Leadership Style : Sam Palmisano, Former Ibm Ceo

IBM Global Services, the technology services and consulting division of International Business Machines (IBM), is the world’s largest provider of systems integration and technology consulting. It offers services in areas such as application development, data storage, infrastructure management, networking, and technical support (Datamonitor Plc., 2007, p.4). IBM Global Services is also among the world leaders in providing business consulting and outsourcing services. IBM Global Services’ headquarter locates in Armonk, New York. The company has more than 190,000 employees around the world.

IBM invests 6% of its revenue, $6.3 billion every year in Research & Development, standing at 16th position among the 20 most innovative companies in the world. (IBM Facebook, 2014)

Using strategic outsourcing, the Campbell Soup got significant costs saving on IT development and made its information system up to date.Outsourcing has a lot of benefits for business organizations, however, Campbell soup saw more than costs saving but long-term strategic benefits.Campbell soup successfully managed its outsourcing project by better control of critical aspects of the organization and mitigating the almost risks.Moreover, the typical relationship of “win-win” is worth learn for all enterprises want total

Change is a basic part of life. Leaders, whether it be the CEO of the company or you, must anticipate forces that will cause changes, identify opportunities that will require changes, react to unforeseen events that make changes imperative, and work with others to overcome the predictable reactions to change, which almost always include some amount of resistance, often to a significant degree.

Bill Gates was the former CEO of the computer software giant Microsoft. It was not purely on inherited merit or luck that he was able to lead and maintain Microsoft, one substantial attribution to the success of Microsoft was due to the leadership style of Bill Gates. The main philosophy that Bill Gates used was autocratic leadership. Autocratic leadership can be defined as: a person who maintains most of the decision making process for themselves (DuBrin A.J., 2013). An advantage of the autocratic leadership style was that corporate decisions were made more efficiently, if Bill were a democratic or consultative leader, it might have taken longer for Microsoft to seize primary markets of interests. Gates was also competent in delegating tasks to the right people, such as allowing the engineering teams to work at full capacity to meet their production goals. Microsoft’s success can be linked to the proper delegation of duties to the correct personnel, and a focus on goal-based decision making.

Office Supply Incorporated (OSI) is a company in crisis, with challenges in its cost structure and poor IT performance. Outsourcing to Technology Infrastructure Solutions (TIS) is an opportunity to both reduce costs and complexity for the firm, but first must consider whether outsourcing is a good strategic fit for OSI. Outsourcing is known as the practice of turning over responsibility of some or all of organizations information systems to a foreign firm in order to stay competitive. Outsourcing is not new to the business world, as it dominated the manufacturing sector the past couple of decades. There are various advantages and disadvantages. Advantages include lower costs, better quality, and downsizing to focus on the

“Today, Indian outsourcing is one of the best ways for CIOs to cut application development and maintenance costs, and deal effectively with the peaks and valleys of software demands.” (Yeo). Outsourcing to India is still focused primarily on highly technological aspects, but is not limited there. They are known for creative development in the pharmaceutical field, and have recently developed an unsurpassed medication for adult ADHD. Their superior IT assistance is not limited to companies, they offer many websites for individuals seeking help with programming. In mid 2007, U.S. outsourcing to India reached $4.9 billion. Although technologically advanced, they still lag in economic prosperity and therefore still don’t expect the type of compensation that Americans do. “They

IBM needs to grow revenue and stay competitive in the dynamically changing computer marketplace of the 1990’s by maintaining technological leadership and accepting the organizational transformation which needs to be undertaken for them to excel. IBM needs to recapture their previously held powerful position in the personal computer and microprocessor markets and regain value in the company which will increase its stock value and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

• Open Architecture : OS – Microsoft, Microprocessor – Intel , reason, to encourage application developers and enhance Peripheral market

Question 1. What competences has IBM had to invest in arising from its transformation from a ‘product-centric’ to a ‘service-centric’ organization?

Prior to their cultural change that took place in the early 1990’s, many would have said that IBM was on a fatal downhill slide. At this point they were beginning to become obsolete. IBM at one point was among the leaders within the world for hardware/software development and information technology services, but all divisions within the organization were run independently from one another. They were not a unified enterprise. To solidify this even further, “rather than working together as a team, divisions competed against each other both internally and in the field” (DiCarlo, L., 2002).

IBM has weaknesses in the transformation of its business model. It is lack of flexibility in the transition because of its large company

Over the past five years, IBM has quietly transformed itself into a "software, solution and services" company. With the transformation from a hardware vendor to a solution provider, it has entered the area of consulting services.

The problem facing Bharti Airtel was the fact that it had to spend far too much time and money negotiating terms with vendors for equipment that was already outdated and useless the minute it was fired up. The $20 million mail server is one example of expenditure waste (Martinex-Jerez, Narayana 2007:1). Bharti Airtel also needed to revamp its IT sector or else risk losing ground to competitors who could boast a more stabilized infrastructure. To tackle both fronts continually was problematic. Gupta desired a solution that could minimize negotiation times and investment risk. The answer was a plan to outsource much of the family-business that was Bharti Airtel to IBM, which looked to control Airtel's telecom base for the next ten years.

IBM’s mainframe thinking- in terms of pricing and cost structure IBM tried to launch it in the middle market-and it bombed. It also blinded IBM to the much faster evolutionary path of the PC.