Few years ago if you told a typewriter making company that, soon the computers will be taking over the world and typewriters will be useless. The company would have considered shutting itself. But the company that once made typewrites is still making International Business machines. The company was rightly named International Business Machines (IBM), earlier it made typewriters; now it makes computers and corporate communication solutions.
According to Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, most leaders operate with one of two mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Leaders with fixed mindset often tent to use the tried and tested ways to overcome challenges. They believe that their qualities are carved in stone and they prefer to stick to the rules. In contrast, leaders with growth mindset believe that their basic qualities can be nurtured and improved through efforts. Jugaad innovators are endowed with a growth mindset.
IBM is one such company that has been successful in cultivating a growth mindset among its leaders. IBM celebrated its 100th anniversary in June 2011. The company has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the 1970s oil crisis, the dotcom boom and bust and even the current global economic recession.
Over the past century, the firm’s leaders have used a growth mindset to proactively disrupt the company many times over, completely reinventing its business model again and again. IBM has gone from selling tabulators to typewriters to mainframes to networked PCs to software and services.
In the year 2000 IBM recognized that although the company had invented the PC, its PC business was rapidly being commoditized by the emerging Internet-based computing model. In 2004, IBM’s former CEO Sam Palmisano made the radical decision to sell its PC business to free resources and move up the tech industry value chain.
Here is how Palmisano explains his decision, “In 1981, the PC was an innovation. Twenty years later, it had lost much of its differentiation. It was time to move on, to the future. This enterprise (IBM) has always moved to the future. Continual forward movement is, in fact, inherent in IBM’s value proposition, our business model. The frontier of what is truly innovative keeps moving, and that compels us not to sit still.”
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