Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change [Paperback]

So what we did we get as our reward? In 1999, in the midst of a booming stock market when IBM was rolling in money, Gerstner gutted our pension plan. His forcible conversion to a cash-balance plan would have cost many older employees half of their pensions. Luckily, the uproar was so great that Big Lou soon relented and magnanimously allowed employees over 40 to keep what they had been promised for decades. Those under 40 were out of luck: by most estimates, they lost "only" a quarter to a third of their pensions. A previously unthinkable IBM employees' union was formed in response to this atrocity.

(Gerstner does not even bother to discuss the pension issue in his book. On July 31, 2003, a federal judge ruled that IBM's alterations to its pension plan illegally discriminated against older workers.)

More back-stabbing was to follow. Retired employees who were promised free medical coverage for life are now required to pay a big chunk of their pension for health insurance -- and this in the face of only one tiny cost-of-living adjustment in a decade.

It was around the time of the pension massacre that the last vestiges of trust and open communication between employees and executives disappeared. "Respect for the individual" had been replaced by "Respect for the size of Lou's bank account." The annual opinion survey was gone -- in pre-Gerstner days, it had been taken quite seriously -- and open discussion of difficulties and complaints had all but evaporated. As late as 1997, we received a candid memo from our division president apologizing for the horrendous problems associated with Lotus Notes (another of Lou's unadmitted disasters). By the end of the 1990s, the best we could expect were bland management-speak memos whose content was about as perceptive and inspiring as Marie Antoinette's comments on peasants.

Instead of candor and respect, we were offered Gerstneresque pearls such as the worthless "Win - Execute - Team" garbage that even our line management found hard to discuss without laughter. ("What's the latest name for our annual list of accomplishments? Personal Business Commitments? No, that was last year. Oh right, now it's called WET. Whatever." Muffled guffaws.)

In short, Louis V. Gerstner's "turnaround" changed IBM from one of the best companies on the planet into Animal Farm.

"All animals are equal but ... oh, why bother. Just hand over any remaining benefits we forgot to take away."

In this book, Gerstner portrays himself as a private figure, reluctant now to make speeches, answer analyst questions, or do interviews. He hopes that his written account will be the definitive version of his life at IBM. It's hard to find any other: as soon as he arrived at IBM, he forbade all other executives from writing about their IBM careers. (Shortly before that, IBMers such as Jacques Maisonrouge and 'Buck' Rodgers had published their stories.)

Gerstner admits in the book that he's into amassing personal wealth -- and with wealth comes status, something he craves even more. I don't think he cares much about society or about employees. The fact that he spent a number of years at the head of a cigarette firm (obsessed with market share, by the way) indicates that he had few qualms about the impact of his firm's products on the customer or society. Set against that, the foundations of his recently acquired 'passion' for education seem insecure. But then the english Queen gave him a knighthood for that.

This book is a reasonably frank account by a man largely insensitive to the blight he cast on thousands of lives. My guess is that whether you buy this book or not will make no odds to him -- his personal fortune is too massive to notice -- but if you're influential, he'll care very much what you think and say about him.