10 "THE IBM WAY": WHAT THE WORLD SAW, 1964–1993

In an interdependent organization, a community of effort is imperative. Thomas J. Watson Jr.
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IBM Became a large firm along with other American and international ones. Each employee learned how to do that as they went along, from senior executives to the newest IBM salesperson, sharing insights with each other, so much so that part of IBM's success can be attributed to its creation and dominance of an information technology ecosystem in the 1960s to the 1980s involving most large businesses and many democratic government agencies. Its influence and behavior expanded and changed, driven by such nontechnical issues as strategy development, accounting and financial strategies, and managerial worldviews, often in response to regulatory and legal regimes. The greatest number of large firms were headquartered in the United States, within easy reach of over half of IBM's employees. By 1973, IBM ranked among the ten largest corporations, along with General Electric, Chrysler, Mobil Oil, Texaco, ITT, Royal Dutch Shell, General Motors, Exxon, and Unilever.
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Historians observed that part of the success of IBM and other firms was their ability to leverage emerging technologies, while the Chandlerian model of how large enterprises worked endured.
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