By Stanley S. Litow
Publication Date: 2026-01-04 10:00:00
Lou Gerstner IBM’s iconic former CEO passed away last weekend at 83 years of age. He will be remembered for generations for rescuing IBM from near demise when its value and viability tanked in the very early 1990s. Before Gerstner took the helm of IBM, many predicted bankruptcy or splitting the company into smaller units and selling them off, but Gerstner not only rescued the company, which almost couldn’t make payroll in early 1993, but he kept Big Blue intact and restored it to the top of the heap by the time he retired in 2002.
In his book about his IBM tenure, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround,” Gerstner chronicles how he engineered the company’s re-emergence and references some of the work he did with regard to the company’s leadership in social responsibility and philanthropy, but actually that story is far more extensive and important and hasn’t been told enough.
And yet, in the current environment where far too many business…
