The Helmsman Of Ibm – Sam Palmisano

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The Helmsman of IBM – Sam Palmisano IBM just celebrated its 100th birthday in 2011. This huge business machine is still running well even more than that. According to Arie’s research, the average life expectancy of a multinational corporation-Fortune 500 or its equivalent-is between 40 and 50 years [4]. So what makes IBM survive and succeed? The answer is that IBM has excellent leaders especially Sam Palmisano. Palmisano became the eighth CEO of IBM in 2002. After Gerstner saved IBM from crumbling Palmisano made IBM look excellent again and even better than ever [5]. Palmisano has a clear goal for himself that is to leave IBM in better shape than he found it and he made it [6]. Palmisano stepped down as CEO 31st December 2011, ending a near-decade-long reign. Looking back ten years Palmisano made several key strategic moves that have paid off greatly for IBM. In 2002 IBM bought Pricewaterhouse Coopers Consulting for $3.5 billion, and created a new global business unit called Business Consulting Services by combining IBM business services and PwCC. As a result, IBM Business Consulting Services becomes the world's largest consulting services organization, with operations in more than 160 countries [7]. In 2003 IBM sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. In 2004 IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo. These moves were a clear signal that IBM is abandoning the low profit business and focusing on high profit business. In 2007 IBM further shifted jobs from high labor cost regions in North America and West Europe to low labor cost regions in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe and setting up giant global service delivery centers that were capable of serving clients around the world. This move was to respond to the challenge of the Indian tech services upstarts. IBM reached a rich talent

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