Thomas J. Watson Jr.

He placed an “all-in” bet on a first-of-its-kind computer and reaped for IBM the fortunes of a new technological age. On the way, Thomas J. Watson Jr. created a marvel of corporate management, nurturing a people-centric culture and expanding progressive social and work policies while piloting the company through a phase of complex and disruptive business modernization to global business dominance.

During his time at the helm, revenue at IBM grew nearly tenfold to USD 8 billion, and employee count more than tripled to 270,000. He built the world’s premier corporate research program and established a leading industrial design practice while positioning IBM for another decades-long run atop its markets. As a corporate citizen, Watson used the IBM pulpit to champion workforce inclusion, forging a lasting legacy of investment and activism in public and in-house diversity programs.

Watson joined his father’s company as a salesman in October 1937, following an unremarkable undergraduate education at Brown University. Like all IBM salespeople, he started in the company’s sales school, learning about punched card machinery. When he finished, he was placed in the western half of Manhattan’s financial district, a prime sales territory.

He was determined to avoid special treatment as the progeny of the CEO. An April 1939 wire from his father made it clear that, at least from the elder Watson’s perspective, he was earning his own way in the company. Thomas Watson Sr. sent a memo to his son to herald the achievement of surpassing the annual sales quota by 69%, calling him “a qualified IBM man not by birth or heritage but by your personal ability and knowledge of the business.”

Still, the passion for flying that Watson Jr. had developed in his college years led him to join the National Guard in 1940. When the Guard mobilized for World War II later that year, he became a military pilot, initially running reconnaissance flights and later shuttling high-level officers around combat arenas and along supply lines. During this period, Watson met Eliot Noyes, a glider pilot who would become the guiding force of IBM’s transformational design program.

As IBM’s new leader, Watson Jr. forcefully committed the company’s future to computers, establishing it as a pioneer in an industry that it would come to lead for decades.

Making the shift to computers required a complex internal overhaul. The company was hiring new workers at a rapid rate, as many as 25,000 a year in the US alone. They needed training in highly specialized skills, many of which the company was defining on the fly, to address the company’s fast-evolving research and product needs in the computing field. In Watson Jr.’s first six years, IBM increased its base of engineers from 500 to 4,000.

Like his father, Watson Jr. believed IBM should be a good place to work. While driving its rapid expansion and conversion to a computer age, he fought hard to preserve the fundamental respect for people that had been at the core of IBM’s belief system. He was equally committed to his father’s principle about lifetime employment, which meant IBMers were in a near-constant state of retraining and shuffling. “If an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself, except those beliefs, as it moves through corporate life,” he said.

Watson Jr. also recognized that the company under his charge could no longer rely on a top-heavy management structure, where all major decisions were funneled up to the chief executive. His father’s paternalistic, almost authoritarian, style may have been appropriate for the IBM of his time, but it wouldn’t work for a global powerhouse. In late 1956, Watson Jr. gathered the top 100 or so executives for a three-day meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, and told them to figure it out. “We went into that meeting a top-heavy, monolithic company and came out of it decentralized,” Watson said.