Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

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Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., KBE (born March 1, 1942) was chairman of the board of IBM from April 1993 until his retirement in December 2002. He served as chief executive officer of IBM from 1993 until March 2002. In January 2003 he assumed the position of chairman of The Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm located in Washington, DC.

He was formerly CEO of RJR Nabisco, and also held senior positions at American Express and McKinsey & Company. He is a graduate of Chaminade High School and Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Gerstner is generally credited with having saved IBM from going out of business. As described in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, when he arrived in April 1993, an active plan was in place to disaggregate the company; the prevailing wisdom of the time held that IBM's core mainframe business was headed for obsolescence. The company's own management was in the process of allowing its various divisions to rebrand and manage themselves — the so-called "Baby Blues."

Gerstner reversed this plan, realizing from his experiences at RJR and American Express that there remained a vital marketplace need for a broad-based information technology integrator. His decision to keep the company together was the defining decision of his tenure, and it — along with the subsequent refocusing of IBM on the IT services business (which grew to nearly 50% of the company's revenues), the embrace of the Internet as a business phenomenon, and a broad effort to revive the company's culture — is widely seen as having resulted in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in business history.

In his biography, Gerstner described the turnaround as difficult and often wrenching for an IBM culture that had become insular and Balkanized. Before he arrived, over 100,000 employees had lost their jobs in a company that had maintained a lifetime employment policy from its inception. Layoffs and other tough management measures continued in the first two years of Gerstner's tenure, but the company was saved, and business success has continued to grow steadily since then, although the company is no longer deemed the employer of choice that it once was.

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