Inside IBM: Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action Hardcover – October 31, 2023

“Inside IBM - Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action” by Dr. James W. Cortada analyzes the culture of the IBM Corporation in scholarly detail. After training as a historian and having worked at IBM for 38 years Dr Cortada is certainly qualified to write this book. This 480 page book is comprised of three parts and the following 12 chapters:1. From Theories of Corporate Cultures to the Realities of Life inside a Global Enterprise2. Role of Ethics in Corporate Culture: Enduring Beliefs at IBM3. “The IBM Way”: Creating and Sustaining a Corporate Image and Reputation4. Developing Man agers in a Multinational Corporation5. How IBM Prevented Unionization of Its American Workforce6. Corporate Benefits in Boom Periods: IBM’s American Experience7. Managing a Nearly Invisible Corporate Community: “IBM Families”8. From Lapel Pins to Coffee Cups: Links Between Corporate and Material Culture9. The Role of American Postcards in Supporting IBM’s Image, Marketing, and Information Ecosystem10. Humor and Corporate Culture: IBM, Cartoons, and the Good Laugh11. Gray Literature in IBM’s Information Ecosystem12. The Essential Strategy for Corporate SuccessTo provide a very high level summary, this book provides a history of the IBM Corporation focusing on the beliefs and practices of the company and employees. I choose to read and review this book largely because I also have experience at IBM. Being a large and diverse company, our experiences were clearly different, though I totally agree with Dr. Cortada’s descriptions and conclusions. I enjoyed reading about the corporation before I joined. I have always appreciated that IBM still tends to look out for its employees, but I was rather amazed at how far the company went to look out for employees and family in the past. Like many other employees I take pride in IBM’s core beliefs of “respect for the individual, commitment to serving customers, and doing outstanding work” and am sad when the actions of either the company or individuals stray from these beliefs. I concur with the author that these beliefs are largely responsible for much of the success of the IBM Corporation, and that there are periods in IBM’s history where not following these beliefs has had a negative impact on the business outcome itself.I found the analysis and description of IBM culture through material items such as coffee cups, pens, postcards, logo imprinted items, etc. to be insightful and interesting. The conclusions and insights at the end of most of the chapters aides with comprehending and absorbing the content. I look forward to discussing this book with my current colleagues.This is not a book one would read casually, but I recommend it to curious IBMers and those who are seriously interested in learning about corporate culture.I thank Dr. James Cortada and the Columbia University Press for kindly sharing a temporary electronic review copy of this work.

As a 14 year veteran "in the trenches" of IBM, I found this book addressed to a corporate level whose culture and stratagems translated own to my level as slogans, platitudes and all too often simplistic or misapplied thinking (e.g. as one example among MANY, a mandate that statistical process control, which as a manufacturing engineer I strongly believe in, was square peg in round hole over-applied to non statistical office routine across IBM Endicott). From my perspective, this book would have been a LOT better had it taken on something like a case study of the AS/400 out of Rochester Minnesota (big success in the marketplace) vs. the 9370 out of Glendale Lab in Endwell New York (bombed due to a lack of software applications). In both of these cases the background, experience and insight of the managers in charge of these products made all the difference.