Planning for Change - A History of IBM

Planning for change

Before looking at how the internal and external environments affect an organisation such as IBM. It is important to distinguish between each environment.

 The external environment can be broken down into two categories,

Mega: technological, economic, legal/political/sociocultural, international elements

Task: Governments and regulators, competitors, customers/clients, suppliers, public pressure groups, the employment market

The external environment is one in which the organisation (IBM) has no degree of control over: Included in the external environment are the opportunities and threats for the organisation and against the organisation (of the SWOT analysis).

 The internal environment is primarily made up of cultural aspects of the organisation, in its structure and the way in which it conducts business and views itself in the external environment.

The internal environment is one in which the organisation has control over making it very important to understand as to remain viable in the external environment. Included in the internal environment analysis are strengths and weaknesses within the organisation.

Now that the internal and external environments have been defined it is possible to look at how these environments effect an organisation such as IBM.

The External Environment

The External Environment had a mostly positive effect on IBM up until the mid eighties, the exception being the antitrust suit filed by the department of justice.

"The history that is much more relevant to IBM's turnaround begins with Tom Watson, Jr., who succeeded his father as CEO in 1959 and who boldly brought IBM- and the world- into the digital computer age."- Louis Gerstner, Who ...

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...e of the main strategies that was used to support work teams in the face of change, through company letters Gerstner was able to reach all employees globally. Letting employees know where they stand and where the company stands is important.

Gerstner points out that some integrator, fundamentally acting in a service role, controls every major industry. This was the basis for building IBM Global Services.

-- along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the likeý I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. `

All of the information in this assignment and all of the quotes were taken from `Who Says Elephants Can't Dance' written by Louis V. Gerstner Jr. and published by Harper Business 2002