THINK

All Industry is rapidly learning that great lesson of the necessity of keeping as true a balance in all of its relations as it keeps in its ledgers. I know of no large organization that is not as earnestly striving to unify its human relations within its walls as it is without. This condition can only be brought about by a better understanding, not only between the makers of a product but also between the users of them.
...
The great industries are rapidly learning this lesson and putting it into practice. No better illustration of that search for the path of truth by Industry could be found than that statement by Henry Ford to the effect that the hurt of any one man anywhere is the hurt of every man everywhere. I believe he cited the business failure of a remote village plumber and traced the plumber's hurt to himself because it deprived him of one potential customer. Mr. Ford then traced that hurt still farther back to the steel mill, the tire manufacturer and so on down the long, interdependent line of producers whose prosperity depended upon a multiplicity of prosperous consumers.

All Industry and all people in every walk of life, from the farmer to the rolling mill, and from the author to the maker of stockings, is only now coming into the full understanding that each man is both producer and consumer, and that the only path for producer and consumer is that joyous path of mutual helpfulness which is perfectly defined in the too much forgotten golden rule.

... Every community in which an IBM worker lives should be enriched by his service to the community equally with his service to IBM and to himself. When Industry as a whole, of which IBM is but a small part, learns this lesson in its fullness, then will United Industry be stronger than all governments in the world, for governments of peoples are limited by boundaries while united Industry reaches across all boundaries to unify all peoples.




Written by Walter Russell
Excerpts from a draft of an IBM presentation written for Thomas J. Watson, Sr. circa 1936

http://www.philosophy.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=82





Thomas John Watson, Sr. (1874 – 1956) was the president of International Business Machines (IBM), who oversaw that company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's distinctive management style and corporate culture, and turned the company into a highly-effective selling organization, based largely around punched card tabulating machines. A leading self-made industrialist, he was one of the richest men of his time and was called the world's greatest salesman when he died in 1956.



"THINK". Watson summarized the IBM philosophy with a motto consisting of one word.