Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

The dominant view at the company and among Wall Street analysts was that IBM was too integrated. The new industry structure was fragmented and, it was argued, IBM should be broken up and fragmented to match. As Gerstner arrived, preparations were under way for separate stock offerings for various pieces of IBM. After studying the situation, Gerstner changed the diagnosis. He believed that in an increasingly fragmented industry, IBM was the one company that had expertise in all areas. Its problem was not that it was integrated but that it was failing to use the integrated skills it possessed. IBM, he declared, needed to become more integrated—but this time around customer solutions rather than hardware platforms. The primary obstacle was the lack of internal coordination and agility. Given this new diagnosis, the guiding policy became to exploit the fact that IBM was different, in fact, unique. IBM would offer customers tailored solutions to their information-processing problems, leveraging its brand name and broad expertise, but willing to use outside hardware and software as required. Put simply, its primary value-added activity would shift from systems engineering to IT consulting, from hardware to software. Neither the “integration is obsolete” nor the “knowing all aspects of IT is our unique ability” viewpoints are, by themselves, strategies. But these diagnoses take the leader, and all who follow, in very different directions.