How did she get there? She spoke her mind at a table surrounded by her manager and many other men who had been in the company longer. Because of what she said to Mr. Watson, her manager was, "having a fit" and others "squirmed in their seats."​

Cover of Among Equals

Not long afterward, it wasn't her manager or any of the others sitting at the table that got Mr. Watson's personal call - but her. He asked her, "Miss Leach, I called to ask if you will come to Endicott this summer to help teach a sales class of IBM accountants from various offices.''

​Her career at IBM had just been kicked started by figuratively kicking IBM's Chief Executive Officer in the teeth.

She wrote Among Equals as "a tribute to all of IBM's systems service women who worked so hard during the war years to maintain and protect the revenue of the  business while three-quarters of IBM's male sales force served in the armed forces or other war work."​

It is of interest to note that Miss Ruth Leach (Mrs. Amonette) continued her outspoken ways after being promoted to Vice President. Consider this excerpt from her speech at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), shortly after her promotion, on the topic of "Women in Post-War Industry." This was just a year or so before the world war would end and many women were asking, "What will happen to my job when it does end?" This is not in the book above.

She spoke these words in a room of over 2,000 male executives from the manufacturing industry:

"There is, as we all know, a difference in physical strength among men and women—more important in the earlier days than today when electric hoists and conveyor belts and other labor saving devices carry the load. …

"Against the fact that a few occupations are unsuited to women should be placed the further fact that on many types of work women do better than men.

​From my own experience I always have kept in mind the importance of training women for jobs they can do to better advantage than men. …

"Will the women who have taken jobs because of the war continue in the labor force after the war? … Some will, but most will not. …There will be women who must support themselves and possibly dependents. This number may or may not supplant those who will leave industry for the home after the war.

"What I believe women want is not to keep those jobs but the freedom to keep them.

​"I almost said the 'right' to keep them."

"White Collar Girl," Ruth Mackay, The Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1944

After reading this book, the reader will know that Ruth Leach Amonette didn't always see eye-to-eye with Tom Watson Sr., but one does get the impression that the "old man" knew who he was getting when he initially hired her, observed her growth as an employee, and eventually promoted her into senior management.

To read Tom Watson's perspective after the war, scroll down to the end of an article on this website: [Women in the IBM Workplace]. It isn't a complete perspective yet, but will provide some background on why it took time for IBM to hire married women as readily as single women.

F. G. "Buck" Rodgers: The IBM Way

The IBM Way by F. G. "Buck" Rodgers is the one book to read to understand the work ethic, character and integrity that IBM expected of its sales force--and every IBMer was expected to be a salesman. The first time one of my IBM compatriots told me that we had an executive named "Buck Rogers" I thought he was teasing me. Later, I would never refer to him as either "Buck" or "Mr. Rodgers" but only as Mr. IBM. That's who he was.

This book to an IBMer will seem repetitive but for a non-IBMer the repetition is good. I would recommend that a new person to IBM start with the last chapter on "The Entrepreneurial Spirit." Mr. IBM says, "Good people need room to develop. They have to find their own voice. … Each IBMer is a businessperson working within the framework of the company structure."

Dust Cover of The IBM Way

This is what the modern day IBM has lost. It needs this and the following philosophy back of Mr. IBM's:

I can't stand to work in a world of yes-men. ... I like people who care enough about what's going on to speak up when they don't like what they see. Of course, there are critics and there are critics, but even the worst of them are more stimulating than the best of the yes-men. ... then there's the royal dissenter. He or she offers not only a well-thought-out criticism but also a considered approach to dealing with the problem.

Buck Rodgers, The IBM Way, 1986

Louis V. Gerstner: Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?

I doubt that Louis V. Gerstner ever read any of the books above or any of those I consider IBM Classics. His first job as Chief Executive was to get IBM financially sound again, but once the emergency was over he should have buckled down to understand the culture he inherited that was built by two of America's foremost industrialists of the twentieth century.

​He was truly IBM's Shakespearean King: He deserves credit for reversing John Akers' direction to split the company into baby blues, for restoring confidence in the corner office, and for speaking motivating words to an almost-dead culture that had been put to sleep by his two predecessors. Unfortunately he did not walk his talk.

​After starting share buybacks in 1995 (that continued for over two decades just recently ending in 2019) and restarting shareholder yearly dividend increases in 1996, he refused to share the new profits generated with those that truly turned the company around: the employees. In 1999, he started a two-decade long transferal of wealth from the IBM employees' pension plans worldwide to his wallet and those of his executives. Depending on how you look at it, shareholder-first and -foremost or me-first and -only had gained its first foothold in IBM that Sam Palmisano only took to its logical extreme. Lou, Sam and Ginni were all capitalist-minded chief executives, not industrialist-minded leaders.

Gerstner's book overlooks two very important contributing factors to his success as CEO: (1) The Great Expansion, the longest U.S. economic expansion ever measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and (2) the culture of the Watsons that refused to let IBM die, and with the right leadership words, restored IBM to financial health in a single year.

 Tom Watson Sr.'s Views in Other Books

Thomas J. Watson Sr.: On Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: Then and Now, was published in 1943 during World War II. This is a collection of writings about Jefferson from various personalities of the day: Thomas J. Watson Sr., Nicholas Murray Butler, Thomas E. Dewey, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Herbert Hoover, Cordell Hull, Thomas Mann, Sam Rayburn, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles P. Taft, and Grover Whalen.

Watson writes: "It was Jefferson who recognized that each one of us has his own life to live, and that none can divest us of that responsibility—that our equality in that responsibility is of such supreme importance as to carry the true meaning of human equality to all free men."

It is fascinating to read how a very divergent group of people saw one of the great founders of our country. Here are a few of the articles with Watson Sr.'s listed first:

• For A Better World by Thomas J. Watson Sr.
• The First Emancipator
• Father of Democracy
• A Fighting Liberal
• Father of the Bill of Rights
• A Bold Faith
• The Foe of Tyranny

Thomas J. Watson Sr.: On the "Essence of Civilization"

The World's Greatest Speeches: From Pericles to Roosevelt is a book full of insights. Eclectic is the best descriptor. Watson Sr.'s speech in this book is in Chapter VIII on International Affairs. The title of his speech is the "Essence of Civilization." This is the speech that Watson delivered on June 26, 1939 before the Tenth Biennial Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Afterwards, he would relinquish his title of President of the International Chamber of Commerce. World War II was coming. Watson delivered one of his strongest speeches with some of his strongest insights:

"We have tried for ages to prove that might is right, and it has put us where we are today. Now let us prove that right is might, and that it must prevail. … If the people of each country will look upon the people of other countries as their neighbors and friends and have their interest at heart, we will have less political tension and economic strife."

​The business leaders of the world heard a man seeking a path to peace, but the speech found four too many political leaders with deaf ears, and eyes focused only on war: Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Stalin.

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