The Wizard, King, and Hobbit of Business

Try to imagine J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy captured in a single two-hour movie or a slim volume you could read in 30 minutes, with the Dark Lord Sauron bellowing, "Who moved my ring?"

The truth is, we love epic adventures that unfold gradually, allowing us to become lost in the people and their stories. From Darth Vader to Harry Potter, from Achilles to Odysseus, from Bilbo to Frodo, there is something primal in our obsession with the multivolume epic. Even in nonfiction, larger-than-life individuals just cannot be stuffed into a single volume. Manchester's biography of Churchill, Caro's Johnson, Sandburg's Lincoln--they hold our attention precisely because they are long enough to do the job.

I began thinking, "Has there ever been a great business trilogy?"

I wanted to find an epic adventure of real people transformed by a hero's journey. I found only one. It's the story of a father who builds an empire, a reluctant son who battles against his father before inheriting the empire and taking it to greatness, and a stranger who shows up in the nick of time to save all that the father and son built. It's a story that spans nine decades and is enmeshed in the sweep of history, from World War I through the Great Depression, World War II, the rise of America, the go-go 1960s, the technology explosion, and the dawn of a new post-September 11 world. The trilogy of IBM--three extraordinary books, each composed by a different author--is populated by characters as bold and daring and ultimately flawed as any in literature, beginning with a fascinating individual who, in middle age, found his life and career shattered.

Part I: The Rise of the King

Five days after his 38th birthday, Thomas J. Watson Sr. awoke to read a banner headline, "NCR Men Indicted by Federal Grand Jury." There, in the second paragraph, in a long list of names, jumped out the horrific sight of the name Watson. Along with 30 other executives, Watson had been nailed for criminal antitrust violations, part of a scheme conceived and orchestrated by his mentor John Henry Patterson. Out of work and carrying the stigma of the NCR scandal, he had to start with less than zero.

In terms of how people respond to crushing setbacks in life, there are three types. There are those who never fully recover. There are those who get their lives back to normal. And there are those--like Thomas J. Watson Sr.--who turn calamity into a defining event from which they emerge stronger than before.

I asked Kevin Maney, author of The Maverick and His Machine (J. Wiley & Sons, 2003), for his assessment of Watson's inner motivations for building IBM into a great company. The primary drives, concluded Maney, were not money, power, or fame--although they did play a role--but a quest for something that added up to more than all of these combined: redemption.

Watson Sr. reminds me of the main character in Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim. Early in the story, Jim finds himself first mate on a ship badly damaged at sea. With a squall bearing down, the captain and crew abandon ship, leaving 800 religious pilgrims to their deaths. The crew returns to port, telling a tale of how the ocean destroyed the ship, only to look out the window one day to see the very same ship pulled back into port. Ashamed, Jim seeks out a remote trading post where he dedicates his life to becoming a courageous warrior leader in a tribal village (hence Lord Jim), seeking redemption for his act of cowardice.

Similarly, Watson Sr. sought out a remote little firm, became its idealistic leader, and dedicated his life to building a role-model company revered not just for its success but equally for its fanatical adherence to core values. He built IBM brick by brick from an agglomeration of small enterprises with the innocuous name of The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Watson Sr. did for corporate culture what the founders of the United States did for capitalist democracy--he invented its modern model and proved that it could work in practice.

Yet Watson Sr. became a figure so cultlike as to create a company wholly dependent on his direction. In fact, IBM would have likely become a mere footnote in industrial history had it not been for one huge stroke of luck: The genetic lottery gave the king of IBM a prince of immense capabilities. Just one problem: The prince had neither the confidence nor the inclination to become king.