THINK Again!: The Rometty Edition |
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Published June 4, 2021
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Updated August 14, 2021
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This, the second edition of THINK Again!, was a refresh published in December 2020. THINK Again! still examines the performance of all IBM Chief Executive Officers. This refresh adds Rometty's performance from 2012 through 2019 so that the book covers all ten chief executive officers from Watson to Rometty.
The Rometty Edition includes everything in the first edition and the following:
The Rometty Edition includes everything in the first edition and the following:
- The author added a preface.
- Charts, graphs, and data points throughout the book were updated with current information through the end of 2019.
- A chapter has been added to capture the eight-year performance of IBM’s first female chief executive officer, Virginia M. (Ginni) Rometty. This additional chapter focuses on the former chief executive’s key performance metrics such as goodwill, revenue and profit generation, sales and profit productivity, and shareholder risk and returns.
THINK Again! Overview
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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. |
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THINK Again 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, two-decade-long, 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.
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, two-decade-long, 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.
The information in this section can be accessed from the "BOOKS / BIBLIOGRAPHY + THINK AGAIN!" menu items above or by selecting one of the menu buttons below which are supported with additional descriptive text.
THINK Again!: Preface, Forward, Introduction and Videos
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This preface was added. Charts, graphs, and data points throughout the book have been updated with current information through the end of 2019.
A chapter has been added to capture the performance of IBM’s first female chief executive officer, Virginia M. (Ginni) Rometty. The book examines Ginni's acquisition strategy and includes insights into her decision to acquire Red Hat. Arvind Krishna will grapple with this 2018 decision just as Rometty struggled with her predecessor’s promise to double earnings per share by 2015—a commitment she finally admitted was unattainable in 2014. The 2020 coronavirus situation did not impact her results. |
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The following is an excerpt from the Foreword written by Daniel Quinn Mills, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School.
"There is something for everyone in this book. For those who love stories of business there is the story of IBM’s long journey in the American and world economies. For those who are interested in abstract concepts, there is a discussion of the essential elements of American capitalism. For those who are interested in personalities, there are corporate chief executives with very different leadership styles. … "Some were successful; some were not. Each, though, is an instructive example." |
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To understand the premise behind THINK Again! it is necessary to understand that it isn't the end of maximizing shareholder value that is wrong, but the means chosen by too many capitalist-driven chief executives. In this introduction the author discusses two extremes of shareholder maximization: shareholder-first and ‑foremost, and me-first and ‑only.
It seems these extremes don't serve shareholder interests! |
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