The U.S. Technology Skills Gap: What Every Technology Executive Must Know to Save America's Future, + Website

PART THREE

Let’s Build Some Arks

Ask your colleagues this question: Who was the best businessperson in the latter half of the twentieth century? Many will say Jack Welch, the former General Electric chairman and CEO.

But I wouldn’t. My choice for that position of honor is Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the brilliant executive who joined the IBM Corporation in 1993 just as pundits were claiming that the company was failing and should be split up and sold off. Gerstner, however, rejected that advice, kept the company together, and returned it to profitability.

He also had a keen sense for the future.

In 1995, more than 12 years before smartphones and tablets became best-selling devices that surpassed the sales of personal computers, Gerstner predicted the demise of the personal computer. And four years after that, he proclaimed at a Wall Street analyst meeting that overpriced Internet companies were “fireflies before the storm.”1 That was one year before the dot-com bubble burst.

A thoughtful manager—and a customer of IBM when he was chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco—Gerstner often asked his fellow IBM workers for advice on what the company needed to do. A favorite Gerstner saying was “Execution is the tough, difficult daily grind of making sure the machine moves forward, meter by meter. Most important, no credit can be given for predicting the rain, only for building arks.”2

Gerstner wanted solutions, not more problems.

His ark comment fits this section of the book. In the first two parts ...