Posted 3:05 PM by Blah blah

When it's wrong to "have a vision":

Eating My Own Words: A letter to Lou Gerstner from Stewart Alsop (Fortune):

Dear Lou: Let me loudly congratulate you upon your retirement from IBM. I clearly remember the reaction most people had when you arrived as CEO in 1993 (after a number of people had reportedly turned the job down, by the way): How the heck can some guy who knows squat about computers save what was once the world's greatest technology company?

And then you promptly came out with a truly memorable quote: "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision." Did we have a field day with that! Gerstner is no leader! He'll just sell off pieces of the company and dismantle this icon.

Given all our chatter, it would have been easy for you to embrace some emerging technology as the Next Big Thing to save IBM. You would have been hailed as a visionary. Instead you declared that "the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision." Can you imagine Carly Fiorina saying, "The last thing HP needs right now is a vision"? Or Ken Lay saying last October, "The last thing Enron needs right now is a vision"? If only!

But IBM didn't need a vision; it needed to execute smartly for its legions of customers. It needed to give them the services and technology they asked for. You got the company to buckle down and deliver on the great strength that had been buried under layers of bureaucracy: integrating computer systems and applying technology to solve customer problems. That's boring stuff, but it made IBM a successful company with satisfied customers. And in the wake of the recent bursting of the Internet and telecom bubbles, satisfied customers seem awfully sexy.

Of course, the most impressive thing about your tenure at IBM has been your ability to ignore the nattering nabobs. Just 18 months before you signed on, I wrote a column predicting the death of the mainframe. (I even predicted that the last one would be unplugged and retired by 1996!) So it was a thrill for me, just one week ago, to pose for your upcoming annual report. Your photographer put me in front of a plate covered by letters spelling out the words DEATH TO THE MAINFRAME. Well, let me metaphorically eat my words now. While those 1991-era mainframes are virtually extinct, it is clear that corporate customers still like to have centrally controlled, very predictable, reliable computing systems--exactly the kind of systems that IBM specializes in. It is also perfectly clear that you were right, and I was wrong. Have fun in retirement!