IBM has been on a roller coaster ride. Though things have been looking better for IBM lately, the authors are not convinced the good times will last. They identify some strategic flaws that may have been painted over but have not been fundamentally fixed. They base their analysis on their own research and on extensive interviews with past and current IBM executives.

The authors feel that IBM has historically made two explicit promises: “To its customers, IBM had guaranteed effective, high-quality technology and excellence of service support, maintained by a close and continuing relationship with the customer.” Related to this is what the authors call “singleness,” that IBM would be the customers’ sole or prime vendor for information technology.

The other promise was to its employees: “IBM had guaranteed job security.” In fact, as the authors point out, IBM offered employment security rather than job security. People changed jobs so often that IBM came to stand for “I’ve Been Moved.”

Given these two promises, “customers were happy, and employees were productive.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, IBM broke both promises. The authors suggest that the only chance IBM has for a lasting recovery is to return to its roots and again offer customers a “one-call-gets-all” solution. Coming from the land of entrepreneurs, Internet time, and open systems, I do not find that idea plausible.

Much of the book gives a good history of the information systems industry, from both technical and financial perspectives. The authors quote freely from internal IBM memos to point out that bureaucracy has been a persistent problem for IBM, not just a recent phenomenon. IBM has always been both centralized and inbred, favoring consensus over contention, a successful formula when exploiting familiar trends. But these traits create myopia when technology changes rapidly, as it has with the personal computer and the Internet.

A good chunk of the text is devoted to analyzing the guaranteed employment policy that IBM had maintained. The authors include an excellent table from IBM’s policies that shows the potential actions available to managers to protect full employment.

The authors do a good job of describing IBM’s crisis, both in organizational and financial terms. I found especially interesting their description of CEO John Akers’s last-gasp effort to save his job. He proposed transforming IBM into 13 mostly autonomous business units, each with great independence from IBM corporate. Akers’s attempt was too countercultural, and it was too late. IBM could not absorb the financial losses inherent even in a minor change, much less one as radical as Akers had proposed. So he was out, and Louis Gerstner was in, and Humpty Dumpty was caught in midair and returned to the wall in one piece.

There has been some success in the short run, but the authors worry that there is as yet no clear strategy. They feel that IBM has to restore its promises: create a single solution for its customers; restore the reality of loyalty, both to those customers and to its employees; and paint and achieve a vision for the future that restores growth and excitement.

The authors are doubtful. They end the book with these words: “IBM has yet to manage the successful transformation of its culture. The needed change in culture requires that employees be imaginative, adaptable, and non-bureaucratic--and that they be free to exhibit these qualities in the workplace.…This book has been a tale of IBM’s problems. Its transformation will be another story.”