Chapter 7. From the Foxhole

  • Basic human needs cannot be ignored

  • Too many people are feeling continuous anxiety and chronic stress

  • Stable organizations are rarely transformed into borderless ones

During the 1980s, IBM, that stalwart of capitalism, fell on hard times. Powerful competitors, including upstarts from Silicon Valley like Apple Computers and Sun Microsystems, were replacing IBM's mainframes with smaller, powerful machines, and global competition was displacing IBM from the top of the computer heap. IBM's core principle of “respect for the individual,” which really meant job security for life, was in the process of becoming unsupportable. The first efforts to increase flexibility and reduce costs were early retirement packages; the corporation ...

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