The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age

by Ralph Watson McElvenny, Marc Wortman

A riveting, first-ever, sweeping biography of Thomas Watson, Jr. - more important to the history and development of the modern world than Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie - who risked everything, personally and professionally, to reinvent IBM and launch the computer age that created the world we live in today

Thomas Watson Jr. drove IBM to undertake the biggest gamble in business history with a revolution no other company of the age could dare– the creation in the 1960s of the IBM System/360, the world's first fully integrated and compatible mainframe computer that laid the foundation for the information technology future.  Its success made IBM the most valuable company in America. Fortune magazine touted him as “the greatest capitalist who ever lived.” Time named him one of the “One Hundred People of the Century.”
 
Behind closed doors, Watson was a multifaceted, complicated man. As a young man, he was a failed student and playboy, an unlikely candidate for corporate titan. He pulled his life together as a courageous World War II pilot and took over IBM after his father’s death. He suffered from anxiety and depression so overwhelming that he spent days prostrate and locked in a bathroom at home while IBM faced crisis after crisis. And he carried out a family-shattering battle over the future of IBM with his brother Dick, who expected to follow him as CEO.
 
But despite his many demons, he laid the foundation for what eventually became the global information technology industry, which dominates today’s world. His story, and the industry he created, is equal to, if not more important than that of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, Vanderbilt and the railroads, and Morgan in finance.


 
 

Genres: Biography, Business, History, Technology, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Finance

620 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 24, 2023

Reviews

[Janalyn, the blind reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Watson Junior took over IBM from his father who saw The company through the depression and thanks to seniors over optimism he fired no one when everyone else around the country were suffering 25% unemployment this biography reads like a very interesting fiction story but it is all true from TJ who is the senior Watson to Tom the son and there personal public and professional highs and lows an in the end why Thomas Watson Junior would be called the greatest capitalist to ever live although I am not big on the Fortune 500 list nor what it takes to get there I can honestly agree when I say I really liked him and his dad TJ. I do want to mention that these two men were Uber successful because of one woman and that was Tom’s grandmother and TJ‘s mom who despite him growing up on the farm she emphasize school work and even sent him to a different town to attend high school and by 1914 when Thomas Junior was born TJ would be going back to New York after having mega success with the national cash register company and a public scandal thanks to his bosses from that company but he would do like most farmers are taught to do and that is pick hisself up from the bootstraps and start again and this is why most of us now know the history of IBM if you want to read a very interesting story and a detailed account of its beginning then you definitely should read the greatest capitalist whoever lived written by an investigative journalist and the man’s grandson Ralph and kudos to both of them on a very interesting book I absolutely loved it and even went to look for the podcast where the two men actually met in person. This is a book I highly recommend in a book that I want to reiterate I found so Uber interesting!!! Don’t get it twisted this book isn’t just about business but about Tom Junior‘s depression that was so bad when he was away at camp he couldn’t even pull his self out of bed and it really worried his nine-year-old brother dick there’s things in this book that will make you laugh make you sad and things that will just make you go Hmmm. So if you like biographies that tells success stories and or stories where people try and try again until they get it right you definitely like this book. I want to thank the publisher Annette Galli for my free arc copy please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

[Kelcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glad I read it, but OOF, too dense. Now I understand why there's a Summary version of this. It's interesting reading this as an employee in the current age, and what a legacy the Watson family had on the world.

[Phil Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book on the history of computing and personnel management, and on how IBM started in the late 1800s, grew, and ultimately peaked as the largest company by revenue in 1985. Starting with tabulators, then reinventing itself toward electro-mechanical computers, reinventing itself toward mainframes, and finally reinventing itself toward desktop computers.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love Succession you will love this book. What a great story. Father vs son, brother vs brother, CEO vs rival. A man who took his company to the top but couldn’t control his own wife and children during the rebellious sixties. It’s all here. Some whitewashing near in the end on why the company lost its way but definitely worth reading

[Alex Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A generally entertaining portrait of an undeniably cool and important figure in American and business history, but a little dense at times and far from objective. The authors really dove into some technical stuff that I just couldn’t get interested in. Also, one of the authors being a grandson of Tom Watson, the book reads like it was written by a grandson of Tom Watson. Very little objectivity in portraying Watson and only casual mention of any shortfalls he may have had. Watson’s rivals are vilified and there isn’t much discussion about it.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Watson Jr. took over IBM in 1956 from his father, Tom Watson. He retired in 1971, but still remained active in IBM.

From the 1950s to the early 1980s IBM was the “Be All and End All” of the newly emerging computer industry. This book tells the story of father and son – and their company - IBM.

Tom Watson Sr. was born in 1874 and worked his way up as a salesperson. He became general manger of a company called CTR (Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) which he renamed to IBM (International Business Machines) in 1924. It invented and patented IBM punch cards which were in use for decades (I remember having a summer job during the 1970s where we had to bring boxes of these punch cards which were used by a team of key punch typists and operators in what was the computer area of the company).

Father and son had a tempestuous relationship. Tom Watson Jr. was in constant rebellion against his father, who wanted him to assume the mantle of IBM. There were endless shouting matches. It was the classic case where the son wanted nothing whatsoever to do with his father and his company. He was a rebel without a cause and was belligerent.

It was only when World War II started (December/1941 for the U.S.) that Tom Watson Jr. developed an independent personality. He became a pilot in the U.S. Air Force and was sent to the Soviet Union as part of a team to supply the Soviets with much-needed American aircraft. Tom Watson Jr found a vocation that was separate from the domination of his father, and he thrived in his new-found freedom and transformed himself.

After the war he renewed his relationship with his father and took over the management reins of IBM. There were still disputes and tension between the two of them, but there was now a new maturity between father and son.

They were both men in motion. Tom Watson Jr, unlike his father, did not want complacent employees. Change was essential to the business of IBM. Tom Watson Jr. was never averse to risk taking, whether in his personal life (like his passion for flying airplanes) or in business management where he favoured decision-making over procrastination and unnecessary delays.

The authors point out that IBM was good to its employees – there was job security, paid vacations, and employees had access to make complaints. On the other hand, the authors speak of endless and excessive overtime hours to meet project deadlines.

IBM was always innovating and coming out with new technologies through their software engineering department. At the beginning of the 1960s they started to develop technology that would allow their business users to keep their software intact with each new upgrade. Prior to this they had to re-write their business code to adopt to the new IBM release.

Page 400 my book

The IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Calculator took ten thousand lines of code to operate. The 1401 came with one hundred thousand instructions. In its first version, software for the 360 totaled one million lines, but as performance demands swelled, the system burgeoned to ten million lines of code.

The phenomenal growth and the changes that IBM brought to society made computers an essential part of everyday life.

Page 355 in the mid-1960s

Prior to development of the New Processor Line, less than 5 percent of IBM’s total research and development budget went into programming. Now, scores of dedicated programmers, eventually growing to some two thousand, were employed to write tens of thousands of lines of code needed to make the computers run.

Page 367

IBM was on track to hire fifty thousand new employees in 1964 alone.

Page 401 the System/360 was developed in the 1960s, after considerable effort and innumerable delays.

Automated teller machines, airline reservation systems, real-time sales transactions, engineering data crunching, and user time-sharing: the advantages of a truly compatible, programming independent mainframe system soon became apparent across virtually every industry.

Page 415

But, in twenty-six revisions through its final release in 1974, DOS (System/360) became the most widely used operating system in the world. It became the template for all future operating systems.

Page 416

IBM estimated that by 1970, at least three thousand different types of businesses and scientific research organizations relied on one or more of the System/360’s nineteen models. From airline reservations, credit card transactions, and inventory control, to stock sales, loan interest setting…

Page 419

From 1964 to 1970, the employee population increased by 120,000 to 269,000.

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the unabridged 17-hour audio version of this title (read by Donald Corren, PublicAffairs, 2023).

Before Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, there was IBM's Thomas Watson Jr. [1914-1993]. This book is a biography of the man who oversaw the transformation of IBM, originally specializing in electromechanical business-machines, into a digital-computing behemoth, creating a company whose name was synonymous with computers for several decades. Tom Watson Jr.'s success at IBM may have been at least in part due to the rivalry with and rebellion against his father. When Watson Jr. appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1955, a marketing triumph for the company, the old man was resentful.

Tom Watson Jr. began life as an angry and often depressed young boy. Alternately indulged (he wore a jacket & tie at age 9 and as a teen, was supplied with his own car, a sailboat, and a monthly allowance worth $7000 in today's money) and disciplined by his domineering and emotionally-distant father, Watson Jr. predictably rebelled, yet he managed to create the bluest of the blue-chip companies. He was a mediocre student, who barely earned his high-school diploma and couldn't get into colleges of his choice. His father eventually got him into Brown University.

Tom Watson Sr. saw IBM's business as that of tabulating machines, which were quite profitable, resisting the suggestion that the company should invest on and move into the computer business. In 1964, under Watson Jr.'s leadership, IBM unveiled a series of computers known as System/360, revolutionizing the field of computer architecture and establishing IBM as a dominating and hip computer company. Until then, computers, even those built by the same manufacturer, were incompatible, causing a user who wanted to upgrade to a larger system to start from scratch and do a significant amount of re-programming and application adaptation.

System/360 computers, which ranged from small business machines to the largest supercomputer of the day, were upward-compatible, allowing programs developed for smaller systems to run on the larger ones with only slight changes. This was a major technical achievement and also a smart business strategy. It motivated customers who needed larger computers because of expansion of their data-processing needs to stay with IBM; a clever way of locking the customers in without facing anti-trust scrutiny. It also provided software developers a larger market and spurred innovations in the software industry.

Following Watson Sr.'s passing in 1956, Watson Jr. assumed the dual roles of President and CEO at IBM, leading the company to new heights by focusing on its computer business, rather than the electromechanical punched-card systems that were his father's favorites. Watson Jr. stepped down from his positions at IBM in 1971 due to health reasons, but he continued to be active in public service and diplomacy.

One aim of the authors is to exonerate IBM from allegations of cooperating with the Nazi regime in Germany. They claim that Watson Sr. cut all ties with Hitler before the US entered World War II and his company subsequently aided the US war effort. The authors also bust the myth that Bill Gates skunked IBM by developing MS-DOS as the industry-standard operating system, noting that IBM would have faced antitrust trouble had it required a proprietary system.

Both Watson Sr. and Watson Jr. treated IBM, a public company, as family property, even though they never owned more than 5% of its stock. This attitude led to Watson Jr.'s rare mistake of appointing his totally-unqualified, alcoholic brother, Dick, as CEO, an act that led to the System/360 project going into a tailspin and forcing Dick's removal.

One should read this book with the awareness that one of the authors is Watson Jr.'s grandson. This family connection does allow closer scrutiny of the family dynamics, but it seems to have shaped the identification of heroes (Watson Jr. and his supporters & soothsayers) and villains (Watson Jr.'s foes, particularly T. Vincent Learson, who eventually replaced Dick and saved the System/360 endeavor).

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a largely sympathetic biography of Tom Watson Jr. of IBM, written by one of his grandchildren and a coauthor. It covers Watson’s life up through his retirement from IBM and his death in 1994. The focus of the book is on the initial establishment of IBM under Watson’s father, along with its vaunted corporate culture (THINK), as well as how the firm’s strategy and culture were further shaped and changed by Tom junior. This was a father-son combination of huge consequence to American business. While the “greatest capitalist who ever lived” claim strikes me as excessive, just as Jack Welch is not the man who destroyed capitalism, the accomplishments involved in building IBM towards its period of peak success are real and worthy of note. Too many people today would date the growth of the computer industry (under various names) as stemming from the early 1980s or later and IBM is infrequently grouped with the digital titans such as the FAANG firms. But IBM set the stage for all of it and the book does a generally good job and reporting, although I would have appreciated more on the broader evolution of the industry.

First, in full disclosure, I grew up in an IBM family at a time that overlapped with the book’s time lines. I came from a large family that moved frequently. We moved into and out of different IBM towns and neighborhoods. At some times I saw little of my Dad and I gradually how stressful his career was. There were alcohol issues and my family split up when I was in high school. People make their own choices and paths, of course, but I have since learned that my family’s experiences were not unusual for other IBM families.

The first takeaway from the book is the value of the IBM culture in fostering the initial success of the firm, maintaining the loyalty of employees, and securing their maximum devotion to customer service. It did not hurt that the prevalence of leasing arrangements made such a reliance of service more feasible and easier to maintain. The move from tabulating machines into the initial computer product line is critical to the ultimate success of IBM and could have benefitted from more explanation. One sees few pouch cards around these days, most recently with the passing of toll booths and non-automated parking arrangements. It was this shift that made IBM very successful but even at the time, there was less popular awareness of computers and how they work that developed after the turn of the millennium.

The centerpiece of the book is the shift to the IBM /360 system. Why this strategic venture was so essential to IBM and to the later evolution of the industry requires much more discussion but the focus on the 360 system in the book was appropriate. Once the initial bugs were worked out, the calculations of how Watson added to IBM shareholder value are there to be worked out.

The major issue I have regarding the book is not the emphasis on the Watson’s and the IBM culture. That is all quite real and appropriate. The issue is that for the culture to matter as it did, the strategic choices of IBM in the industry and the state of the industry had to enable the strategy to succeed and enable shareholder value to be created. Without the strategic choices or industry conditions, the firm culture and management structure would have been less important.

The personal story is interesting and sufficient details are presented for a rich take on IBM at the time to be apparent. Careful readers can figure out the rest. That IBM lost touch with the development of the PC business after a promising start is not that surprising. But by then, Tom Watson Junior had left and the story is no longer his.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's long and largely by the numbers. Watson's flaws are not ignored, but they are mostly used to contrast with his good qualities, so that the good qualities stand out more. As I plodded through, I kept wishing that the author could have found an angle that would make the telling of the story more interesting. He didn't, but there's still much of value to be found here.

Tom Watson Jr. was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. His dad already had wealth beyond what most of us could imagine from the early IBM that built its business on punch cards and mechanical tabulators. Young Tom was a poor student, a spoiled rich kid who was expelled from school after school for teenage pranks. He bridled at the idea of joining the family business. He finally got his bearings when he became the personal pilot and aide to Omar Bradley during the second world war. It was only then that he began to understand and that others began to appreciate his talent for organization and for seeing through to the heart of problems that baffled others. Before the war he had worked at IBM and had great success but always felt, probably correctly, that his successes were handed to him as the crown prince and never truly earned.

Returning to IBM after the war, he began to have real accomplishments as an executive, but he had a mercurial personality and had frequent clashes with his dominating and even more mercurial father. He led the company into the computer age at a time when most people thought that computers would ever only have a few uses for science, military and the very largest corporations. He was responsible for establishing the company as a research leader in an era when it developed basic technologies such as operating systems and compatibility that we take for granted in computers today. Most importantly, he bet the company on the development of the famous 360, which became virtually synonymous with the idea of the mainframe computer in the era before personal computers became viable. He would have been the first to acknowledge that none of these were his personal accomplishments acting alone. He was an organization man, but he was instrumental in building, organizing and running the greatest corporate organization of his era.

The primary strength of the old IBM, inherited from Tom Watson Sr., was not innovation. It was sales and service. Meet your sales quota. Keep the customers happy. Sell them more. Never lose a customer. Always present the right corporate image to your customers. These mantras were the underpinnings of the corporate culture. It was never about Internet era "disruption". I think that Tom Watson would have recoiled at that idea. And though the corporate structure was demanding, it was never ruthless in the style of Jack Welch. Tom Watson cared about his people, but even more than that he cared about his company and its success. It made him vastly wealthy, but he took far less for himself than contemporary tech entrepreneurs. The company always came first, and since the company's business was relatively clean and benign, that allowed him to have the rare quality in capitalism of doing more good than harm.

[Matt Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a great time reading this. Despite how important IBM is as the foundation of the computer industry (historically speaking, at least) I knew little about it and even less about Tom Watson Jr. in a sense this is a biography about Kendall Roy if he’d been a very competent executive - the pampered son of a beloved CEO, living in his fathers shadow and one day expected to take the reins.
But Tom Watson Jr was a talented executive. He was also supportive of his employees and believed both in capped executive compensation and bringing up the living standards of his whole company. Never one to rest on success, the most dynamic part of the book tells the bet-the-farm tale of the System 360 project, an IT project so ambitious it’s hard to imagine any modern company doing it (I was also delighted by the inclusion of Fred Brooks, author of mythical man month. Despite having read that book, I didn’t quite put together the magnitude of the work he’d done).
As a biography I have to be a bit critical of the fact that Watson’s home life was something of an after thought. It’s not until his ibm story is complete that the author discusses his extramarital affairs and strained relationship with his kids. One would think these might have been important all along, and Watson’s own disregard for his family makes this narrative choice somewhat ironic.
Overall though, as a portrait of an influential businessman, it doesn’t get much more compelling than this, and I’d recommend to anyone curious about skilled executives or the history of the computer business.

[Straker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suppose it's not realistic to expect much objectivity when the author of a book is the main subject's grandson but this is a really sloppy effort. Tom Watson Jr's 1990 autobiography, by far the most frequently cited source in the book, is treated like the gospel truth with no apparent attempt made to verify his version of events. Watson Jr's successor as IBM CEO, Vin Learson, is vilified repeatedly here (as he was in the autobiography) with only a few tepid remarks from employees offered in his defense. Learson died in 1996, long before this book was written, but he had four daughters - were any of them asked for their input? And what about the children of the deposed Dick Watson, Tom Jr's younger brother, who died in 1974? Perhaps they could've offered a more balanced portrait of their father. But by far the most noticeably absent voices are those of the rank and file IBM employees who experienced Watson Jr's management style first hand. Surely there are some left who could've been consulted, if the author had cared to do so. I could go on but you get the picture. Not recommended.

[Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I joined IBM in the Military Products Division in Kingston, NY in 1956 following Tom Watson's death in 1956. I was always amazed that the IBM Corporation seized the initiative at the time to prepare for future growth by adding a zero to my employee serial number. I really knew nothing of T J or his sons and this book really educated me on the obvious fact that they as well as all of us have clay feet and dealt with family issues and personal failings and dangerous or destructive interests. It is informative that his advocacy of world peace through world trade fared no better than the current sanctions and tariffs!
I was impressed that the authors were impressed with the Kingston product line of the SAGE AN/FSQ-7 and 8 based on the MIT Whirlwind I that I was hired to learn in a 9-month training course at the Neighborhood Road production factory.
It is worthwhile note that SDC began as the systems engineering group for the SAGE air-defense system at the RAND Corporation. In April 1955, the government contracted with RAND to help write software for the SAGE project. (A somewhat stifling feature is that the octal program numbering system for the SAGE computer had a positive and negative zero which resulted in some confusion in programming Numerics.)
I had assignments in installations at Topsham, Maine; Madison, Wisconsin and Tacoma, Washington. In 1962 IBM support ended when USAF blue suits assumed the functions and I returned to Kingston with a hardware support assignment for final systems testing of the IBM 7040/44 production there. Upon the announcement of the IBM System/360 production switched to the 360/65 and 360/75 which now used hexadecimal support (interesting that the later personal computers used the little-endian order of computer memory storage whereas these large computers always use the big-endian arrangement.)
I achieved the 25-year Quarter Century recognition with the accompanying awards and completed 35 years with many Dallas/ Fort Worth, Texas assignments in Field Engineering support (including a time in the Johnson Space Center mission control where Federal Systems Division managed) DOS/VSE and IBM Marketing software support. Appropriate retirement in 1991 with the Voluntary Transition Program was accepted.

[Janine Sneed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Jr’s massive accomplishments

1./ reorganized the company into accounting operating divisions

2./ launched IBM Research

3./ launched IBM Design

4./ launched the mainframe system 360

5./ first large industrial firm for salaried employees

6./ implemented firm-wide nondiscrimination policies in hiring well before passage of civil rights legislation

Lessons:

1./ get out of the shadows of others to build your own sense of confidence

2./ IBM means service and the more you respond with a personal tone, the more customers and employees will respond to you.

3./ Respect for the individual

4./ Avoid groupthink and embrace wild ducks

4./ Leaders need followers

5./ Deal with problems immediately before they get worse

[Chelsea Telfer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive and interesting history of IBM and the men behind it. Covering a huge amount of detail from Tom Watson Sr to Tom Watson Jr, it is a succession style story of business excellence, family drama and geopolitics. I found it quite hard to get into, and really had to work hard to keep reading it. That said, I’m glad I stuck with it, a good business read and fascinating to learn the true influence of IBM.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is about Thomas Watson, Jr. and his packed life. Starting from a rather dismal bum-like state to rising up to be a lieutenant colonel then taking over IBM. Quite a story about the development of the System/360 mainframe and how it almost broke the company.

Hard to believe one person can pack so much into a day of their life. Given the book was written by one his grandsons, I think there was a little bias going on.

Interesting story.

[Jonathon Schuster · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminds me a bit of a lesser version of Isaacson's "The Innovators" in that it is both a human story and a computer science history. Written partly by his grandson it reads like a book written by a loving grandson. At times quite repetitive, but fortunately skimmable in those sections, it's a worthwhile read if at all interested in the history of the modern computer as well as corporate change.

[Roberta Westwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

More bio than IBM

This was a reasonably good book, but as it went on, I found myself more interested in the rest of the IBM story, than this leader. That could be partly because I didn’t grow to like him all that much as a leader, plus I didn’t like how he treated his spouse and kids. I did like learning how DOS was created. If you worked in technology in the early days, or have ever worked for IBM, you’ll probably appreciate this book more than me.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Serviceable biography of Thomas Watson, Jr, recent CEO of IBM. Watson’s father essentially started IBM and, after quite a familial and professional battle, turned it over to Jr. IBM was a progressive company, treating employees quite well. Jr invented the information technology industry with his commitment to “thinking” machines and the groundbreaking System/360.

[iTZKooPA · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved the entire book. It covered an incredible amount of corporate and some personal detail during the lead up to IBM's creation and through its biggest gamble ever.

As an employee, it's a bit sad to read about some aspects of management and the culture that made the company an unprecedented success that quickly faded upon strained succession after succession.

[Harlan Strader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent Biography of Watson, warts and all. Growing Up IBM was the Apple/Nvidia of its day leading America and the world into the computer age. The myths around the company and its culture defined business in the 50's and 60's. This is a fascinating history of the company, the family and the man who made it so.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Watson's story is one that shows just how far a person's life can range over ups and downs. I wonder if he will be remembered. He certainly influenced IBM moving forward in computers, but I sensed his attempt in diplomacy was what he ended up loving most in life - a life that he wanted at the end to control in his own way.

[Andrew Shepherd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a good business book. What is fascinating is the dichotomy between the two brothers and the father. I always marvel at the Great American capitalist builders although more and more it seems that while they have great business fundamental practices they also also stumble upon the right product at the right time in history.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good and, at times, great biography. However, it gets bogged down a bit in the middle as it discusses the details of the IBM models and their history.

Thomas Watson Jr. led an interesting and eventful life. This book is well worth reading.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic biography of Tom Watson Jr. and IBM. Includes history the the founding of IBM by his father, Tom Watson Sr., and IBM's initiatives to become the go-to company for computer mainframes in the 1970s and 1980s. I also have the audiobook which is great to listen to.

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!

[Jamon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing how 40 years since he left the board, the impact on IBM is still seen today with style of meetings and hierarchy. Impressed the company did not bankrupt in the 1960's or 1970's.

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an incredible story of the en who started and ran IBM. A very detailed account with so many take aways for managers and innovators.