Making the World Work Better – Kevin Maney

IBM Press, 2011, Large-format Paperback – Business & Economics – 352 pp.

Making the World Work Better: The Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company

Thomas J Watson Sr’s motto for IBM was THINK, and for more than a century, that one little word worked overtime. In Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company , journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M. O’Brien mark the Centennial of IBM’s founding by examining how IBM has distinctly contributed to the evolution of technology and the modern corporation over the past 100 years.

The lessons for all businesses – indeed, all institutions – are powerful: To survive and succeed over a long period, you have to anticipate change and to be willing and able to continually transform. But while change happens, progress is deliberate. IBM – deliberately led by a pioneering culture and grounded in a set of core ideas – came into being, grew, thrived, nearly died, transformed itself… and is now charting a new path forward for its second century toward a perhaps surprising future on a planetary scale.