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Louis Gerstner Jr. BOOK REPORTINTRODUCTION
| Term Paper Title |
Louis Gerstner Jr. BOOK REPORTINTRODUCTION |
| # of Words |
988 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) |
3.95 |
Louis Gerstner Jr. BOOK REPORTINTRODUCTION
The business world is constantly changing. Companies rise and fall on a regular basis but the ones that can fall and rise up again end up becoming the symbol of success in today’s business market. The book called “Who says elephants can’t dance?” is written by Louis Gerstner Jr. showcases a company (IBM) that fits in this category. The purpose of this book report is to inform students of how a company in today’s business world becomes and remain successful.
SUMMARY
This book was written by a former CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner Jr. He is accredited with changing the face of IBM to become a leader in this industry. Before he arrived, IBM was on the brinks of bankruptcy. The three most important points of this book can easily be categorized as culture, communication and leadership. Before Louis Gerstner came in as the CEO, IBM was just known as having narrow-minded corporate culture, which managed to ignore the needs and wants of its customers, and to an extent its employees. An example of how structuralized the company had become, comes from a senior executive, who wrote a sixty page document on how he wanted his administrative assistant to serve him, it even included a section on how and when this executive wanted his spearmint gum to be. The two most important points communication and leadership will be further discussed in the following paragraphs.
POINT #1: COMMUNICATION
The company was lacking communication with the customers and its employees. They didn’t have a system of getting customer feedback and didn’t have any sort of informal communication system for its employees; every form of communication was so highly organized. Louis was able to establish informal communication by simply writing out a friendly email to all the employees. “Dear colleagues, I’m pleased to announce that the fourth quarter profits for this year are up.” Following that Louis was able to cut down prices and set up a system to get customer feedback which help improve IBM’s products.
COURSE CONCEPT#1: PROBLEM SOLVING PROCESS
The problem solving process has six main steps: find and define the problem, generate alternative solutions, evaluate alternative and select a preferred solutions, conduct ethics double check, implement solution and lastly evaluate results. The first step was taken when IBM found out that they were on the edge of going bankrupt. The second step was getting someone in the CEO position that could help turn them around from their current issue and this was where Louis V. Gerstner, Jr came in, he instantly learnt about the problems the company was facing and next (step 3) started to write out informal emails to employees, sharing with them the current problems and getting their feedback on how to get thing in the right direction, he also decided to installed a system where they could really get the feedback of the customer. The fourth step was completed when Louis V. Gerstner, Jr did...Read entire document
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