If You Care About Change, You Need To Learn To Leverage Shared Values. Here’s Why:
When Lou Gerstner took over at IBM in 1993, the century-old tech giant was on its knees. Many thought it should be broken up into smaller, more focused companies. Others had different ideas. So at Gerster’s first press conference, people were curious about his strategy and disappointed when he failed to deliver one.
“The last thing IBM needs right now as a vision,” he said. What he meant was that IBM’s culture was broken. “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game,” he would later write. “It is the game. What does the culture reward and punish — individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?”
What Gerstner saw was that IBM had lost sight of the values that had made it successful in the first place. He wasn’t “disrupting.” He was making IBM culture safe to innovate again and, by doing that, he achieved one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history. If you want to achieve truly radical change, you need to start with shared values.
Making The Shift From Differentiating Values To Shared Values
IBM wasn’t Gerstner’s first stint leading a company. He’s been President at American Express and CEO at RJR Nabisco, both of which were very different from…
