The Research Of IBM Corporate Culture After2002

Generally Speaking, the corporate culture is determined by the enterprisestrategy, yet it has its own evolvement logic. This evolvement logic is moreobvious when the company get into a ‘blue ocean’. The company with strongadaptability will catch up with the change of outside environment and wouldlive better and longer. There are many layers of corporate culture, but I onlyfocus on the three elements of corporate culture, which are: shareholders，employees and customers. The many factors inside and outside companyhave influence on the three elements and the result of game among the threeelements may be changed. We need to analyze those factors one by one.What’s more important, as we will see later, the corporate culture can evolveby itself just like a life entity. It needs proper rules, but the rules are dynamic instead of static and rely on the equilibrium of the three elements. Eachelement tries to find more vantage for itself and the three elements finallywill found a bigger interests platform. And then the corporate culture wouldbe more adaptive, productive and better synchronized with the corporatestrategy. What should be pointed out is, it is right that the company wouldhave problems when the corporate culture does not match the corporatestrategy, but it does not mean that the corporate culture is decided by thecorporate strategy. For most companies nowadays, they put too muchemphasis on the element of shareholders, especially for American companies.Louis V. Gerstner retired from IBM as the CEO in2002. By then, IBMhad completed the corporate culture and company strategy reform and thengot into a peaceful development period, or we can say that IBM get into anew ‘blue ocean’. During the period the company sticks to the strategyformed from Gerstner time, meanwhile the corporate culture changedunnoticed and gradually. From the view of corporate culture, IBM becameconservative and rigid. The employees did not have a common vision withthe shareholders, neither between the customers and the company. Thecompetence of IBM became weaker and weaker. In one word, the corporateculture deviated from the corporate strategy in the past10years. Thecorporate culture loses the evolution feature and stays at an sluggish status. This is because that IBM put too much emphasis on the element ofshareholders and neglected or even reduced the element of the employees.And further harm the element of the customers.This thesis researches the culture development of IBM after2002via casestudy to reveal the inner logic of the evolvement of the three elements ofcorporate culture. It will also sum up some lessons that a company can adoptduring the peaceful development period to avoid failure in the future. What’smore important, through the analysis we see the new requirement ofmanagement, which includes: the emphasis to an individual, theun-centralization of all the elements, leading rather than controlling. WhetherIBM will go upon the tide again, it will provide a lot of beneficial experiencefor us.