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Who Says Elephants Can't Dance (by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.)

Amazon link: Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change

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Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement, bringing IBM back from the brink of insolvency to lead the computer business once again.

Offering a unique case study drawn from decades of experience at some of America's top companies — McKinsey, American Express, RJR Nabisco — Gerstner's insights into management and leadership are applicable to any business, at any level.

Ranging from strategy to public relations, from finance to organization, Gerstner reveals the lessons of a lifetime running highly successful companies.

Try Googling: Gerstner Sony consultant

Contents of Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?

Foreword
Introduction
PART I—Grabbing Hold
- 1. The Courtship
  - The Search
  - What the Experts Had to Say
  - The Decision
- 2. The Announcement
  - Meeting the IBM Team
  - The Official Election
- 3. Drinking from a Fire Hose
  - Early Priorities
  - The Shareholders' Meeting
- 4. Out to the Field
  - The Click Heard Round the World
  - The Mainframe Decision
  - The First Strategy Conference
  - The Customer Meeting at Chantilly
- 5. Operation Bear Hug
  - The Management Committee Dies
  - Meetings with Industry Experts
  - The Financials : Sinking Fast
  - The Media Early On
- 6. Stop the Bleeding (and Hold the Vision)
  - Keep the Company Together
  - Changing Our Economic Model
  - Reengineer How We Did Business
  - Sell Unproductive Assets to Raise Cash
  - Hold the Vision
- 7. Creating the Leadership Team
  - Building a New Board
  - Employee Communications
- 8. Creating a Global Enterprise
  - Remaking the Organization
  - Breaking Up the Fiefdoms
- 9. Reviving the Brand
  - One Voice, One Agency
- 10. Resetting the Corporate Compensation Philosophy
  - Pay for Performance
  - Stock Ownership
  - Executive Stock Ownership Guidelines
  - A Distasteful Necessity
  - Other Changes
  - Postscript: The First Year Ends
- 11. Back on the Beach
PART II—Strategy
- 12. A Brief History of IBM
  - Inventing the Mainframe
  - Growing Around the Mainframe
  - How the Culture Evolved
  - The Next Big Thing
- 13. Making the Big Bets
  - Their Real Motive
  - A Services-Led Model
  - A Networked Model
  - Implications of a Post-PC World
- 14. Services—the Key to Integration
  - Building the Organization
  - The Nature of the Bet
  - The Future
- 15. Building the World's Already Biggest Software Business
  - Diamond in the Rough
  - A Future After the War
  - Acquiring Lotus
- 16. Opening the Company Store
  - IBM Research
  - Getting Started
- 17. Unstacking the Stack and Focusing the Portfolio
  - Leaving Application Software
  - The IBM Network
  - The PC Dilemma
  - Fallacies and Myths and Lessons
    - With OS/2-the fallacy that the best technology always wins.
    - In the case of application software—the myth of "account control."
    - In the case of pcs , there are still unanswered questions.
- 18. The Emergence of e-business
  - Discovering the Cloud
  - A Network Computing Blueprint
  - Shaping the Conversation
  - The Emperor's New Economy
- 19. Reflections on Strategy
PART III—Culture
- 20. On Corporate Culture
  - The Basic Beliefs
  - Stepping Up to the Challenge
- 21. An Inside-Out World
  - The Customer Comes Second
  - A Culture of "No"
  - Bureaucracy That Hurts
  - IBM Lingo
  - Presiders Over Process
- 22. Leading by Principles
  - Here are the principles
    - 1. The marketplace is the driving force behind everything we do
    - 2. At our core, we are a technology company with an overriding commitment to quality
    - 3. Our primary measures of success are customer satisfaction and shareholder value
    - 4. We operate as an entrepreneurial organization with ...
    - 5. We never lose sight of our strategic vision
    - 6. We think and act with a sense of urgency
    - 7. Outstanding, dedicated people make it all happen ...
    - 8. We are sensitive to the needs of all employees and ...
    - The eight principles were an important first step
  - Waking Up the Leadership Team
    - Required Behavioral Change
  - A New Path for Leaders
  - Making It Happen
  - Declaring Our Moon Shot
  - Restless Self-Renewal
PART—IV Lessons Learned
- 23. Focus—You Have to Know (and Love) Your Business
  - Steely-Eyed Strategies
  - Intelligence Wins Wars
  - Good Strategy: Long on Detail
  - The Hard Part: Allocating Resources
  - Survival of the Fattest
- 24. Execution—Strategy Goes Only So Far
  - People Respect What You Inspect
  - World-Class Processes
  - Strategic Clarity
  - High-Performance Culture
- 25. Leadership Is Personal
  - Passion Is for Everyone
  - What It Takes To Run IBM
  - Integrity
  - Postscript
- 26. Elephants Can Dance
  - Too Expensive, Too Slow
  - A Step Too Far
  - Shift the Power
  - Measure (and Reward) the Future Not the Past
  - Walk the Talk
- 27. IBM—a Farewell
Appendices
- Appendix A— The Future of e-business
- Appendix B—Financial Overview of the IBM Transformation
Index

Peter Drucker: Conceptual Resources

about Peter Drucker — a political social ecologist

Combined outline of Drucker's books — useful for topic searching.

Process: find topic; get Kindle version; word search; dictate notes to voice recognition software (Dragon NS or smart phone); calendarize

Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair by Doris Drucker

Most of the following contain interesting introductions and prefaces with key strategic concepts. Reading through a book's index is a valuable use of time.

Toward tomorrows

Toward unimagined futures

The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939)

The Future of Industrial Man (1943)

The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)

Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)

The Age of Discontinuity (1968)

The New Realities (1988)

Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

Managing in the Next Society (2002); Last section originally published earlier in The Economist (http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819)

Comprehensive Management Books

Concept of the Corporation

Practice of Management

Managing for Results

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)

Managing the Non-Profit Organization

Management, Revised Edition

Management Cases (Revised Edition)

The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization

“Time Related” Management Books

Managing in Turbulent Times

The Changing World of The Executive

Frontiers of Management

Managing for the Future

Managing in a Time of Great Change

Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Managing in the Next Society

Individually Aimed Books by Drucker

Managing Oneself

The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive in Action

What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)

The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)

The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet

Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi

Adventures of a Bystander

Books about Drucker and his ideas

The Definitive Drucker

Inside Drucker's Brain

A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher

Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management

The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy

The Drucker Difference

Drucker Essay Collections

Although written years ago, these essays can be valuable attention directing tools. They can take your brain to places (brain addresses and brain roads) it wouldn't naturally go. What has changed and what is likely to change?

Technology, Management and Society

Men, Ideas & Politics

Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays

The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition

Brainscape enhancement and topic assessment

Key Links for Site Exploration

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At the present time this is a prototype site. I add, remove, and redesign content based on my own unfolding comprehension of the time-life navigation ^© (TLN) landscape . This means that you might want to periodically revisit relevant pages.

Site design goals (beta—September 2010): My minimum goal is to provide enough "sign-posts" that serious site users don't find themselves in major negative situations because they didn't get the TLN memo. My desired goal is to provide "sign-posts" to a meaningful life—both for individuals and society. One supreme sign-post is to set your sights on achievements that really matter, that will make a difference in the world. The second half of your life is the major opportunity for full effectiveness and fulfillment.

Many of the books that were available when I first started working on what I now call "time-life navigation" have gone out of print or are hard to find. You can still use the content of the book outline pages to identify topics of interest and to search Amazon Books for topics or phrases.

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