James Cortada, a professionally trained historian who worked for IBM for almost forty years, has written a comprehensive history of that firm. In addition to his insider experience, Cortada brings real scholarly expertise, having earlier produced a fine history of the data processing industry prior to computers, as well as other books and articles on related topics. To avoid corporate interference with the content of this new book, Cortada did not start working on it until he had retired from IBM. The good news is that he thereby avoided IBM's requirement that anyone working there obtain prior approval before publishing anything about the firm. The bad news is that as a former employee Cortada no longer had access to the IBM archives he had used in writing earlier books. He relied this time on the considerable amount of primary and secondary material on IBM currently available in the public domain and conversations with such key figures in the history of IBM as former CEOs Thomas Watson Jr. and Frank Cary.

Cortada writes from the perspective of someone who, in his words, “personally embraced IBM's optimistic corporate culture” and was “privileged to be one of those iconic … salesmen” (p. 620). His new book clearly shows both the strengths and weaknesses of that kind of perspective in writing the history of a leading American (and world) business enterprise. Much of the early story from the company's founding in the Progressive Era through the 1960s is by now familiar to students of business history, because IBM in that period has been so heavily studied. What is most original in Cortada's telling of the story through the early 1970s is his essentially internalist explanation of IBM's rise. His account argues that the crucial factors in explaining the firm's spectacular success from the 1930s through the 1960s as having stemmed from gifted, effective leadership, a focus on meeting customer needs, and a distinctive corporate culture that attracted highly talented people, treated them well, and in so doing motivated them to work very hard to make the overall business succeed.

“Corporate culture” can be a somewhat fuzzy concept, and so Cortada is careful to explain just what he means by it. In his words, “IBM's culture was one of optimism, of meritocracy, the core beliefs of any sales-dominated enterprise. By culture is meant its values and its points of view, not just its behavior” (p. 589). In his telling, the company flourished when it adhered to that culture and floundered later when it moved away from it. That later part of the story—which includes the slowing of IBM's forward momentum from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, its precipitous decline over the following decade, and then its mixed record of revival thereafter—is the most original part of Cortada's book. Once again, his explanation focuses mostly on internal factors in explaining how that happened. His close association with the firm during most of that time is a source of real strength, in that he paints a vivid picture of how life at IBM changed for its workforce as the older, much more generous social contract with its employees was abandoned.

Although an excellent and illuminating insider history, IBM also exhibits some of the potential weaknesses of that perspective. For example, Cortada overstates IBM's commitment to diversity and meritocracy, during the Thomas Watson Sr. years especially. Through the mid-1950s, the firm's workforce comprised mostly white, Protestant men of northern and western European ancestry. While Watson Sr. did begin hiring women in significant numbers during the 1930s as system service workers, women generally did not rise to the ranks of management during his long tenure as CEO. And even when the company became more diverse under CEO Thomas Watson Jr., most of the top jobs in management went to individuals drawn from the heavily white and male sales force. Another example of Cortada's tendency to place an overly positive spin on what IBM did is his fairly rosy depiction of its work on the lucrative SAGE project, the radar tracking system developed for the Department of Defense during the 1950s. Watson Jr. reveals much more mixed feelings about SAGE in his memoirs, seeing it as wasteful because it could track only bombers and thus very quickly became partially outdated, once the Soviets developed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

An even more serious weakness in IBM is Cortada's lack of sustained emphasis on external factors in explaining both the firm's rise and its decline. While he acknowledges, in passing, the growth of the national state and the advent of the Cold War in helping IBM grow and prosper, Cortada moves such considerations into the background. IBM would be a stronger and more balanced book if he had given such external factors as much attention and importance as the internal ones he refers to repeatedly throughout his account. The firm's 1936 contract (the biggest in IBM's history) with the federal government to administer Social Security and the rivers of direct and indirect Cold War–era subsidies that enabled IBM to become king of the computer business merited more than the passing attention Cortada gives them. Had he foregrounded those factors, Cortada's book would have made clearer that the fading of the more statist era of the 1930s through the 1960s contributed directly and heavily to IBM's subsequent decline. More attention to the rise and decline of private-sector labor unions would also have illuminated more clearly why the firm's CEOs instituted and later abandoned its very generous system of employee pay and benefits, as well as lifetime job security, once they could no longer be justified as helping ward off unionization. What Cortada has given us instead is a very fine book about the internalist factors that helped shape IBM, but not much more.