Wyb

BUSINESS, MANAGEMENT

IBM’s Organizational Culture of Radical

Thinking
UPDATED ONUPDATED ON MAY 4, 2023 BY JESSICA LOMBARDO

IB
M’s office building in Bangalore. The organizational culture or corporate culture of
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has characteristics that promote
best practices in the information technology industry. (Photo: Public Domain)
IBM aligns its organizational culture with business goals for leadership in the information
technology industry. Organizational culture or corporate culture defines the
philosophies, principles, and values that influence employee behaviors. Cultural
characteristics influence human resource support for IBM’s strategic responses to
opportunities and threats in the business environment. The company maximizes the
benefits of its organizational culture, such as in using cultural influence to motivate
workers, called IBMers, for business growth. This corporate culture emphasis is on
growth despite the strong competition determined in the Five Forces analysis of IBM.
The company competes with providers of cloud computing, artificial intelligence,
 software, and hardware, such as Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, Google
(Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, and Intel. This condition sheds light about the role of
corporate culture in the long-term success of the IT company.

Organizational culture affects decision-making throughout IBM, also known as Big Blue.

For example, worker participation in feedback systems for customer service quality
depends on the company culture. Also, the corporate culture affects human resource
involvement and contributions to IBM’s intellectual property and patent portfolio used as
competitive advantages for business leadership in the information technology industry.

IBM’s Organizational Culture: Type and

Characteristics
IBM has an organizational culture of THINK. Thinking and creating solutions are
included in this corporate culture. In this context, the company relies on thoughts and
ideas for developing new information technologies or improving existing ones. The
following elements are the most notable in IBM’s organizational culture:

1. Radical thinking
2. Dedication to every client’s success
3. Innovation that matters
4. Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

This organizational culture is based on Thomas J. Watson Sr.’s efforts to integrate the
company, which was originally known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording
Company (CTR), formed from the amalgamation of four companies. Watson’s goal was
to unify the whole organization and ensure its long-term success. His efforts created the
foundation for IBM’s current corporate culture of Think. The cultural characteristics have
been formally redefined based on the results of the 2003 ValuesJam, which was the
company’s way of establishing key values through the participation of employees.

Radical Thinking. Radical thinking is the primary and most defining characteristic of
IBM’s organizational culture. This cultural trait influences the company’s development
through its more than 100 years of operations in the information technology industry.
IBM managers encourage employees to engage in thinking that has potential to disrupt
the status quo and deviate from traditional ways in the business. In this way, the
corporate culture promotes creative and innovative thinking that leads to technological
breakthroughs. For example, based on contributions from radical-thinking employees,
the company introduced the IBM System/360, which was the first easily upgradable
computing system family for customers, especially businesses. The organizational
culture encourages technological breakthroughs that reflect IBM’s vision statement and
mission statement and the achievement of related goals and objectives for the
business.
Dedication to Every Client’s Success. This feature of the organizational culture
focuses on clients’ needs and guides employees’ decisions for business development.
Also, IBM aims to maintain high-quality customer service to address the needs of the
information technology business. This organizational culture feature indicates the
importance of customer relations in determining business success. The concern of
customer service quality is a sociocultural factor relevant in the industry, as identified in
the PESTEL/PESTLE analysis of IBM. For example, customers are more likely to
develop a favorable perspective of the company, based on product effectiveness and
quality of service. Thus, this characteristic of IBM’s corporate culture supports business
goals for customer loyalty and a growing and stable share of the market.

Innovation that Matters – for Our Company and for the World. The emphasis of this
feature of the corporate culture is on addressing market demand through product
development, which is one of IBM’s intensive growth strategies applied with generic
strategies for competitive advantage. To ensure that innovation matters, this cultural
attribute points to excellence as a key success factor in the information technology
business. For example, excellent computer systems provide long-term benefit to
customers, in terms of solving their business problems. Thus, the organizational culture
contributes to the value of the company’s brand