Agony and ecstasy at IBM - family business International Business Machines Corp

Nation's Business, August, 1990 by Sharon Nelton

Agony And Ecstasy At IBM

A stormy father-and-son relationship; helping heirs apparent learn responsibility; a daughter's demands to take part in the business. Father, Son & Co., Thomas J. Watson Jr.'s memoirs of life with father at International Business Machines Corp., is on the best-seller list and deserves to be. A juicy account of the stormy relationship that existed between Tom Watson Sr. and Tom Watson Jr. as they led IBM to greatness, this book can wring sweaty recognition out of any father and son in business together.

Watson says he was in awe of his powerhouse of a father, "yet we both had such hot tempers that it was hard for me to be in the same room with him, much less try to learn from him how to run a company." They fought savagely about every major issue of the business, from how to finance IBM's growth to what roles other family members ought to play.

What Father, Son & Co. (written with Peter Petre, Bantam Books, $22.95) somewhat plays down, however, are the ways in which the two men sought to affirm their love.

Watson told Nation's Business that his father would often tell him that he loved him. "And very warmly. And he would frequently, at the end of one of these battles, be in tears with his arms around me and his face next to mine, saying things like, `Now, come on, Tom, I'm counting on you, and you and I have got to stand together.'"

They were a "kissing family," Watson says. "I always kissed my father good night, or, if I met him on the street and I was 40 and he was 80, I'd always grab his hand and kiss his cheek."

Watson's book is refreshingly candid. He tells tales on himself--as a child, he burned a brand-new leather coat by trying to make smoke signals with it over a fire. He admits his own management blunders. And he more than once admits he cried, and he even describes seeing a psychiatrist when it looked as though his marriage of 30 years would fail (it didn't).

We asked if it was hard to be so honest. "Not at all," he replied. About four or five years ago, said Watson, who left IBM in 1970 and is now 76, he finally became "comfortable with my life." Only four or five years ago? Why not sooner? The answer seems to lie in the things he did not only inside IBM (taking it from $700 million in annual sales to $7 billion during his years of leadership) but outside it as well, serving the Carter administration as chairman of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament and as ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was finally able to tell himself, "Heck, it just wasn't IBM," but that he was able to succeed at other endeavors as well.

Perhaps in his book he states it most succinctly when he writes, "I think I was at least successful enough that people could say I was the worthy son of a worthy father."

Though his father has been dead for more than 30 years, Watson seems to love him as passionately today as he ever did. But he told us the best father-son relationships he has seen are when the son, not the father, is the success. In his book, he says lots of sons ask him if they should follow their fathers into business. "My answer is: If you can stand it, do it."

To us, he said that to forge any relationship, "you have to take some bitter with a great deal of sweet, and that's the way I felt about my father."