Overview
- IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna informed employees on Sunday that Gerstner died Saturday at 83, and he did not specify a cause.
- Appointed in 1993 as IBM’s first outsider chief, Gerstner rejected plans to break up the company and reoriented it toward integrated services and middleware.
- His overhaul included aggressive cost cuts, asset sales, elimination of OS/2 and other lagging products, about 35,000 job reductions, and tighter, companywide accountability.
- Under his nine-year tenure, services revenue grew from roughly $7.4 billion in 1992 to about $30 billion in 2001, and IBM’s market value rose from around $29 billion to about $168 billion with shares up roughly 800%.
- After retiring in 2002, he chaired The Carlyle Group and expanded his philanthropy in education and biomedical research, as industry leaders such as AMD’s Lisa Su shared tributes to his influence.