Invisible Forces: Modern strategy principles from the aerie of IBM

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Invisible Forces reveals the inside stories behind 35 years of IBM strategies from the market-making introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in the early 1980s to the use of Watson and AI to cure cancer in recent years. Those stories are interwoven with insights from real-world experiences applying leading-edge strategy and management concepts. Adam Smith famously used the metaphor of an "invisible hand" to describe the market forces that shaped industrial economies. In our modern world, that invisible hand is joined by numerous other invisible forces like global standards, collaborative innovation, and the exploding digital commons. It is these forces that cause trucks sold in Texas to be shaped by policies in Beijing; that cause the largest patent holders to license those patents to everybody; and that enable digital strategies to leap from the shoulders of giants. This book reveals those forces and many more through the successes and failures of IBM's strategies over the last 35 years. The final chapters describe the frontiers of modern business strategy, many of which surface important public policy issues on the topics of privacy, artificial intelligence, collaborative innovation, and trade with China. While Invisible Forces does not offer solutions on these critical issues, it does frame them with a concrete understanding of what's really happening, a perspective notably absent from most public debates.