Tom Watson Ibm Quotes

A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

I once heard a story about Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Asked to what he attributed the phenomenal success of IBM, he is said to have answered: IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now,

Tom Watson, though, held his team and himself to a different standard. As he explained to his men in 1930 at the outset of the Depression, “No man deserves any special credit for being an average man. It is the men who are striving to be above the average who are the men who build business—they are the men who build nations.” This belief applied to every person, including himself as the person holding the title of the CEO, because a policy was “a policy for the entire organization; not for just one man.” The average, in his eyes, was “the average” because the “above average” carried the rest. He was determined to be one of the great CEOs who would carry the rest.

Without 'ideas,' the material creations we regard so highly could not have been conceived or produced. … Without 'high ideals' we cannot derive from the marvels of our modern creative and productive genius the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Tom Watson Sr., “Production,” June 1947