In Reply to: Re: Hard Cop Soft Cop( With passion) - Palmisano's Future vision posted by Pearly Gates on 28 January 2004 at 14:20:25:
Many will recall that in its glory days IBM took extraordinary profits with remarkably little contractual risk. It liked a warm but clinical relationship with its customers. It looked like this philosophy would drive it to $100bn turnover by the end of the 80's - that was the target.
Of course all here know that didn't happen as the magic of IBM's formula for printing money disappeared. And as that $100bn a year target looked hopeless what did IBM do?
PARTNERSHIP - remember it. Get involved with the customer on his key projects. Give him the value add from IBM. Find that value add wherever in IBM and give it to him.
About a year later I recall Partnership, which mantra was an essential for any foil presentation that year, gave way to SOLUTIONS , which in fact meant "leveraging" the Agent and 3rd party community who were paid well to take IBM's profits.
Fast Forward to today and 1.No growth and 2. the mantra is again essentially Partnership, or should I say what the dream of Partnership was over a decade ago but which just didn't happen.
Flip back to the end of the 80's and two years later the s*** hit the fan.
Will history repeat itself? I think so. The challenge for IBM is undoubtedly to avoid "Commodity Hell". It is by no means certain that it will, and of all companies a commodity market is for IBM like garlic for a vampire.
So lock in what you can now, because things are unlikely to ever get better. Save our pensions.