IBM corporate culture, family orientation, and environmental adaptation

IBM Culture

IBM -- Maintaining Culture

IBM was able to maintain its corporate culture for many years in the midst of an every changing environment. This paper explores how IBM was able to do so.

IBM serves as a prime example for many organizations who wish for create a corporate culture that endures. The organization was able to embed a corporate culture that was able to withstand the pressures that are created by a dynamic and rapidly changing global business environment. Not only was IBM able to keep its sole throughout the changes, so to speak, but it was also able to leverage its culture to tackle the emerging dilemmas that it faced in the wake of globalization. With nearly half a million employees this was not an easy task either. The culture that IBM was able to sustain definitely had its access to state of the art technology. This allowed for IBM to collaborate and disseminate information on an unprecedented basis. However, technology is only a tool, and IBM's collaboration and information sharing was only as good as the information being shared.

Sam Palmisanso in 2002, IBMs chief executive officer, realized that the command and control culture would not work in a twenty first century business environment (George, 2012). As a result, he led a seminar of roughly half a million employees that was interactive. As a result of the conference, the IBM employees decided that humility and openness, patience and a long-term view, directness, and pragmatism were vital to the organization and could serve as the bedrock of the future of the organization. The quote that can best describe this event is summed up in this passage:

"The old model of the heroic superman is increasingly archaic. The most active and successful leaders today see themselves as part of the global community and peer groups. They listen as well as they speak. Never confuse charisma with leadership. The first job of a leader is to enable an organization to survive without him or her. The key to that is to build a sustainable culture." (George, 2012)

Culture can often be thought of as either a top down or bottom up process; sometimes these two forces work against each other until some kind of equilibrium is reached. IBM's success is undoubtedly due to the fact that the organization was able to blend these two perspectives in a harmonious way. Information and communication technology (ICT) has experienced a rapid growth spurt in the latter half of last century. In fact, in every cellular phone, every MP3 player, and even some washing machines now have more computing capacity than the navigation computer that is still used to fly the space shuttle (Jetter & Neus, 2009). Modern society plays by a new and constantly evolving set of metrics that cannot be inherited from the previous generation.