15 STORMS, CRISIS, AND NEAR DEATH, 1985–1993

The expansion of IBM's worldwide business took many forms in 1980. Among the most visible were the 8 million square feet of plant and laboratory space under construction in eight countries at the end of the year. — IBM Annual Report, 1980
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Behind IBM's Dominance of the mainframe business, its annual rankings by business magazines as the most admired corporation, and the whimsical ads of the "Little Tramp" and IBM's PCs hid a story of corporate failure of gigantic proportions. Beginning in the late 1980s and extending over two decades, IBM dismissed or retired some 200,000 employees, more than half of whom were located in the United States. A generation of executives and middle managers left, too, including John Akers, the first chairman to be terminated in IBM's history. The tsunami of layoffs and retirements proved so massive that an employee walking through almost any IBM office in North America saw entire floors of empty cubicles and offices, an old IBM telephone directory tossed on the floor, an IBM coffee mug perched on a window sill, or perhaps a half dozen IBMers working in a space that used to hold over 100 colleagues. At least there was more than enough parking. It did not matter whether the location was a sales office, factory, divisional headquarters, or laboratory. IBMers gauged the extent of the layoffs by the number of cars parked out front. Ironically, most of these empty buildings were relatively new. A construction boom at IBM during the 1970s and 1980s added skyscrapers in such cities as Paris, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, and Detroit, and new factories on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia. It seemed executives needed their own tower, especially sales executives.