My brief experience with Mr. Gerstner
A year-and-a-half ago, I'd never heard of Mr. Gerstner, Mr. Palmisano, or Mr. Zeitler. I, like many fools, thought that if the heads of IBM knew what they were doing, they'd be shipping the 38/400/iSeries platform like Aunt Jemima flips pancakes... And since they don't, I figured they must just be plain fools.
Funny things have happened, from there to here... By a long series of "flukes of nature", I wrote Mr. Gerstner a letter, which I'll post shortly. To make a long story short: in the process of writing that letter, I read IBM Redux by Doug Garr.
I found out three things, mainly: I really liked Gerstner; Gerstner is one of the few heavy-hitters that uses his gut instincts to make decisions; and it was I, who was the fool.
After I wrote the first series of three letters, I found out a lot more about Gerstner...
Now, I run a Mom-and-Pop contract coding biz (just me and The Wife), and I've bought just one $25,000 400 from IBM. Nobody had ever heard of me, and I hadn't even heard of myself, at that time...;-) I represented no group of people and could probably count, on a hand or two, the number of times I'd ever met anyone from even the local branch of IBM, in the 20 years I've worked on their computers. (Outside of the occasional visit from the IBM CE to work on a machine.)
So, if you fully understand the preceding paragraph, you understand my utter and complete astonishment that Gerstner (by all indications) not only read my letters.. but took them seriously.. and responded to them in the best way possible...!
I'd read, in IBM Redux, that in Gerstner's eyes anyway, the customer is still # 1... And then he went and proved it to me by his actions. He responded to a single, totally inconsequential, customer.
I still can't get over it... Now, this happened back in September of 2000, so I'm long over having my ego puffed up by Gerstner responding to little-ole-me... This is a statement about Gerstner, not me.
Gerstner has honor...
Seen the topic blogged about some... A few people know what that means, but fewer still have it. Gerstner honored me, by responding to my letters, and it sure wasn't because he was looking for me to write this piece. He just did it because that's the way he his...
That's what honor is about... Just doing the things that are called for.. and not because of the expected exchange value.
So obviously, I'm writing this "not to bury Caesar, but to praise him". And I have complete faith that Mr. Palmisano is cut from the same cloth.
(Still.. I think IBM doesn't always know what they're doing, with regard to the iSeries, though...;~)
10:29:58 AM 
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