Dr. Jake Tayler Jacobs

IBM had just posted an $8 billion loss, the largest in American corporate history at the time.

Its stock had collapsed.

Its best people were leaving.

Industry analysts, competitors, and even some of IBM's own board members had reached near universal consensus the company was too big, too slow, too bureaucratic to survive in the fast-moving personal computer era.

The only rational path forward was to break IBM into smaller, more agile pieces and sell them off.

After all, elephants can't dance.

Gertzner, who had spent his career at American Express and RJR Nabisco, he wasn't a technology executive.

He didn't have deep relationships in the industry.

When his appointment was announced, skeptics questioned whether an outsider could possibly understand a company as complex as IBM, let alone save him.

But Gertzner had one advantage that the insiders lacked.

He could see.

He wasn't blinded by decades of internal assumptions.

He wasn't trapped in the belief systems that have calcified over generations of IBM's culture.

He could look at the company with fresh eyes, ask questions that no one inside had thought to ask or had been afraid to ask.

What he discovered changed everything.

IBM didn't have a strategy problem.

The company was drowning in strategies.

Every decision, every division had turnaround plan.

Every business unit had a deck.

Every manager had a vision of how things could be different and be better.