WHO SAYS ELEPHANTS CAN'T DANCE?
On April 1, 1993, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. began his remarkable career at IBM as Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. It was a job that had been repeatedly passed up by the top CEO titans in America. . . Jack Welch of General Electric, Larry Bossidy of Allied Signal, George Fisher of Motorola, Bill Gates of Microsoft-and had initially even been rejected by Gerstner himself when he was the first candidate offered the momentous opportunity in December 1992. Although viewed by the general public as a national treasure, at that time in the American corporate landscape IBM was unanimously considered a plodding dinosaur in the technology industry, with sales and profits declining at a steadily alarming rate. Lacking vision and clinging to their mainframe mentality, they missed out on the first wave of the personal computer revolution.