Adapted from his illuminating book by the man who led IBM to one of the largest transformations in corporate history.

Adapted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success by Phil Gilbert. Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold.

Never in my life had I imagined working at IBM. I launched my first software business in 1984, when I was just a few years out of college. For the next 25 years I was a serial software entrepreneur until 2010, when my third startup, Austin-based Lombardi Software, was bought by IBM. Until that time, IBM had been one of our fiercest competitors.

Lombardi’s products were in the mundane middleware space of business process management (BPM). Our software performed similarly to BPM offerings from IBM, Oracle, and half a dozen other smaller competitors. And yet, Lombardi was winning the market. We did it the way any great company wins: we nurtured a culture that actively sought out ways to better solve our customers’ problems, and we constantly investigated the latest technologies that might improve the user experience. Institutionally, we challenged ourselves to always look at the status quo with disdain. Our customers loved our software, loved us, and many of them working at major enterprises sang our praises and advocated for our products among their peers at other companies.

It was this reputation and our growing market share that led to the IBM acquisition. I committed myself to working at IBM for a year to help integrate Lombardi’s operations, but making a career at any big corporation never interested me. After my year at IBM was up, I imagined leaving in search of my next startup.

It took only about two months on the IBM campus in Austin to leave me feeling like I needed to get out sooner. The buildings reflected the distinctive corporate architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, with granite walls conveying the primacy of the institution and the insignificance of the individual. At IBM, it seemed like creativity and passion were subordinate to conformity and fitting in.

The process of integrating an acquired company’s technology into IBM is called bluewash. It entailed reviewing and rewriting much of Lombardi’s computer code to conform with IBM standards. Admittedly, it’s a necessary process to ensure compliance, but it took longer than it needed to. And, frankly, it was as dreary and spirit-dampening as it sounds. Bluewash took a lively growing startup and inadvertently retrained its employees to adjust to IBM’s slower, process-oriented culture. The result was an exodus of many of the startup’s most entrepreneurial people.

One of Lombardi’s three main products in development at the time was a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) app for Apple’s soon-to-be-released product—the iPad. However, a senior IBM executive overseeing our acquisition assured me with great confidence that “business-to-business SaaS is not going to be a thing.” And so, just weeks before Apple’s iPad was introduced to the world, our app was killed.

My spirit was also getting killed, but more slowly than the iPad app. I said as much to Robert LeBlanc, the senior vice president at the top of our division.

“Man, I look around and I just don’t see where I fit,” I told him. “I don’t see the curiosity for delivering great software that people love to use.”

I noticed Robert wasn’t smiling. But he wasn’t pissed off either. And while I didn’t know it in the moment, what he said next would detour the course of my career for the coming decade.

“Why do you think we bought Lombardi?” he asked. “You do things differently. We know we need to change, but we don’t necessarily know how. So, I think you’re looking at it all wrong. You’re looking at people in roles that exist and processes that exist and you don’t see yourself. I get it. But think about it like this: you think you know where we need to be? Then what can you do to help?”

Robert suggested putting me in charge of IBM’s entire business process management group. If I took the job, he wanted me to use my authority to change the group’s culture so it was more like Lombardi’s, and less like IBM’s.

The BPM portfolio was a mess, with 44 software products in various niches. I would need to integrate Lombardi’s products and people into this mix, along with another acquisition—a French company that had continued marketing its products under its original brand name. And although the BPM group was more than four times the size of Lombardi, it was tiny from the IBM perspective. Running this walled-off sandbox meant I could make radical changes to operations.

The transformation of IBM’s BPM group took 500 days. We pruned the bloated product line from 44 to 4. We reduced the head count from 1,100 to 700 and added professional designers to guide the product teams. Sacred cows were gutted amid org chart infighting galore. There were many days I expected an email from Robert with some version of “Stop! Enough already!” That email never came.

While the changes upset a lot of people, they inspired others and rallied them to the cause. I found allies who liked the new practices so much they wanted us to move even faster. There were IBMers who’d long felt impeded by the old culture and were thirsting for change.

Over the 500 days, we cut down time to market, raised gross margins, and grew our market share. Our customers loved the new product line, and our employees were engaged and energized.

About this time, Ginni Rometty became IBM’s ninth CEO. Although the company still reigned as the world’s largest computer services provider, her immediate challenges included slowing sales growth and sagging morale. She put the question to her top executives: what are we going to do?

That’s when Robert offered a suggestion: “We have this guy in Austin. Maybe he can help.”

Robert asked me to put together a presentation on the BPM turnaround to share with IBM’s senior vice presidents. I opened with plain business terms: speed to market (faster), head count (down), revenues (up), profit margins (up), and market share (way up). Only after I’d gotten their attention with outcomes did I delve into the how of change.

These senior executives were impressed but skeptical that any of what we’d done could apply to their own areas. They all saw the need for change, but few were eager to disrupt their fiefdoms.

When I met with Ginni, she listened, nodded, and asked, “Okay. What can we do to have that happen everywhere at IBM?”

“I have no idea,” I confessed. How could I affect 400,000 people, none of whom reported to me?

Ginni asked me to think it over and draft a plan for changing IBM’s global culture.

Back at the office in Austin I started mulling over her words. I figured I’d better check to see if I was even in the ballpark of their expectations. I emailed a very high-level spreadsheet with rough estimates. “You may think the solution is 50 people, but it’s not,” I wrote. “It’s more like a thousand.” We’d need to hire new heads because they had skills IBM didn’t have. It would take five years.

“Okay, got it,” Ginni said. She promised to get back to me.

In less than a week I received word through Robert: “Go.”

Me, on the phone: “Awesome. I’m on it!”
Me, in my head: “Oh, shit. I’m the dog that caught the bus.”

That was May 2012. I had four months to architect the program and develop the financial plan for approval through IBM’s budgeting process.

Here’s how I worked through the problem. Culture change is hard, and most people resist it. But when the status quo is failing, that’s also hard. Nobody enjoys delivering crappy user experiences to their customers or shows up to work thinking, “I hope I can take longer than necessary to make decisions today.” But that’s what culture does to people. It’s powerful.

The problem IBM faced in achieving change was virtually identical to the problems I faced when launching a startup: how do we get people to change to something new when it seems easier to stay with what they’ve got?

The answer was always the same: you make it dramatically easier for them to solve their problem, and you improve the quality of their outcome.

In order to lead change, you turn change itself into the product. You invite employees to buy in, and you lavish attention and resources on your earliest adopters. You don’t mandate change, you offer change.

This insight proved to be the central animating factor for everything that followed. It was the magic trick of our entire transformation—how we got hundreds of thousands of people to embrace change of their own free will.

Our aim was to provide a product that was so desirable it would be worth paying for. It would be, in a word, irresistible.