AUTHOR’S NOTE: IN THE SPIRIT OF TRANSPARENCY

AS AUTHOR OF this book, I have some confessions to make and want to share some information, because this is not an ordinary corporate biography. Historians write most corporate histories, and usually they are trained at the PhD level in business history. Many other histories are written by long-serving employees of a company who are not formally trained as historians but are clearly interested in and knowledgeable about the events of their company. The historians tend to write in the third person, never using the word “I,” and are distant in their presentation of the history of the firm. The employees tell more stories, are more interested in the culture of the company, and could not care less about what theoretical constructs the academics are introducing or illustrating. The first group wants to demonstrate Chandlerian historiography or some other paradigm; the second group has only read other histories of the firm they are writing about.

Then there is me. I earned a PhD in modern European and American history and spent over 38 years at IBM in sales and consulting and in various managerial roles. Along the way, I simultaneously developed my career at IBM, working for the company in New Jersey, Poughkeepsie, New York, Nashville, Atlanta, and Madison, Wisconsin. I worked in international organizations and had staffs that straddled continents, but I also kept writing histories of the information technology world, including about IBM. By the time I came to write the book you are reading, I had spent 45 years studying the firm but wanted to present its history more as a professional historian than as a reminiscing employee. For decades, for my earlier history books, almost every time I had to come near corporate headquarters for some IBM meeting, I made it a point to carve out a couple of hours to work at the IBM Archives. In time, I came to understand that magnificent collection better than its wonderful staff did. I had stuck my nose into hundreds of cartons of old documents, probably touched every bound volume of company newsletters and magazines, and glanced at many hundreds of photographs. That was all made possible because of the convenience of going to White Plains, Somers, and Armonk as an employee. As an IBMer, I met many of the personalities that have walked through the pages of this book since the 1980s.

I talked with Frank Cary about his role a number of times, made two presentations to John Akers, did an analysis of process outsourcing opportunities for Sam Palmisano while he ran GBS, and Ginni Rometty was my second-line manager for two years. I had the thrill of spending an hour with Tom Watson Jr. in 1982 discussing IBM’s history and his role in it. I made the point to him that if he ever wrote his memoirs, he had to discuss how he and IBM made the transition from tabulating to computing equipment. I was so pleased when years later he wrote his book and included a detailed and honest discussion of that very issue; the archival record confirmed that he did it accurately.

I personally embraced IBM’s optimistic corporate culture, privileged to be one of those iconic DPD salesmen, and had nine 100 Percent Clubs and three Golden Circles to show for my efforts. I served as a manager for over 30 years of my time at IBM, so I experienced the lack of civil liberties we managers faced but had to ensure our employees enjoyed. I sat on enough perches in the company to have witnessed much of what unfolded in the last third of this book, but, like most IBMers, while I found much to admire in the company, I understood its warts and weaknesses and did not hesitate to deal with or complain about them while at IBM or hide them from this book, because it is the act of honestly attempting to understand both that makes it possible for historians, business professors, employees, and others working in large firms to appreciate the role of this company and possibly of their own.

Now, as to the company itself and this book, that, too, is a story. While much has been written about IBM, often encouraged by the company’s media community, IBM is at its core secretive. IBM wants to control what is said about it and for decades did an excellent job of doing so. Its problems beginning in the 1980s, followed by the development of the Internet with all its many blogs and now the need to manage a workforce half of whom its own executives admit have been at IBM less than five years, mean that the company can no longer control what is said about it to the extent it did years ago. Good news is great, but bad news is plentiful. From the 1950s to the present, the company has had the policy of not supporting or assisting authors of books about IBM who are not currently employees. That rule applied to me as well. I began work on this book after retiring from IBM, and with just occasional exceptions for obtaining photographs and getting minor questions answered, much has been closed to me. Occasionally a historian gets in to see a few files, such as about IBM’s operations in a particular company decades ago. Had I written this book while still at IBM, I would have probably been given much more access to the archives and other sources, as I had for decades, but I probably would also have had to submit it to someone at IBM to review the text before publication. That is why I waited until I left IBM, realizing I would not be allowed to see newer files, the records of the board of directors, and so forth. No matter; as the endnotes demonstrate, there was much material available about the company in external publications, databases, and blogs. I do not believe that I was denied any important fact about IBM’s history by waiting. I also support the policy that IBM should husband its files so as not to inadvertently cause embarrassment to any IBMer, active or retired, assist a competitor, or compromise the privacy and confidentiality of a customer’s operations. My contacts in IBM are wide and generous and always willing to answer my questions, especially with respect to events occurring inside IBM since my retirement at the end of 2012. My objective was to use only what I needed without compromising the company, especially if I heard about business forecasts and future product announcements. That is why you see no discussion about the future of IBM in this book, although I continued to learn much about that, even as these pages were being written in 2018. Should you have comments, critiques, or additional information about IBM that I should have, reach out to me. My e-mail address is jcortada@umn.edu.