In spite of its pretentious title, this book is another inconsequential contribution to the vast waste pile of collections of cliches and anecdotes packaged in hard covers as business advice.

The book splits readily into three loosely connected pieces. Part 1, “IBM and Beyond,” is by the senior author, the late Lou Mobley, whose IBM career ran first in engineering and then in education from 1938 until his early retirement in 1970. His three major assignments gave him rare opportunities to observe the management of the corporation. First he was the personnel specialist on a 15-man task force “to move IBM into electronics” in 1950. Then Thomas Watson Sr. told him to compile a history of IBM, an assignment that Thomas Watson Jr. “postponed indefinitely” in 1956 because “The story isn’t over.” (Perhaps the recent publication of Watson Jr.’s memoirs [1] can be taken as his admission that the story is at last over.) Finally Mobley was the director of IBM’s Executive School from the entrance of Tom Watson Jr. to the graduation of John Akers.

Mobley sketches the IBM story in familiar terms as seen by an admiring insider, without any of “the skeletons in the closet and the angels in the air” that McKeown claims he sought when he “ransacked IBM’s records and scoured the memories of all IBM executives.” He ends his story by listing four tensions between traditional industrial age management assumptions (those of old IBM) and emerging information age imperatives (those “Beyond IBM”).

The next two parts, “Leadership” and “Marketing,” probably written by McKeown, are uninspired and uninspiring collections of the kind of folksy name-filled anecdotes favored by multiclient business consultants; they are supposedly intended to teach by example but read more like self-advertisement and professional bragging. The last part, “Finance,” is Mobley’s. It could have been titled “The Easy Path to Understanding Accounting and Financial Data” and might well have been used in the IBM Executive Course that turned excellent salespeople into less-than-excellent managers. Like parts 2 and 3, it is sprinkled with the names of notorious entrepreneurs and high-flying corporate failures.

The principal contribution of this book is its hint that Mobley’s inside business history of IBM lies sleeping like Brunhilde in the corporate files waiting for some fearless Siegfried to find it and lead it out.