By Tom Akaolisa
Publication Date: 2025-12-29 01:05:00
In the spring of 1993, when Lou Gerstner walked into the headquarters of IBM, there was little romance left in the building. The world’s most storied technology company was hemorrhaging money, shedding relevance, and slowly losing the confidence of its customers, its workers, and itself. The public narrative had already been written. IBM was too big, too slow, too bureaucratic to survive the new age of computing. The only question, many believed, was how cleanly it could be broken apart.
Gerstner did not arrive as a technologist, a visionary futurist, or a romantic about innovation. He arrived as a realist. And in the end, realism proved to be revolutionary.
Today, as we mark his passing at age 83, Gerstner’s legacy stands not as a story of invention, but as a rare and underappreciated act of leadership: the preservation of a great institution when it would have been easier, more fashionable, and more profitable in the short term to dismantle it.
