By Anton Shilov
Publication Date: 2025-12-28 22:46:00
Louis Gerstner, the executive who engineered one of the most important corporate turnarounds in the history of the high-technology sector, died at the age of 83 on Saturday. Gerstner took control over IBM in 1993 when it was at the brink of breakup and bankruptcy, rebuilt the company into a services-led enterprise, and restored its strategic relevance by 2002. Multiple prominent high-tech leaders worked at IBM under Gertner’s leadership, spreading his skills across the industry nowadays.
IBM’s first CEO not from IBM
Louis Gerstner was the first IBM chief executive — and so far, the only — to be hired from outside of the company. When he took the helm in April 1993, IBM was bleeding money, and the previous CEO planned to split the company into multiple semi-independent units to make them more flexible to compete against immediate rivals without being tied to IBM’s corporate requirements. Instead of dismantling the company, he did the opposite. He preserved IBM as a single…
