THOMAS WATSON and IBM by Peter F. Drucker

“I began to work with Thomas Watson, the old one, in the 1930s—long before the computer became a reality—and worked with Thomas Watson, Jr. for many years. But, the computer delivers data. You have to ask what information do I need to do my task. From whom, in what form, and when. And what information do I owe to others. To whom, when, in what form. You have to take information responsibility, which starts out with the assumption that what is obvious to me nobody else could see at all—that old saying of perception psychology. So, what I see so clearly nobody else in the organization probably sees. It is my job to communicate. It is my job to make others see integrative because I ask myself not what market research do I do, but what results for the business should I be aiming at. Those are some of the things increasingly important as you move into knowledge organizations.”