Tom Watson's Secret.

Tom Watson, founder of IBM, said that IBM became what it did for three simple reasons.

At the beginning, Tom had a very clear picture of what the company will look like when it was finally “done.”

He then asked himself how a company like that would have to act.

Finally, once Watson was clear as to how the company would need to act once the dream was in place, he then realized that “unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company, it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.”

(Adapted from “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber.)


Too often we confuse activity with progress. We assume that we need to keep moving in order to reach our goals. Frequently the reverse is true. We need to slow down for a few minutes, days or even weeks to ask – again – the most basic of questions.

We ought to set aside the To Do list long enough to ask “What do we want to be when we grow up?”

As we clarify – again – how it looks and feels, how we look and feel we then must start ‘being’ that way today.


Dov Gordon’s CEO Thought-Provoker™ Questions:

i. Picture the way you want your organization to be two or three years from now. How do you see yourself ‘being’ as a leader? As a manager? If the rest of the picture has changed and evolved, you too must have changed and evolved.

ii. Looking ahead at this future image what have you started doing that you don’t do today? What do you no longer do?

iii. Follow Watson’s advice and choose one or two activities or behaviors from this future image and begin to be like that today. Which one will it be?