Gerstner was chair and CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, a time when the company was struggling for relevance in the face of competition from rivals such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. After becoming the first outsider to run the company, Gerstner abandoned a plan to split IBM, which was known as Big Blue, into a number of autonomous Baby Blues that would have focused on specific product areas such as processors or software.
When Peter Drucker first met IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson in the 1930s, the legendary management thinker and journalist was somewhat baffled. "He began talking about something called data processing," Drucker recalled, "and it made absolutely no sense to me. I took it back and told my editor, and he said that Watson was a nut, and threw the interview away."
