Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  This was an extremely bitter story to hear from Charley Kirk. I went straight home after the meal, and that night I couldn’t sleep. In all the time I’d known my father, he had lived and done business in a manner beyond reproach. Could he have knowingly broken the law? I imagined him as a callow young man, still less than thirty years old, with humble roots and great ambition and ten years’ experience in lowly jobs varying from clerking in a grocery store to selling sewing machines. I thought about how loyal he was to Patterson, and here was Patterson saying, “I trust you with a million dollars. Go do this thing—we’re in the right, those machines are ours, and they shouldn’t be dealt in by these secondhand guys.” At that point in his life, Dad did not understand the illegality he was getting into—the antitrust laws were still quite new and he hadn’t gotten much past the eighth grade. But he certainly must have seen the subterfuge. At least I now knew why my father had what I’d always considered the most irrational hatred of the Department of Justice.

  I didn’t blame Kirk for telling me the bad news; he was doing me a favor, and it was far better to hear it from someone who admired and sympathized with Dad. But I was gaining on Kirk in business skill, and that caused our relationship to go downhill rapidly. The more Kirk worried about his job, the more of a yes-man he became to Dad. The minute my father questioned a man’s performance, Kirk would pull the trigger on the guy. It happened late in 1946 with a district manager named Harry Eilers. He was a very accomplished and popular man, and he ran the Midwestern sales district from Minneapolis. One day Dad asked Kirk whether it might not make more sense to locate district headquarters in Chicago. Kirk immediately ordered Eilers to move, and when he said that he couldn’t, without probing further Kirk demoted him to running a sales office, and named a new district manager in Chicago. That burned me up, because I knew Eilers was good. Later it came out that illness and family circumstances had kept him from accepting the transfer. But Kirk wouldn’t budge and Dad backed him, so Eilers was out.

  In April of 1947, I finally decided that I couldn’t tolerate working with Kirk anymore. I went into Dad’s office and told him I was quitting. I said, “Look, Dad. Kirk is here. I can get along with all the other people you’ve hired, but not Kirk. He’s not my kind of guy. He’s too rough. And he’s only nine years older than I. If I stay I’m going to have to work for him for twenty-two years before he’s old enough to retire. Then I’ll run the business for eight years, and it’ll be time for me to retire too. I can’t look forward to that.”

  I was quite serious, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea what I’d do next. Dad began to argue with me and I ended up storming out. I called Olive and asked if she’d drive into the city. It was probably six o’clock by the time she met me at the Waldorf. We had dinner and then went upstairs to the roof and drank champagne and danced. I told her what I’d done, and she said, “I’m sure you’re going to feel sorry later.” Finally, around eleven o’clock, we got in our car and drove home.

  Dad really knew how to put on a show when he needed to. We got out to Greenwich around midnight. As I drove up to our house I saw Dad’s car and chauffeur parked there and I said to Olive, “Oh, my God.” When we walked in, Mother and Father were both in the library. The lights were turned down very low, and my poor mother was sitting way over in a corner, exhausted because it was so late. Dad was sitting hunched in a chair in the middle of the room, looking about as frail and old as he knew how. He probably had dimmed those lights intentionally to create that effect. I walked in and was ready to walk out again, but he held out his hand and said, “Tom, you just can’t do this to me. You can’t quit.” He didn’t quite come out and say, “Please don’t destroy my lifelong ambition,” but there was no doubt that’s what he meant.

  I said, “Dad, look. You’re a man of the world. You can see that even if you take out all the personalities and just call us Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, the fact remains that I’m thirty-four and I’ve got to work until I’m fifty-six before I get a chance at command.”

  “I can see your point of view, I can see your point of view,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. You take Mr. Kirk to Europe. Introduce him to the managers over there, and I’ll think of something.”

  There was a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce scheduled in Montreux, Switzerland in June. The organization had revived after the war, though it wasn’t as influential as before. Kirk and I were both scheduled to go as U.S. delegates, and I made plans to show Charley around Europe afterward and introduce him to the managers of various countries, many of whom I’d known since childhood. I didn’t know what would happen after that. I doubt Dad did either at that point. He sent us to Europe because he was playing for time. The thing keeping me calm was that I knew I was either going to get the problem fixed or leave. I’d crossed the bridge of trying to wait it out. Subconsciously, I suppose I thought my old man would “handle” Kirk.

  So in May of 1947, Kirk and I set sail for Europe with our wives. The International Chamber meeting was a bore. Afterward we hooked up with Valentim Boucas, whom Dad had picked to escort us around Europe. Boucas was IBM’s representative in Brazil and one of the most worldly and genial guys I ever knew. He went all the way back to my childhood, and my father greatly admired him. They’d met in the 1920s when Boucas, the son of a Rio de Janeiro harbor pilot, was struggling to get a start in the world. He had the kind of vivid personality that could project happiness to everybody in a room. He was a bit of an operator, which Dad never wanted to admit. He let Boucas have the IBM Brazil concession for almost no money, and Boucas became enormously wealthy as a result.

  Boucas figured I was going to become head of IBM, and he didn’t take Kirk seriously at all. The first stop on our trip was Zurich, where IBM had a fair-sized subsidiary. They gave us a dinner where there were eighty or ninety people, at a big hotel on the lake. I greeted them in French, which I spoke reasonably well, and Kirk made some remarks in English, which someone translated. Then they called on Boucas, who knew how to speak English but elected to speak in French that night because he knew Kirk couldn’t understand it. Boucas immediately got my attention when I heard him say something about le fils. All the way through, the theme of his remarks was that the most important thing in business was the family. “Here is this fine young man,” he said, “son of the grand monsieur.” He told them how lucky they were to have me there, this man who’d been away à la guerre and now was back in the business, carrying on the family name. Kirk didn’t know what was going on and assumed Boucas was talking about him. Every time Boucas came to a point of emphasis, everybody would clap and Kirk would smile and nod while Olive and I sank lower and lower in our chairs. Boucas wound up by declaring I was going to lead the company in the future, and that while nobody had formally announced it yet, he was committed to that end and he knew how great it would be for everybody. There was an absolute ovation. Kirk looked around and just beamed.

  Our junket then took us across the Alps, along the Riviera to Marseilles, then up the Loire valley toward Paris. We had two motorcars, one of which was a lovely old Cadillac that the people at IBM France had dismantled and buried in a basement when the Germans invaded Paris. After the war they’d pulled it out and welded it back together, and it worked perfectly despite a little rust. Boucas rode with Olive and me, while Kirk and his wife rode with a secretary. It worked better that way because Kirk and I were so uncomfortable in each other’s presence. In our car we had a fabulous time. Boucas charmed Olive completely. In a poor town near Milan, he told the Italians that a famous movie actress was visiting from New York. A crowd gathered around. Olive was twenty-eight and looked beautiful enough to be in the movies, and the people were all peeking in the car windows and yelling, “Give us your autograph!” Since she didn’t speak Italian she didn’t know what was going on until Boucas confessed what he’d done.

  Finally Kirk and I almost came to blows over a sidetrip I wanted to take when we reached Marseilles. An old Italian friend of Dad
’s, and his wife, had joined our party for a few days, and I knew that their daughter, who had just been married, was staying at a nearby resort. We were scheduled to drive to Lyons, and this resort was about forty miles in the opposite direction. So I said to Kirk, “We can just go over there and see Cecile. Her parents would like that, Olive wants to meet her, and I’d like to see her again. It won’t take too long.”

  “Well,” Kirk said, “it’s an hour over and an hour back.”

  “Yes, and we’ll only stay about half an hour.”

  “Well, that’s five hours out of our trip.”

  I said, “It can’t be five hours, Charley. It can only be two and a half—an hour over, a half hour there, and an hour back. Then we’re back where we started.”

  “No, no. Because while you’re doing that, the car could have been going two and a half hours in this other direction. So two and a half and two and a half is five.”

  I knew there was a fallacy in what he was saying but I was too damn mad to think what it was. And he hung right in there, insisting he was right. The vehemence of that silly argument is hard to describe, but I’m glad it stopped when it did. Olive pulled at my coat and I was able to shut up and get in our car.

  We finally reached Lyons that evening. Late that night I was awakened by heavy knocking on our hotel room door. It was our secretary. “Come quickly, Mr. Watson,” he said. “Mr. Kirk is very sick.” I put on a robe and followed him. Kirk had had a massive coronary. When I got to his room he was unconscious and within an hour he was dead. The Kirks were Catholic and Mrs. Kirk said she wanted to go to Mass, so as day broke we went to the Lyons cathedral. Since there had to be an autopsy, Boucas and I stayed behind while Olive took Mrs. Kirk on to Paris where she could get her into a more comfortable hotel. Then we all brought the coffin home with us to New York.

  Dad felt Kirk’s death as a personal loss—Kirk was his number-two man and one of IBM’s own. Probably he also felt relief that a huge problem had been solved, and I’m sure he felt guilt at that relief. I could see those emotions in the funeral he gave Kirk in Endicott. It was really something. Dad trotted out college presidents, there were a number of eulogies, and the service took over two and a half hours. For the first and last time at a great occasion Dad didn’t give a speech. I later heard that during the procession out of the church, Dad was so emotional that he forced his way between two pallbearers and grabbed an edge of the coffin himself.

  I’d always looked at Charley Kirk as a barrier between my father and me. It wasn’t until after Kirk’s death that I realized he had also been a buffer. Undiluted T.J. Watson could be pretty hard to take. He now had the biggest and most successful one-man show in American business, with something like twenty-two thousand people working as if they were an extension of his personality. To Dad it seemed perfectly natural that his photograph should hang in everybody’s office. It didn’t embarrass him in the slightest when his men organized a worldwide IBM celebration on the thirty-third anniversary of his employment. The company newspaper described this as a “spontaneous tribute,” even though everybody knew it took months to prepare. Dad was now in his seventies, and as he aged the songs, tributes, pictures, and adulation had gradually gotten out of hand.

  Until well into the 1950s, Dad was much more famous than the company. IBM dealt with other businesses, not consumers, so it was far from a household name like Ford or Metropolitan Life. Whenever we were written up in the Saturday Evening Post or some other popular magazine, the spotlight was always on Dad and his ability to make tens of thousands of people march to slogans like “A salesman is a man who sells” and “There is no such thing as standing still.” We were known as a personality cult. I thought this image was bad for Dad and bad for the company. But I couldn’t say point-blank, “Honest to Pete, this is ridiculous.” It would have caused an ungodly explosion. For anyone who questioned his way of operating, Dad had an impregnable defense: “Look at the record!” You could argue it wasn’t slogans that were making the record, but he’d say, “How do you know?”

  So it wasn’t an easy thing to be at Dad’s side during the Hundred Percent Club convention in Endicott the summer of Kirk’s death. The annual Hundred Percent Club meeting had long since outgrown the Waldorf, where it was held in the late 1930s. By now we had well over a thousand men in the sales force worldwide; over eight hundred and fifty had made their quotas for 1946 and were supposed to be honored. As usual, Dad went all out for their three-day stay. He had an entire tent city put up—seven acres of tents in neat rows, including sleeping tents, mess tents, a tent where professional photographers took the men’s portraits and another where bootblacks shined their shoes, tents for displaying products, and a giant big top decorated with sales slogans and banners for the meeting itself.

  To keep the Hundred Percenters comfortable, all the sleeping tents had wood floors, and sidewalks had been laid down so the Hundred Percenters wouldn’t get their feet muddy if it rained. Once the convention was under way, each man would wake up in the morning to find a newspaper under the flap of his tent with a complete account of the previous day’s events, written and printed while he slept. Salesmen from overseas would get to their seats in the big top and find headphones through which they could hear, each in his own language, the speeches that were being made. The preparations took weeks, and Dad’s convention men worked their heads off to make sure nothing went wrong. Photographers from Life were circulating around, taking pictures of the event for a story about Dad and IBM that was going to be called “Supersalesmen.”

  In many ways the Hundred Percent Club was the high point of Dad’s year, and the more drama he could wring out of it, the more he liked it. He arrived in Endicott on opening morning. I met him at the train and we walked into the back of the big tent exactly twenty minutes before the band was supposed to start playing “Ever Onward,” the IBM anthem. A little group of convention planners greeted us, looking both proud and nervous. Dad said, “Now, what did you fellows have in mind this morning? I’d like to go over the program. Who’s going to open?”

  Of course, T. J. Watson was going to open. “We allow you twenty minutes,” they told him.

  “That’s very nice, that’s all I need. What are you going to do next?”

  “We have a presentation by Mr. Thomas D’Arcy Brophy, the head of the American Heritage Foundation.”

  “Now wait a minute, the most important person is the salesman. I want to hear from all the Hundred Percenters.” I knew he was thinking of the 1930s, when each salesman would get up and speak for three minutes. Those banquets had been endlessly boring. The salesmen were great fellows but they weren’t philosophical enough to write decent speeches. So I said, “Dad, this is not like the 1930s. We only had a hundred men back then and it’s almost nine hundred this year.”

  “Well, they could each say just a line or two.” Somehow he got past that issue, but then he found something else to pick at. He said, “Let me see the products. Do you have products here?” By now it was about eleven minutes until the band would strike up. He went into the display tent and pointed to the machine nearest the door. “That’s a tabulating machine there. We ought to have a keypunch! The first step in any installation is the keypunch, then the cards get sorted, and then they come to the tabulating machine! But you fellows have the tabulating machine in front!”

  “But Mr. Watson, we can’t move it now.”

  “Well, let’s go into that for a moment.” Then they had to haggle with him about that.

  “Mr. Watson, this was all planned by the Product Display Department. This tabulating machine is our best new product.”

  “I don’t care about that! I want to have it right!”

  He was having a terrific time, but it was terrible for everyone else. The real danger was that he would say, “Gentlemen, I don’t care if nine hundred men are coming into this tent in three minutes. Let them wait. I want you all to come to my room. We’re going to talk this out.”

  Fortunately i
t never came to that, partly because I intervened and made an appeal to his heart and his common sense. “Dad, some of these men have been up for two nights working to get these machines positioned and running where they are. We can’t tear it all up now.”

  “Well,” he said, “I guess not.” A couple of minutes later the band began to play, the men filed in, and the Hundred Percent Club came off gloriously—as planned.

  People expected this kind of cantankerousness from Dad. But I don’t think any employer gets away with being truly arbitrary for long before his best executives quit and his workers join unions. That didn’t happen to Dad because he was extremely sensitive to the needs of the people he hired. From the minute IBM started making large profits in the 1930s, he kept the company in the vanguard of humane employers. IBM offered the best benefits money could buy, which in the early days meant good pay, steady employment, a chance to get promoted, educational opportunities, clean shops, and country clubs. The New Deal and the rise of labor unions changed the public’s idea of what big institutions ought to provide, and Dad responded with a broad new plan. As soon as the war ended he unveiled it step by step, in a series of addresses that were made in the most dramatic possible way.