The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM

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The first complete take a look at one in all The us’s legendary business leaders

This groundbreaking biography by Kevin Maney, acclaimed technology columnist for USA As of late, offers fresh insight and new information on one of the vital twentieth century’s greatest business figures. Over the course of forty-two years, Thomas J. Watson took a failing business referred to as The Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company and transformed it into IBM, the world’s first and most famous high-tech company. The Maverick and His Machine is the first brand new biography of this business titan. Maney secured exclusive get right of entry to to hundreds of boxes of Watson’s long-forgotten papers, and he has produced the one complete picture of Watson the man and Watson the legendary business leader. These uncovered documents reveal new details about how Watson bet the company within the 1920s on tabulating machines-the forerunners to computers-and how he daringly beat the Great Depression of the 1930s. The documents also result in new insights in regards to the controversy that has followed Watson: his suppos ed coll usion with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Maney paints a vivid portrait of Watson, uncovers his motivations, and offers needed context on his mammoth role for the duration of brand new business history. Jim Collins, creator of the bestsellers Good to Great and Built to Last, writes within the Foreword to Maney’s book: “Leaders like Watson are like forces of nature-almost terrifying in their release of energy and unpredictable volatility, but underneath they still adhere to certain patterns and principles. The patterns and principles may well be hard to see amidst the melee, but they’re there nonetheless. It takes a gifted person of insight to highlight those patterns, and that may be exactly what Kevin Maney does on this book.”

The Maverick and His Machine also includes never-before-published photos of Watson from IBM’s archives, showing Watson in greater detail than any book ever has before. Very important reading for each and every businessperson, tech junkie, and IBM follower, the book could also be full of the type of personal detail and reconstructed events that make it a page-turning story for general readers. The Maverick and the Machine is poised to be one of the vital essential business biographies in years.

Kevin Maney is a nationally syndicated, award-winning technology columnist at USA As of late, where he has been since 1985. He’s a cover story creator whose story about IBM’s bet-the-company move gained him national recognition. He used to be voted best technology columnist by the business journalism publication TJFR. Marketing Computers magazine has four times named him one of the vital influential technology columnists. He’s the creator of Wiley’s MEGAMEDIA SHAKEOUT: The Inside Story of the Leaders and the Losers within the Exploding Communications Industry, which used to be a Business Week Bestseller.
Place of dwelling: Clifton, VA.

“Watson used to be clearly a genius with a thousand helpers, yet he managed to build an institution that could transcend the genius.”
-from the Foreword by Jim Collins

“Like all great biographers, Kevin Maney gives us an engaging story. . .his fascinating and definitive book about IBM’s founder is replete with amazing revelations and character lessons that resonate As of late.”
-Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, bestselling creator of Evolve! and When Giants Learn how to Dance