Ibm: One Of The Most Valuable Brands In The World
Charles Ranlett Flint, an engineer who graduated in 1868 from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating Recording Company (CTR). The company roots date back to the 1880’s to four companies which were united in 1911 to form a new holding company (CTR) by the leadership of Charles Flint. The company headquarters was based in New York, started operating with 1300 employee and George Fairchild became the first chairman of the board of directors. In 1914, Thomas J. Watson was hired as a young businessman who soon became the chairman and CEO of CTR or as he renamed it in 1924 International Business Machines company globally known as IBM. In the same year IBM already had plants in Endicott, Washington, Dayton, France and Germany and 3500 employees were hired around the globe. The main business of the corporate was in automated methods of recording and assembling data using printed paper cards. After the second world war, circuit board technologies and manufacturing were the research focus however the company kept expanding each year till it became one of the most important multinational technology companies.
The current Chief Executive Officer is Ginni Rometty. She graduated in 1979 and worked for General Motors. In 1981, she joined IBM as a system analyst and engineer in Detroit. She climbed the ladder of success quickly and passionately as she spent the first 10 years working in technical positions then joined the sales team after that she was in IBM’s consultation group following up with some managerial positions. On the 25th of October 2011, IBM declared Ginni as the new CEO and president of the company. Unfortunately, Ginni does not have a lot of managerial roles in 2020 as she decided that its time for retirement after years of declining revenue and a slumping share price. She suggested that the company’s next era should be under the leadership of Arvind Krishna who is a younger individual who had crucial roles in developing some of the companies major fields and that showed her Entrepreneurship which poured in the company’s benefit. She was a pacesetting leader who knew that growth and comfort can not coexist and true growth came from risk taking and that is what she taught her employees.
IBM had its own organizational culture which is THINK. Thanks to Thomas Watson efforts this culture was introduced to the company. It revolved about 4 main concepts starting with radical thinking. IBM managers encourage employees to engage in thinking that has potential to disrupt the status quo and deviate from traditional ways in the business. In this way, the corporate culture promotes creative and innovative thinking that leads to technological breakthroughs. Dedication to every client’s success focused on clients needs. Innovation that matters is one of the company’s intensive strategies for growth and competitive advantage. Finally, trust, personal responsibility and respect of each individual such trust and respect lead to positive relationships that support high employee morale and stronger alliances with business partners.
Big Blue, the nickname chosen for the company, operates successfully in more than 170 countries around the globe. Since it is the world’s fourth most valuable brand, the company developed ethnocentric, polycentric and geocentric global attitudes combined to achieve maximum success. Their ethnocentric attitude can be noticed by the huge diversity between employees and how they are all equally treated by the company. Moreover, as the company grows their ambition also grows which made them attempt to spread out the appeal of their products and services among multiple countries shows their polycentric attitude. Finally, their geocentric approach can be observed as they try to conduct their business anywhere in the world. C-T-R opened its first office outside of the US in Brazil a “representation office’’ for the company — in 1917, beginning what would become a leading role in the development of information technology in Brazil. IBM established its first office in China in 1928 in Shanghai. As advances in communication technology and transportation during the 1930s.
The Corporate Service Corps (CSC) was one of the ways IBM used to achieve effective multi-cultural teams. After being launched in 2008, it was used to aid leadership development while delivering high quality problem solving for communities and organizations in emerging markets. It is basically a laboratory for producing new and effective techniques of leadership to enhance the teamwork values between their diverse employees.
The managerial functions such as planning, staffing, organizing, etc. they all fall under the control process which is the core of any successful business. It is easy to reach success but the real challenge is to maintain it. Measuring a business performance can be conducted by defining your governing objective, developing a theory of cause and effect to asses presumed drivers of the objective, identifying the special activities that employees can do to help achieve the governing objective and evaluating your statistics.
To conclude, I believe that IBM is one of the most successful technological firms available around the globe as they are ambitious and think big. They move the company to reach modern solutions for modern problems using cloud computing, artificial intelligence and so on. The diversity they have among their employees proves their success in leading a smooth-united teams. IBM’s ambition has no limits they always try to grow bigger internationally. That’s how it became one of the most valuable brands in the world.
