Not that anyone asks me anymore why I work for IBM, but this article in Business Insider by Mark Fidelman pretty much nails it.  Basically the thesis is that open, collaborative organizations are the way of the future and fear-driven, dictatorial organization are gonna go the way of the do-do.  Now, IBM isn’t perfect, but there aren’t many other organizations in the world that can actually claim that they are, in fact, actively working to mold their organizational culture in this way. 

Not only that, but the article lays out the business benefit, “IBM has been so successful in its last few years, that it’s outperformed the S&P 500, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.”

There’s also some nice, tidy philosophical underpinnings explained.  Here is a selection of my fave quotes from the piece.

“While Apple has been wildly successful, IBM’s Social Business is much more attainable and sustainable than what Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky describes as Apple’s genius led, culture of fear. For the genius is always, as Benjamin Disraeli and later Peter Drucker predicted, succeeded by a “lieutenant of Marines” who understands the business but nothing else. So the company is only left with an innovation vacuum.”

 

“Work creates a unique social bond – it is the interface between people, technology and culture. Work’s social bond must also evolve. It must responds to market conditions and customer demands. There isn’t a large company that does this better than IBM.
It may be too early for some organizations to come to grips with social business as a strategy. They are stuck in a corporate dystopia, ruled by the equivalent of an Orwellian inner party which condemns individuality and transparency as thought crimes.”

 

Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM & Less Like Apple ow.ly/8hWP4