By Simon Sharwood
Publication Date: 2025-12-29 05:38:00
IBM has announced the death of its former CEO Lou Gerstner, who passed away on Saturday, aged 83.
In his biography, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” Gerstner recounted his middle-class upbringing and time at Dartmouth University and Harvard Business School. At 23, he went to work for management consultancy McKinsey and within nine years became a senior partner before taking a senior role at American Express.
During his 11 years at American Express, Gerstner had his first encounter with IBM when one of the divisions he oversaw adopted computers from Amdahl in addition to its Big Blue mainframes. IBM threatened to withdraw support for its hardware. Gerstner tried to contact IBM’s CEO, only to be met with bureaucratic indifference despite American Express being a very significant customer at the time.
“Cooler heads prevailed at IBM and the incident passed,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, it did not go out…
