Chapter 17 What can we learn from IBM?

When we try to learn from excellent foreign companies, we often go astray in the "rational wrong path" and fail to see the complexity of the world.Just take a little closer look at IBM's history and see how it succeeded (or failed) in a changing, real business environment, how it evolved under the influence of social change, technological change, foresight, luck, etc. , how its development trajectory is affected by the complex personalities of the leaders and the subtle relationship between them, we will find that it is moving forward in an uncertain history and finally achieves the current success.That's the most important thing we can learn from the history of IBM (and other companies that are seen as management models).

Knowing that we live in this uncertainty and contingency, rather than the certain world portrayed by popular management theory, we will be able to learn smarter, make smarter decisions and manage more proactively. In business history, only a handful of companies have achieved IBM's size and respect, and the list that has long been regarded as "management paragons" is even shorter: IBM, Ford, GM Automobiles, General Electric (GE), Toyota, Southwest Airlines, 3M, Wal-Mart, Sony... Since Thomas J. Watson founded the company in the 1910s, IBM has indeed continued to provide management inspiration for management practitioners and theoretical researchers : Its three corporate beliefs (including excellence, high-quality customer service, and respect for individuals); how it successfully transformed from punch cards to electronic computers; Tom Watson Jr. bet the entire company on the development of the S360 computer; IBM Encountered difficulties in the 1990s and the subsequent great reversal achieved by the legendary CEO Gerstner; as well as its various specific management measures, processes, organizational structures, etc. beyond the strategic level.

These are the answers we often hear to the question "What can we learn from IBM?", and similar answers can be found for many other companies that are considered exemplary.However, behind these fragmentary assertions expressed in a very certain tone, honest management scholars usually have a small print note that is not so certain and is easily overlooked: these practices do not guarantee success, and may even lead to failure; For almost every practice, there can be found examples of doing the exact opposite, but equally or more successfully. Under the double pressure of academia turning management into a rational and rigorous science and the business world demanding easy-to-use management theories, management theory (especially strategy) has increasingly become "buying and selling fashionable business", replaced by an illusory rationality. Dominated by philosophy, it stands at the present point in time of those time-tested successful companies, looks back at the past with a deterministic world view, and attributes the success of the present to past management practices for granted.We have long accepted the complexity of the world, and in management we have long begun to look at the future with uncertain eyes. However, when we study company history to discover management inspiration for the present and the future, we mistakenly regard the "past The future" is regarded as certain, and they go astray into "rational astray".

As long as we look at IBM's history a little more carefully, rather than reducing it to a few independent events, we will find that it has traveled through an uncertain history and finally achieved its current success.That's the most important thing we can learn from the history of IBM (and other companies that are seen as management models).We know that although the short-term performance of a company's stock price cannot reflect the company's management status, it is often the best portrayal of a company in the long run (referring to decades or even longer).An outstanding company like IBM, which has experienced nearly a hundred years of success, usually has a stock price chart with ups and downs and even big ups and downs, but it always points to the upper right. Square straight lines.

What we have to do is to look back at the history of IBM (mainly the history of the era of Thomas J. How it succeeds (or fails), how it develops under the influence of social changes, technological changes, foresight, luck, etc., and how its development trajectory is affected by the complex personalities of leaders and the subtle relationships between them.By reviewing it, we know that business is full of uncertainties and affected by various accidental factors. If we make a different choice at any key point, we will see a IBM that may be equally successful but completely different. "Management is not a science. Its human element is too strong to meet the standards of science. We have built such a complex enterprise machine that people usually look at IBM as a model of order and logic-a company where water flows and everything falls into place, and we think that we The company had a sound plan and executed it with precision. I never thought IBM was so perfect."

We are not saying that the business world is unknowable, or that we should not manage anything, but rather, understand that we are in a world of uncertainty and contingency, not the deterministic world portrayed by popular management theories , we will be able to learn smarter, make smarter decisions and manage more proactively.During Gerstner's tenure as IBM's CEO, there was a banner like this in his office, which said that there are four types of people: those who actively take action to make things happen; those who passively accept what happens; A person with an onlooker mentality; a person who doesn't care about anything.There is no question that we should all act proactively and make things happen in an uncertain world. IBM has turned most opportunities into successes with excellent management. IBM's history also teaches us that we should be "an out-and-out optimist" about the future, like IBM's founder Thomas J. Watson.

When Thomas J. Watson died in the summer of 1956 at the age of 82, he received the highest accolade a businessman could receive—one of the few who used business to change society and ways of life.In the previous decades, he was the supreme "king" of the company, and no other CEO in his era could appear in the newspapers as frequently as he did.However, we will find that this great businessman achieved greatness through many uncertainties and flukes, although his ambition did make him change the name of his small company to "International Business Machines Corporation" (International Business Machine  ie IBM) very early on. ), his management and leadership skills are also extraordinary.When looking at the history of people, we generally do not make the oversimplified mistake of looking at the strategic changes of companies. From the very beginning, we believe that people are living organisms that grow and are affected by various factors, but we think that companies are rational. planned out.

In 1914, Thomas J. Watson began his life at the age of 40, both by chance and by necessity.He was ruthlessly kicked out of National Cash Register Corporation (NCR) by his business mentor, John Patterson, with a guilty verdict on the company's antitrust violations court annulment).He joined a company then called Computing-Tabulating-Recording (C-T-R, soon renamed IBM), and became president a few years later.He brought with him a lot of what he learned from NCR that he later applied to IBM.For the rest of his life, Watson tried to outdo his mentor, prove Patterson wrong (which he quickly did), and prove to the world that he was a businessman with a conscience and candid integrity. Build IBM into a great and enviable institution.

In the turbulent 1920s, Watson gradually found the company's development direction and turned IBM into a "punching machine" company. His vision, will and firm belief played a vital role. The first important trend and opportunity ofBut there is no information to suggest that Watson did so recklessly in the first place, and his biographer Kevin Meany writes: "He realized it slowly, over a period of nearly 10 to 12 years. , and came to such a conclusion through repeated observations." The 1920s were very similar to the Internet age at the end of the last century. Suddenly, most households had electricity, telephones, and radios. A new generation enthusiastically embraced science, automation, and new inventions.Many entrepreneurs see themselves as revolutionaries who bring us into a new era.Watson, who operates meters, attendance clocks and tabulation instruments, slowly realized that the former two could not bring him into the new era, but those machines, also known as "punching machines", could.The bulky, noisy time-card machines that record information on cards and perform complex calculations are installed in corner offices of many companies and are used only by professionals such as accountants.Although the masses simply don't understand it, it captures the imagination of the masses: "Other machines automate manual labor, thereby increasing the productivity of the hands; punch cards automate mental labor, thereby increasing the productivity of the brain." Sen began to put the future on this kind of "thinking machine", or the data processing industry.

Data processing was an attractive industry, and two other factors gave Watson a monopoly on "data processing" that did not exist in other areas of meters and time clocks.First of all, he has a large number of punch card patents. When he was in NCR, he knew that "inventions can drive sales, and patents can prevent competitors from adopting similar inventions." The second secret is dedicated punch cards, which are not interchangeable with rival cards. In exchange, when customers use IBM's punch card machines, the cost of switching from IBM's cards to other companies is prohibitive, and some insurance companies use several floors to install these cards.IBM also made huge profits from selling cards to customers.In the 1920s, IBM was one of the most dynamic star companies in the stock market, producing gauges, meat grinders, clocks, attendance clocks, punch cards, and punched cards.

On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy seemed suddenly paralyzed. Stocks continued to fall, many companies laid off workers, and financial institutions were in trouble.But Watson, a natural optimist, wanted to find a way to take the company further. In the early years of the 1930s, he used his unwavering optimism to gamble the entire company on a gamble that it would either thrive or fail completely.Watson's two key actions are: First, his factory will continue to produce and no one will be fired.He asked factories to continue producing instruments and parts, storing them in warehouses.His logic is that there will be a renewed explosion in demand, at which point IBM will be ready to capitalize on it.He actually brought IBM to the critical point of collapse. The company's cash can support it for several years, but if it cannot return to normal by 1933, the company will fall into a cash shortage; U.S. dollars (6% of annual revenue) to build the first enterprise laboratory to conduct research and development without a specific direction. It was a model followed by Xerox PARC Research Center and Microsoft Research Institute.Research and development in this laboratory throughout the 1930s put IBM far ahead of any potential rivals.From 1929 to 1934, the company's revenue stagnated, while Watson invested more and more in production and research and development, and the company teetered on the brink of collapse.Watson was nearly fired, and the board had discussed it, but it was shelved. The final success should be attributed to Watson's optimism, and perhaps to a greater extent due to his luck.In fact, according to the conventional thinking of people looking for management models, if IBM had disappeared as early as the 1930s, who would remember that Watson had bravely invested in the trough and accumulated a competitive advantage for the future? By 1935, the United States had still not emerged from the Great Depression as the optimistic Watson predicted, and World War II was brewing, and global trade was also affected.Watson has accumulated a large amount of inventory, and the scale of production is constantly expanding.But in August of this year, Watson's "greatest luck in his life" came, and IBM was saved. On August 14th, US President Roosevelt signed the "Social Security Act", which established the US social security system and brought huge demand for information processing. The demand for punching machines soared overnight, and only one company could Meeting that need: IBM Watson.IBM had been investing in R&D and new products throughout the Great Depression, and its products were better, faster, and more reliable than all other companies, and it won the exclusive contract to represent Roosevelt's New Deal accounting projects.For almost half a century, until the 1980s, IBM dominated the data processing industry.In this victory over the Great Depression, Watson himself summed up the secret of success: "A little madness, a little luck, plus hard work, always ready, and luck will come." World War II involved all Americans, and Watson was no exception. His factory was also used to produce military supplies.But he didn't like the many constraints of wartime operations, and the production of armaments left his salesmen with little work to do.But soon, he turned the war contract into an opportunity to double or triple the size of IBM in a relatively short period of time, and the capital of this expansion would be borne by the government. Initially, most companies involved in the production of armaments opened new factories for military orders, while the original factories produced conventional products to keep the company profitable. The same was true of IBM's original vision, and the military order provided the funds to allow IBM to expand its factories and workers without taking short-term risks.But soon most companies realized that the war would eventually end and military orders would disappear, and they were ready to close their factories.But Watson made an unusual decision: not to cut back.That meant he had to be able to sell twice as much after the war, and economists generally predicted that the postwar economy would enter a recession. Watson also insisted on his caring attitude towards employees. He promised those employees who went to join the army that they could still receive 25% of their wages during the war, and they could return to IBM to work after the war, even though it meant that his There will be far more workers than necessary.Again his optimism played a key role in the decision, with Kevin Meunier saying that "though counterintuitively, he firmly believed that a large IBM would be able to break through the post-war economic stagnation and come back with a strong A powerful, unstoppable colossus emerges." After the war, as expected, there was a short period of recession for a few months, and many companies laid off workers drastically.At this time, IBM had about 4,000 veterans back, and military production naturally disappeared.However, Watson did not experience too many hardships this time, and immediately ushered in a rapid economic recovery that no one expected. The company therefore needed more IBM punch cards to keep accounts, and the demand soared.As in the Great Depression, Watson was fortunately prepared. It looked like Watson took almost all his chances, and he actually missed just as many.When Carlson, the inventor of xerography, offered to sell the technology to IBM, Watson said no. Carlson went to Xerox, and years later IBM tried unsuccessfully to squeeze into the copier market.Putting aside the radio-electronic typewriters made by IBM that were popular with the military during the war, Watson did not think there would be such a commercial need.Although Watson provided punch cards as input and output devices for the electronic computer ENIAC very early, he rejected the ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly in 1946. When IBM entered the field of electronic computers a few years later, Eckert and Mauchly Ziley became IBM's most important competitor.Kevin Meaney writes: "Like many CEOs, Watson was completely right about some product prospects and misguided for others. But for him, it was important to never give up trying. " But Thomas J. Watson's greatest fortune in World War II was not the expansion of the company, but his eldest son, Tom Watson Jr.In World War II, Tom Watson Jr., who participated in the war, got rid of his father's influence, discovered the dormant leadership ability in his body, and was full of confidence in himself for the first time.After the war he rejoined IBM and became the company's new leader.During his short time in the company before the war, it was said that on the first day of each year, he completed a year's sales quota with specially arranged large orders, and the rest of the time was spent on fun.In his brutally candid autobiography, published in 1990, Tom Watson Jr. wrote: "As a young man I was depressed and unprogressive... I was a complete playboy..." As luck would have it for Watson, a new, grown-up Tom Watson Jr. arrives just in time for him to lose control of everything he's created.Even luckier, in the decades to come, Tom Watson Jr. performed no worse than him, if not better.There are too many such stories that the descendants of business giants cannot continue the glory of their predecessors.Over the next decade or so, Tom Watson Jr. and his father would periodically erupt into violent quarrels, power struggles, and frictions, but it is fair to say that this was what allowed the company to smoothly enter the computer age, neither too quickly nor too slow.Watson created a company empire based on punch cards, and although he also showed interest in electronic computers, all his ideas inevitably came down to punch cards.Tom Watson Jr., eager to win, was too eager for success, and may not have considered that the company had to rely on punch cards for its main income for a long time.Perhaps the most important thing in the story about father and son is that this big trend of shifting to electronic computers enables Tom Watson Jr. to completely get rid of his father's shadow, carry out radical changes in the new era, and shape the new IBM. It doesn't have to be a clone of your dad. Watson Sr. decided to build electronic computers more out of revenge than seeing the future of the industry.In order to win over the relationship with Harvard University, Watson cooperated with Harvard's Aiken to manufacture the supercomputer Mark 1, but IBM was not mentioned when the computer was finally unveiled. Watson angrily wanted to prove to the world that it could be designed and manufactured without Harvard and IBM It is very similar to his anger when he was fired from NCR and joined C-T-R.He ordered Bryce and Lake, who were in charge of the corporate laboratory, to build a supercomputer that surpassed Aiken. Bryce and Lake knew that this would be difficult to achieve in the short term. Instead, they suggested that instead of spending a long time developing a supercomputer, it is better to build a simple computing instrument based on vacuum tubes, and then IBM can be the first to introduce the electron. computer products and occupy the market.Although this cannot defeat Aiken, it can at least obtain the public effect that Watson wants, and it can also provide a step for the future manufacture of supercomputers.Bryce recruited a young engineer from IBM, Halsey Dickinson, who was researching vacuum tubes in the basement of his home, and put him in charge of the project. During World War II, Watson ordered the cessation of electronic research, and Dickinson had to turn his research to Go home and do it.Dickinson built a prototype of a 1.2-meter-high black metal box that could perform multiplication with tubes ten times faster than with a punch card machine.Little Tom Watson had just been to see the gigantic supercomputer ENIAC, and was unimpressed, but excited about this little box.This was the first electronic computer product, the IBM603 electronic multiplier, and soon IBM introduced the more powerful 604 to replace it. Their success exceeded everyone's expectations in IBM. Soon, Eckert and Mauchly, the inventors of ENIAC who had been rejected by Watson, soon launched UNIVAC at Remington Rand, IBM's main competitor, and took away the leading position in the computer industry from IBM.The U.S. Audit Office, long one of IBM's largest customers, bought UNIVAC to replace IBM's time card machines.When IBM launched its own computer later, it was known as "IBM's UNIVAC". Under the threat of UNIVAC, the impetus for change began to emerge within IBM, and Tom Watson Jr. was undoubtedly the most powerful promoter.He recruited hundreds or even thousands of electronic engineers at once.Taking advantage of a military order, Tom Watson Jr. started the company to manufacture so-called "defense computers."Although UNIVAC temporarily took the lead, IBM's subsequent 701, 702, 650 and other computers quickly surpassed it technically.It is a pity that UNIVAC is still synonymous with computer in the hearts of the public.For a long time, IBM still lagged behind other more innovative competitors in this industry.With the advancement of the electronic computer project, Watson gradually retreated behind the scenes. The company became more and more like Tom's IBM, and entered the era of electronic computers with all its strength. Of course, the punch card machine still provided most of IBM's profits. What IBM finally defeated UNIVAC on the electronic computer was not technology, but sales.Businesses began to believe that they needed to buy a computer, but they were not confident about how to use it. Those computer experts made them frightened, but they believed that IBM, a company that had provided business equipment for a long time, could help them. Sales of punch cards brought IBM electronic computers. Competitive advantage of the era. Jeffrey Young, author of Forbes' History of the Computer Revolution, writes: "It's a pattern repeated over and over again in the digital age: Great technology is copied sooner or later, and sales and marketing are what differentiate most companies that ultimately succeed." In any case, under the leadership of young Tom Watson Jr., IBM finally entered the era of electronic computers and began to move away from his father's beloved punch cards and punched cards.Little Tom recalled his father's influence this way: "Without his special liking and persistence for punch cards, IBM would lose its focus; it would become a hodgepodge like Remington Rand." But in the future For a long time, IBM has not achieved the kind of monopoly it has had in the market in the past, and it has always been crowded with competitors. In 1955, because of an adventure, Tom Watson Jr. became a representative of the electronic computer era. Time magazine reporter Bennett was depressed after going to Remington Rand to interview UNIVAC. He happened to see the window in front of the IBM building. The "defense computer", she went in and tried it.The receptionist, experienced in communicating with the public, immediately took Bennett to Tom Watson Jr.'s room.Bennett listened to the story of IBM's electronic miracle, which was in line with Time magazine's view that the second industrial revolution was happening, and they found IBM to be the best representative of this revolution.After an intensive round of interviews, Tom Watson Jr. was on the cover of Time magazine, whose story equated IBM's electronic computer with the progress of human civilization. Before and after Watson's death in 1956, what Tom Watson Jr. did was mainly to transform the company from an entrepreneurial company managed by entrepreneur Watson with his personal wisdom into a professionally managed company. When he recalled the situation at that time, he "IBM's platform of action is essentially the wisdom of a select few. If the company continues to grow and we continue to run a multi-billion dollar business so disorganized, the company will likely fail," wrote the author. Maybe it will flash like a shooting star and end up as a meteor.” With a clear organizational chart and responsibilities assigned, Tom Watson Jr. was no longer prepared to do everything his father had done. All the important managers of IBM in the past started as salesmen and were gradually cultivated. However, outside of IBM, most large companies in the 1950s adopted the "staff and front-line" organizational model. Tom Watson Jr. Do the same.There are many other management measures, but he never expected that in the following decades of professional management development, IBM has certainly become a model of management, but it is sometimes called "the largest bureaucratic bureaucracy outside the US government" in good faith. mechanism". In 1961, IBM's size was two and a half times that of Watson's death in 1956, and its stock value increased fivefold. IBM produced 4,000 of the 6,000 mainframe computers in use across the United States.On the other hand, the company seems to have reached a plateau, in contrast to the booming electronic computer industry, the company's growth slowed down.And the company was offering several different models of computers that were incompatible with each other, with different internals, different software, and different peripherals.In late 1961, Tom Watson Jr. approved plans for a whole new line of computers called the "S360," which would phase out the various models the company had sold well and badly in the past.The annual R&D cost of this project is US$1 billion, and the total cost exceeds US$5 billion. It is the largest enterprise R&D project in history and is comparable to the Manhattan cost of the US government.Compared with Watson's several gambles that put the entire company on the line, this time it was even worse, and the process was equally dangerous.Without the S360 project, IBM may gradually become an ordinary company.As Gerstner said, "Before System 360, IBM was just one of many ordinary companies that produced and sold computers." If it failed, there would definitely be no IBM today. The S360 computer was a huge success, it was overwhelming, and the company was again growing at a rate of almost 30%, the kind of growth that only a start-up could achieve. In 1965, IBM became one of the 10 largest industrial companies in the United States. Two years later, the company's market value surpassed that of General Motors. The extreme success of the S360 inevitably led to yet another antitrust lawsuit from the government, entangled in a decade-long battle.This time it completely changed the way IBM does business, and Tom Watson Jr. had to voluntarily abandon the bundled deals that IBM had practiced since its inception and price products and services separately.Despite Watson's considerable reluctance, it was here that Gerstner largely found IBM's future years later.In this antitrust lawsuit, IBM's main opponents were the famous Control Data Corporation (CDC) and its legendary founder William Norris, who were well-known at the time and are now unknown to most people.In business history, we really only remember those businesses that stayed.The lawsuit was stayed until 1981 when it became moot, and in the process IBM "went from an aggressive and proud competitor to a cautious behemoth," and every decision the company made from 1972 onwards It must be filtered by the antitrust law. Tom Watson Jr. himself finally withdrew from the IBM stage in an extremely accidental way. In 1970, he had a sudden heart attack. After recovering from his illness, he announced his resignation immediately, instead of waiting until he was 60 years old three years later as originally planned. At the beginning of the 1980s, the computer industry began to welcome some small competitors, and IBM finally decided to enter the personal computer (PC) market. companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and the now-defunct Compaq.Gerstner admitted in his autobiography that in the past 15 years, IBM has hardly made a penny from the personal computer business, and has invested huge sums of money in technological innovation and other aspects. If you have a personal computer, you will lose more money.The only reason that matters, he says, is that Microsoft and Intel control key hardware and software, and thus the price of PCs. The history of the IBM PC is well known, and Ethridge stood out from the company's then-CEO's constant "Where's my Apple Computer?" inquiries. Personal computers that purchase components in large quantities from outside.The personal computer, named the IBM PC, made the personal computer a widely accepted product, and commercials featuring a Chaplin-esque bum demystified the computer, selling faster than ever before.However, despite its success in sales, profits are another matter. In 1984, the PC business accounted for 20% of total revenue, but 75% of total profits still came from mainframe computers.The personal computer won IBM a "youthful" feeling in the popular mind. It was no longer as old as other mainframe companies, but it brought IBM into a highly competitive and low-margin market.A large number of IBM PC compatible machine companies continue to emerge, and their leader is Compaq, and compatible machines quickly eroded the market created by the IBM PC. IBM launched a personal computer based on the 286 chip seven years ago, running a brand new OS/2 operating system that required a large amount of memory. Unfortunately, at that time, under the promotion of Compaq, the market had accepted the faster 386 chip. The market was in the midst of a shortage of memory chips, and IBM dropped its still profitable PCAT computer when it was introduced. IBM wanted to redefine the personal computer market, but failed. The most critical question about the IBM PC is: Would IBM have survived the 1980s without entering the personal computer industry?Most of the rivals that competed with it on mainframes and minicomputers disappeared because they did not realize the power of personal computers.But on the other hand, if in the era after the mainframe, IBM seized any technology developed by its laboratory but applied by its opponents, it would probably be completely different. Those technologies have made at least these companies: Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Seagate, EMC, Cisco, and more. In the market boom in the 1990s, Gerstner successfully realized IBM's big reversal. The symbol of "e-commerce" made IBM one of the hottest companies in the Internet era, and it made a lot of profits but not wasted like many Internet companies. Big money.Gerstner found "service" for the company, which he called "a service that emphasized customer needs that didn't exist in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s," that is, providing information to customers on their behalf. Technical services, rather than standing on the standpoint of IT vendors.However, so far, although the IT industry may be the most transparent industry in the world, in fact, the records about IBM's history are still in an "unclassified state" similar to government materials, as in Gerstner's autobiography. It will take time to describe it in a definite way, and observe it from an uncertain historical perspective. When mentioning the famous work "The Pursuit of Excellence" by management guru Tom Peters, most people remember the eight attributes of an excellent enterprise he advocated, such as being close to customers, value-driven, and staying true to the industry, etc., but they forget the other What he really wants to oppose is the "rationalist management method" that spread from business schools and reached its peak at that time. He said that we have gone astray as "rational astray".When we tried to learn from outstanding foreign companies, we made the mistake he highlighted in the chapter on "Rational Mistakes": a one-sided view of management without seeing the complexity of the world.When developing the S360, after Tom Watson Jr. experienced various twists and turns and finally succeeded, he asked Frank Cary, the vice president at the time, to "design a system to ensure that such problems do not recur."But when Cary became chairman of the company a few years later, he eliminated this so-called "product development structure." There can't be another product like the S360." Though Thomas J. Watson spent his life building machines that thought, his favorite saying was: "It's people who do it anyway".One of the reasons why rationality goes astray is that we can never meet the same people.Anyone who has actually done it knows that those twists, setbacks, and luck are inevitable, but why, when we try to draw management inspiration from the history of great companies, do many people work backwards from the present and describe them For an inevitable world?It is this so-called rational thinking that prevents us from obtaining real management inspiration. Addendum: Cases for this article on IBM history come from The Autobiography of Watson Jr. (aka), Kevin Meaney's Watson: Maverick and His IBM Empire, Jeffrey Young's Forbes History of the Computer Revolution", Gerstner's "Who Said Elephants Can't Dance", Doug Gayle's "Gostner and IBM's Ten-Year Turnaround", Richard Tedlow's "Seven Business Giants Influencing History" Wait.Special thanks to Mr. Wu Bofan for the wisdom enlightenment of the historical view expounded by taking Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" ​​as an example in the conversation at the end of February. He expressed the vague and subtle things very succinctly. Everyone understands their role in the overall organization.Everyone is able to react to the environment in a faster way and be more motivated to come up with new ideas, knowing that the current budget plan can be adjusted at any time.