Word: took
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...boldly took IBM--and the world--into the computer age, and in the process developed a company whose awesome sales and service savvy and dark-suited culture stood for everything good and bad about corporate America. No wonder the Justice Department sought (unsuccessfully) to break...
...that Watson went home to was an American icon. It was the outgrowth of a debt-ridden maker of scales, time clocks and accounting machines that his father took charge of in 1914--the year Tom Jr. was born. The elder Watson created a fanatically loyal work force at IBM--the company's name since 1924--hanging THINK signs everywhere, leading employee sing-alongs (corporate anthem: Hail to IBM) and dictating everything from office attire (white shirt, dark suit) to policies on smoking and drinking (forbidden on the job and strongly discouraged off it). IBM dominated the market for punch...
With IBM clearly on top in the early '60s, Watson took one of the biggest gambles in corporate history. He proposed spending more than $5 billion--about three times IBM's revenues at the time--to develop a new line of computers that would make the company's existing machines obsolete. The goal was to replace specialized units with a family of compatible computers that could fill every data-processing need. Customers could start with small computers and move up as their demands increased, taking their old software along with them. This flexibility inspired the name System/360, after...
...perhaps his proudest achievement was to emerge from the shadow of a legendary, relentlessly demanding father. In his first five years as chairman, the younger Watson observed the anniversary of his father's death in 1956 with a ritual. He quietly took stock of what IBM had accomplished since his father died, and then said to his wife, "That's another year I've made it in his absence...
...income--and cure her case of alopecia, or baldness, commonly suffered by black women at the time because of scalp diseases, poor diet and stress--Breedlove became an agent for Annie Turnbo Pope Malone's Poro Co., selling its "Wonderful Hair Grower." Realizing the potential of these products, Breedlove took her daughter and $1.50 in savings to Denver, married her third husband, a newspaper sales agent named Charles Joseph Walker, and with him established a hair-care business that made brilliant use of advertising in the growing number of black newspapers...