Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  We had to load the stretchers ourselves, because the soldiers on the field were too demoralized to help. Those wounded were the most moving sight I’d ever seen—an emaciated blond boy with the look of a hunted animal who had lost his unit and wandered for weeks in the jungle; a huge, bearded man who was painfully wounded in the legs but kept up the morale of the others with his constant smiles and conversation; other pitifully hurt men fighting for their lives with abdominal wounds, brain injuries, jungle fever. The smell and flies in the hot cabin were overwhelming—I kept gagging and finally went forward to the flight deck out of embarrassment. That day we evacuated twenty-eight men in two trips. Seeing these men, I could understand why pilots were willing to fly through hell to give them help.

  But as much as I admired the courage of men like Lieutenant Taylor, that flight was enough for me. I wasn’t sorry to leave the Assam Valley behind and to head back to the Mediterranean, where the war was mostly won by now. We inspected bases in North Africa and along the Adriatic coast of Italy and then flew over to Rome. Flying across Italy just a little north of Monte Cassino, we passed over steep, rugged terrain where the Fifth and Eighth armies had faced their toughest fighting the winter before. In that section of Italy most of the towns are on the peaks of the mountains, and every town we saw had been badly bombed. We landed outside Rome, and on the drive into the city we passed the sight of many wrecked German 88mm antiaircraft guns. Rome itself had been spared, by Allied-German agreement, and the people looked neater and the girls prettier than any I’d seen since leaving the States. We stayed at a hotel that had been taken over as an officers’ rest camp and had a bath and a good dinner on an open terrace, listening to Viennese music and the yells of merrymaking soldiers on the streets.

  The next day, I found myself looking up IBM—or Watson Italiana, as it was called—in the telephone book. For some reason I felt compelled to go there and see what the situation was. The office was in an excellent location right near the hotel. It looked closed, with a big sign on the door that said PROPERTY OF I.B.M., NEW YORK CITY. But the door was unlocked and I walked through a very bare showroom into the office of Giuseppe Samarughi, the manager, whom I’d met once in New York. He shook my hand warmly and then an American major who was also there said, “I’m glad you’ve come. Maybe you can help us out.” This was Harry Ritterbush, formerly of IBM’s New York office and now in charge of all the punch-card records in the Mediterranean theater. He told me he’d been trying to look after this office since the liberation of Rome. Amazingly, rents were still coming in from customers around the area, but dealing with the occupation authorities was a big headache. Like all the businesses in Rome, Watson Italiana had been taken over by the American military government, and they weren’t letting Mr. Samarughi run the office the way it needed to be run.

  I really had no authority to act, but Samarughi and Ritterbush seemed to expect it of me. Maybe I’d become more decisive in general, or maybe for that one instant I was ready to get back to IBM. In any case I headed straight for the military governor’s office, where I gave assurances that IBM equipment was American and not alien property. I stayed there until the logjam was broken and they agreed to put Samarughi back in charge. Then I gave him responsibility for all of Italy until Milan could be liberated and the regular country head could take over. Samarughi was very grateful and, as a keepsake, presented me with a Beretta pistol. It was a neat little weapon of the type carried by Italian officers; I accepted it even though it crossed my mind that guns like it had been used to kill American boys.

  General Jones didn’t want to leave the Mediterranean without taking a short holiday on the island of Capri. After all the destruction we had seen, the beauty of the deep blue water and the seaside villas built amid spires of rock was almost shocking. On the beach I met an Italian marchesa who invited my colleagues and me to a party that night. We were the only Americans there. The marchesa’s whole crowd struck me as depraved. There were beautiful Italian ladies accompanied by men who looked like international loafers, and I danced with a wealthy Swiss woman who told me in all seriousness that she was “sweating out the war on Capri.” I left the party feeling glad to be an American serviceman.

  On the way back to Washington I began to think seriously about what I would do after the war. It was clear that an Allied victory was coming, even though it would take a while. In spite of what I’d done for Mr. Samarughi, the idea of joining the ranks of my father’s men didn’t appeal to me. By now I’d gotten used to the satisfaction of accomplishing things on my own, and I loved the daily thrill of flying. So I decided that owning and running a small aviation company would be just about right. In August 1944, I went up to New York on leave and told Dad I wasn’t coming back.

  Father was very shrewd about it. I expected him to say, “Your mother and I are terribly disappointed.” But rather than make a fuss, he told Fred Nichol to help me turn up opportunities in civil aviation. Nichol jumped right on it. First he wrote to Pat Patterson, the head of United Air Lines, whom Dad knew, telling him I wanted to be a pilot and eventually to move up into management. I got a letter back from Patterson that said, “Come see me at the end of the war.” Then Nichol found a young fellow named Osbourne who had invented floats for seaplanes. In those days seaplanes were very popular and Osbourne’s business seemed solid. It was called the Edo Float Company, and to my surprise Dad didn’t object when I talked about buying it. He wasn’t applying any pressure at all. But Nichol’s eagerness to find me something outside IBM made me wonder what I was passing up, which was probably the effect Dad intended.

  In the spring of 1945, I was back in Washington, and asked General Bradley, who was now a vice president at Sperry-Gyroscope and visiting Washington on a business trip, to come to our apartment and have dinner with Olive and me. I waited for him at the Pentagon, and when he emerged, led him to my car and started the drive home. More than a year had gone by since his retirement and we’d only spoken a couple of times. But our conversation on the road in the twilight of that spring day is riveted in my mind, because it completely changed my life.

  He said, “Tom, what are you going to do when the war is over?”

  “Well, General, I’ve got a job lined up that I think I’m going to take. I’m going to be a pilot with United Air Lines.”

  I expected Bradley to say “That’s a good choice,” and maybe compliment me on my flying. Instead he said, “Really? I always thought you’d go back and run the IBM company.”

  I was stunned. I concentrated on driving for a moment or two, and then I asked the question I suppose had been buried in my mind from the time I got up from the curb as a boy and went home crying. “General Bradley,” I said, “do you think I could run IBM?”

  And he said, “Of course.”

  I kept going over and over the conversation as I mixed drinks and carried dishes back and forth at dinner. After I took the general back to his hotel, I parked on an untraveled road and sat behind the wheel for half an hour, trying to evaluate what he’d said. Since he had made his point in a conversation that was thoughtful on both sides, I concluded that he had indeed meant it. The next question was whether or not his opinion was important enough for me to act on it. Bradley was by no means an easy man to serve. He was a great leader, but he had his up and down moods and I hadn’t always performed in an exemplary fashion for him. But in spite of this, he had high respect for my abilities. This made me think that I might be selling myself short by going to United Air Lines—or anywhere else but IBM.

  I said to Olive when I got home, “General Bradley thinks I could run IBM.” She was silent for so long that I said, “Olive, what do you think?”

  She said, “Tom, you’re a fun-loving boy and it’s hard to believe you really want to do it. But when you put your mind to something I’ve never seen you fail.”

  I concluded that Bradley’s words must be true. It amazed me how much I’d changed in the Air Force. My attitude had improved dramatically and my energy lev
el had greatly increased. I’d realized that I had the force of personality to get my ideas across to others, as long as I took the time beforehand to think things through. I was sure of my ability to speak in public and write clearly. These were all strengths that had developed under Bradley. He was my bridge to self-confidence.

  Twenty-four hours later my mind was made up and I started planning a trip to New York. I called my old man and said, “I’d like to come up on a workday and meet the people there, because, to be honest with you, I may be coming back to IBM if you will have me.” Of course, this was something he’d been waiting for years to hear, and there was warmth and happiness in his voice as he said simply, “I’d be delighted, son.”

  To this day, I do not know for certain if my father was clearing the way for me. But when I went up to IBM that spring to look things over, I could see that the prospective competition for the top jobs wasn’t great. IBM was booming along, but the executive office in New York was oddly empty. A lot of the old guard who’d been with Dad from the beginning had retired, and as they dropped by the wayside, he hadn’t replaced them as rapidly as he might. Before the war there were some bright, hard-driving fifty-year-old managers bucking for those senior jobs. But when I got back, these hotshots were gone—they’d taken jobs elsewhere or gone into business for themselves—and unimpressive men were in their places. I never found out why—at the time I honestly thought there was something magical about it. I remember thinking, “Gee, maybe I’ve got a chance here.”

  After that I had to leave on another long inspection tour with General Jones, all over the South Pacific. By the middle of August 1945, we had gotten all the way to Sydney, Australia, and I was drowsing in my hotel room, half listening to the radio, when a British announcer said, “The Japanese have surrendered unconditionally.” I ran onto the street and danced with an Australian nurse. Four years of war, five years of the army, and now victory! The news was hard to believe but it gave me a delicious, weak-kneed feeling. By lunchtime there were eighteen people in my little room singing and dancing. The street in front of the hotel was crowded with cheering throngs and I only saw a few people who were not deliriously happy—perhaps those who had lost loved ones and knew the cost of the prize we’d won.

  Within a few days we were on our way home, flying from Hawaii to San Francisco in the middle of the night. General Jones was sound asleep and I was at the controls. All told, in my five years, I’d flown about twenty-five hundred hours, fifteen hundred of them either over the sea or close to enemy territory, and finally the war was over. I remember the beauty of the full moon on the scattered cumulus clouds two thousand feet below us. As I sat listening to a Honolulu radio station playing a symphony, and in the background the singing of our engines, I thought of how Olive would have enjoyed that scene.

  The way at IBM seemed clear for me, and I never had anything in mind but to aim for the top job. But I came home from the South Pacific in September 1945 to a terrible shock. Dad had replaced Fred Nichol with a new number-two man, a smart, hard-driving executive named Charley Kirk. I’d never taken Fred Nichol very seriously. He’d started out as Dad’s secretary, just like George Phillips; he was the kind of fellow to whom Dad could say, “Why don’t we build a tower to the moon?” and Nichol would say, “Yes sir, I’ll order the steel this afternoon.” Charley Kirk was a different story. He was only forty-one, a prodigious worker, aggressive and yet very popular with the men. He came from a rough background, somewhat like Dad’s, and he’d made his reputation as a supersalesman in our St. Louis office. When the war came Dad brought him to Endicott, where Kirk was in charge of the rapid and successful expansion of the plant.

  I never expected to have to contend with Kirk at headquarters. In my mind he was the factory boss who belonged up in Endicott. But the anxiety of working for Dad finally took its toll on poor Nichol—in the spring of 1945 he had a nervous breakdown and after a few months he retired at age fifty-eight. When it became clear that Nichol wasn’t coming back, Dad brought Kirk down from Endicott, promoted him to executive vice president, and gave him a seat on the board. This was hard for me to understand—I guess Dad still seemed so self-sufficient to me that I couldn’t appreciate why he needed a number two. But one thing I later learned about managing a company is that it’s like trying to run a family with a lot of children: too many things need doing. You want to get the factory going right, you want the sales to go up, you want to motivate this guy, put a better fellow in that job—you have a list on your desk and the items are all hard to accomplish. If you have a man like Kirk, you can show him your list and he’ll say, “Let me handle these four things.” That has a powerful appeal for a harried executive such as Dad, who by then was in his seventies. But all I could think of was that if Dad ever got sick or died, Kirk was the logical successor.

  I left the Air Force at the end of 1945, and on the first business day of 1946, I reported to IBM. Dad greeted me in his office. I had on a stiff paper collar and a good dark suit. He shook my hand and gestured toward the other end of the room. “Tom,” he said, “you’ve met Charley Kirk.” Then Dad told me I was going to be Kirk’s assistant. I’m sure I shook Kirk’s hand and said how glad I was, but I was so surprised that I don’t remember doing it. It took several days for me to sort out how I felt about this assignment. I knew it wasn’t as demeaning as it might sound, because the title of “assistant” had a special meaning at IBM. Dad always preached the idea that executives and managers should see themselves not as bosses of employees but as their “assistants.” And he often made promising young men assistants to the top people. So there was no stigma in being an assistant.

  On the other hand, the fact that I’d be working with Kirk and not with Dad really bothered me. By the end of the following week it was clear to me that the two men had formed a tight bond. Kirk and I went up to Endicott, where Dad had ordered a week-long meeting for all of IBM’s sales managers. Conferences like this were called “executive schools” at IBM, and this was the first big one since the end of the war. Kirk ran it, and Dad didn’t show up until Wednesday. When he came in he sat down in the back of the assembly hall. At the podium making a presentation was one of IBM’s youngest branch managers, a close friend of Kirk’s from St. Louis by the name of Jim Birkenstock. I saw Dad beckon for Kirk to join him at the rear, and the two of them put their heads together and talked quietly behind their hands. Suddenly Dad said dramatically, “Mr. Kirk, that man on the platform is so impressive that he will be our new general sales manager. I am going to make the announcement right now.” There was a gasp from the people who heard this, because Birkenstock had thereby leaped from a junior position to become practically everyone’s boss, and with his new job went a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary. So Dad made the announcement, while Kirk took Birkenstock’s predecessor aside and told him he’d have to shift to another job. Dad was known for giving unexpected promotions, but this was unheard of. I took it as an indication of Kirk’s great influence on my father.

  I have to hand it to Kirk that from the moment we got back to New York he treated me fairly and went flat out to teach me the business. He had a large desk in his office, and he simply told me to pull up a chair alongside. “I don’t have time to explain everything I do,” he said, “but you’ll learn if you sit here and watch.” That was where I perched every day for months, and whenever Kirk went out to a meeting I’d go along. I saw practically everything he did. I learned how to make decisions, for Kirk was excellent at making them fast and making most of them right. When you have his kind of experience and feel for a business, you can make very rapid decisions, particularly where you can forecast the result. But he also knew when to not go pell-mell, for example on a matter that, if handled wrong, could hurt IBM’s reputation or provoke a lawsuit. At this point Charley was handling dozens of different responsibilities—I’d never seen such a prodigious worker. Sitting by Kirk, I had as good a cross-section view of IBM’s problems as I could have gotten anywhere in the compan
y.

  Even so, friendship between Kirk and me didn’t seem to be in the cards. One night early on, he invited me up to his place with three or four IBMers, all friends of his. He had a room at the Ritz Towers because he still hadn’t had time to move his family down from Endicott. After we sat down Kirk pulled out a bottle, tossed it on the bed, and said, “Have a drink, Tom.” I said, “No, thanks.” They all pulled back a bit at that, Charley especially. He knew that I’d spent a lot of time in nightclubs before the war. What he didn’t know was that around the middle of 1944, I’d decided that my career would be better served if I completely gave up drinking, even social drinking. “Look,” I said, “it’s no reflection on any of you—it’s after hours—but at the moment I don’t drink a drop.” That made me the odd man out. Everyone else had a drink and started talking about old times in St. Louis, and I left.

  IBM’s situation in those days was enough to make anybody want a drink. Like hundreds of other businesses, we had to switch as fast as possible from wartime to peacetime production. Dad had no intention of shrinking IBM back down to its prewar size—that would have meant firing his new employees, selling the new factories he was so proud of, and closing the door on some of the returning veterans to whom he felt a deep obligation. Yet two thirds of our factory space was devoted to making war matériel, and that market disappeared the day America won. So how were we supposed to keep all the employees busy and the factories full? Somehow IBM was going to have to sell three times as many business machines as before the war.

  Dad was surely one of the most positive-thinking and optimistic businessmen who ever lived, but even he worried about this one. There is a record of a meeting in 1944 where he was already leaning on his engineers to develop new products for peacetime. “Supposing the war in Europe ends in three months,” he said. “What can we go out and take orders for that we are not taking orders for now?” The engineers called off the names of machines being developed, but Dad said none of them opened up new fields. “What I have got to look for is new business,” he said. “Otherwise, there is no use in talking about keeping all those people employed full time, gentlemen. It is easy to say but hard to do, and I lost a lot of sleep last night just thinking about how we are going to do it.” Dad told the engineers that from then on they would have to work a lot faster. Before the war it wasn’t unusual for new IBM products to take five years from conception to market. But Dad pointed out that with machine guns, something totally new to IBM, the company had gone from a standing start to full production in a matter of months. “If we can do it on the gun,” he said, “we can do it on this apparatus that we know something about.” He wasn’t just being arbitrary—somehow he sensed correctly that, because of the war, the pace of technological change in American life had permanently accelerated.