Big Blue Process

28 April 2012

Great piece from Robert Cringely on IBM’s fixation on process over product, featuring a couple of classic Steve Jobs quotes: > Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think well somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created so they start to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. IBM won’t be the only big company to fall foul of this mentality.