Beyond IBM: The Inside Story

This highly specialized treatise on present and future trends in business and finance makes up in perception what it lacks in cohesion. The late Mobley, v-p at IBM, and McKeown, his one-time colleague at an independent business service, trace the giant electronic company's spectacular growth under Thomas Watson Sr.'s ``autocratic'' management and the ensuing ``bureaucratic'' regime of Watson Jr. The authors then analyze the more open, purpose-oriented ``teleocratic'' operations style appropriate to the information age in which ``job-descriptions blur and networks emerge to get things done.'' They describe in detail total balance-sheet financial systems, warning of cash position failure, and go on to project vast international avenues for electronic reciprocal marketing of credit, goods and services. (Jan.)