By The Times
Publication Date: 2026-01-13 00:01:00
By 1993 IBM, once one of America’s industrial giants and the bluest of Wall Street’s blue chips, was teetering on the brink of insolvency.
The market for its mainframe computers had been severely undermined by the advent of the personal computers and much smaller, nimbler, less diversified rivals such as Apple and Microsoft. It was rich in creative talent, but its management was hidebound, its workforce bloated and its culture “inbred and ingrown”. It was deeply in debt and haemorrhaging money. Morale, like the company’s share price, was rock bottom.
In desperation IBM’s board sacked John Akers, the chairman and chief executive, and began searching for a successor. It approached the likes of Apple’s John Sculley, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Motorola’s George Fisher, but none was interested. It turned instead to Louis Gerstner, who was 51 and had no experience in the computer industry. For that reason he also turned the job down when first approached, but what he did…
