Word: thoman
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...others consider the company already stressed: thus the yo-yoing stock price, which remains below its 1987 high. The prediction problem is so bad that according to the Wall Street Journal, analysts attending IBM's investor meetings pay more attention to the body language of CFO Richard Thoman than to the numbers he unveils...
Gerstner and Thoman, however, have engineered a corporate future that takes more from their corporate customers' body language than their own. The folded arms and quizzical looks on display in the meetings about computer systems--not another one!--at offices and factories alike are body talk expressing fear of machines, and IBM sees a huge business in making that emotion go away. Digital change has evolved from an amusing walk toward the future to an all-out sprint. FORTUNE 500 CEOs feel they are running for their life when it comes to technology decisions, and the race is distracting them...
...looks like a highly profitable choice. IBM's service sector, with sales of $12.7 billion, is pegged to grow at around 25% a year--that's good news, since the company can sell real brainpower rather than its quickly obsolete silicon counterpart. The group is growing so fast, says Thoman, that it's facing a challenge that's novel even for IBM: locating 15,000 talented new bodies to throw into the business next year...
Gerstner has revived the old-line software and hardware businesses that were at the root of the last corporate nosedive. He parachuted Thoman into the firm's struggling PC division with a mandate to clean up the mess. Thoman killed some of the group's nearly 500 models of machines and breathed life into those he kept while pounding costs through the floor. In January, IBM spent twice as much and took twice as long to make a PC as industry leader Compaq. Now it claims it has No. 1 beat...
...that it was halting shipments of all its products containing the Pentium (about half the personal computers it is at present sending out to stores). Brandishing its own laboratory research, IBM contended that the chip's mistakes were far more frequent than Intel had let on. Said G. Richard Thoman, an IBM senior vice president: "We believe no one should have to wonder about the integrity of data calculated on IBM PCs." Some industry observers suggested that IBM may have had ulterior motives for knocking Intel's quality, since Big Blue will begin selling the competing Power PC microprocessor next...