Risktory: The Story Of Risk

Coming up on this week’s episode, a story of resilience and reinvention, courtesy of IBM. In 1984, IBM was the King of the Computing world. Where other competitors, such as Apple, constructed and built each hardware component, and wrote every line of software for their computers, IBM innovated a competitive advantage where they would buy hardware components, assemble said components, and ship its computers with Microsoft Windows pre-loaded. What IBM did was innovative, clever…. and it catapulted them to the top of the IT food chain.Unfortunately for IBM, their advantage was not to last. Once competitors – such as Dell - figured out what IBM were doing, they not only copied IBM’s business model. They did it better and, very rapidly, eroded IBM’s market dominance. In 1993, IBM posted what was then corporate America’s biggest ever loss of $8 billion dollars.What did IBM do? It reinvented. Just as it had done before, but this time with a focus on building an operating model that would be truly resilient.