Who Says Elephants Can`t Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change, Gerstner Louis V. Jr.

On April 1, 1993, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. began his remarkable career at IBM as Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. It was a job that had been repeatedly passed up by the top CEO titans in America-Jack Welch of General Electric, Larry Bossidy of Allied Signal, George Fisher of Motorola, Bill Gates of Microsoft-and had initially even been rejected by Gerstner himself when he was the first candidate offered the momentous opportunity in December 1992. Although viewed by the general public as a national treasure, at that time in the American corporate landscape IBM was unanimously considered a plodding dinosaur in the technology industry, with sales and profits declining at a steadily alarming rate. Lacking vision and clinging to their mainframe mentality, they missed out on the first wave of the personal computer revolution. Transforming the financial ledger from the red to the black for a company of such size and magnitude as the iconic IBM was considered a suicide mission that even the savviest CEO was afraid to undertake. But, as Gerstner bluntly explains in his book Who Says Elephants Cant Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change, I have always been drawn to a challenge.