In supporting creative thinkers, educating staff and following through on its commitments to all employees, IBM was living the value of “respect for the individual.” Watson Jr. summarized two other basic beliefs of the company: excellence in your work and service to the customer. On the latter, the elder Watson told IBM executives in 1929 that “all is lost without service.” In 1949, the company ran a series of now-famous ads in most newspapers across America, stating simply “IBM means service.” It began to present awards of the same name each year to top performers in customer service.
It would turn out to be prescient guidance for the company six decades later, when rising competition and commoditization of the personal computer and mainframe markets threatened IBM’s leadership in hardware, which it had sustained for decades. Through a period of profound transformation in the 1990s, led by Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the company’s first external CEO hire, IBM shifted its portfolio to a more balanced mix of integrated, high-value service offerings. Gerstner articulated a vision for the company around a “service-led model,” implementing in strategy what Watson Sr. had expressed decades earlier.
When Sam Palmisano took over as CEO in 2003, he and his team identified new opportunities for the company in the global economy, but recognized that to capitalize on them, IBM would need to transform itself — again.
As in the past, its leadership focused first on culture. The previous decade had taken its toll on IBMers, many of whom questioned whether company values, rooted in the Watsons’ basic beliefs, had survived the near-death experience of the 1990s. Palmisano, too, wanted to know. In 2003, he kicked off an employee-feedback process that resulted in IBM’s ValuesJam, an online forum inviting IBMers from all over the world to weigh in on what the company should stand for and how its employees should operate.
What emerged from the thousands of responses was a set of guiding values, similar to those the Watsons had preached for more than 60 years: dedication to every client’s success, innovation that matters “for our company and for the world,” and trust and responsibility in all relationships.
Through the ebbs and flows of business over recent decades, the company has maintained its values as a guiding force during constant technological change. In her farewell letter to IBMers in 2020, outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty summed up the way in which the values will continue to serve as a North Star for her successors and into the future. “We internalize these values and share a belief in the fundamental promise of technology,” she wrote. “Of course, this culture existed long before I joined the company and will endure long after I’m gone.”