IBM

What their 1937 Song Book says about a bygone era of Corporations-as-Societies

This is part six in a series about societies—rather than businesses or governments—that have made a meaningful impact on the world. Read the series intro here, part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, and part five here.

Few people know this but there’s actually a 29-page songbook published in 1937 by the technology company IBM that recaps the prior 37 years’ worth of songs they’d created and sung together at special occasions. Here’s the link—it’s incredible.

It’s incredible for, bare minimum, a handful of reasons:

One (the obvious one): it’s supremely uncommon (to the point of nonexistence) to imagine a company these days inventing songs for themselves to sing. Sure, Disney will invent songs for you to sing, but for themselves? This is probably an attribute of our current era (aka we rarely sing together anywhere, not just not at work) as much as a reflection of the specialness that IBM wrote and sang songs together—but it’s probably actually a mix of both.

Two: the songs often draw upon common melodies already-known to its people, putting IBM-specific words to specifically American songs. In this way they’re expressing both their Americanness and their IBMness concurrently.

Third and most interestingly: the songbook is a sign of a time when companies weren’t just companies, rather they were Companies in the sense intended when the Company Man concept is invoked. These companies went beyond a workplace—they invented a society within which all your needs were considered, a place you’d be comfortable singing songs altogether, not just about your beloved nation but also your beloved company.

So let’s give quick context on that moment in time, investigate the songbook itself for insights about Corporations-as-Societies, then unpack what this business has to tell us about societies.

Quick History

In 1937 IBM generated $37 million in revenue, equivalent to $808.9 million today. It would become, for a time, the world’s largest computer hardware company and the world’s largest computer software company. Thirty years past the songbook’s publication would mark IBM’s peak market cap of, adjusted-for-inflation, $1.3 trillion—putting it top 5 for most valuable companies in history.

But IBM was also emblematic of the well-known Company Man archetype. The era we’re inspecting predates that concept (which emerged in the USA more in postwar 1950’s). But people at IBM were Company Men nonetheless—which, as an aside, was and continued to be unusual for the tech industry, since technological changes can occur so rapidly it’s difficult to bank on long-term company existence (generally considered a requirement for rational career-long commitment by workers).

The Company Man is still very much a thing elsewhere in the world, but not in the US anymore. As is well-reported, the average Millennial adult has had more job and career changes than most older generations by quite a wide margin. And younger generations (Gen Z, etc.) are predicted to experience more, not less, of that trend.

So it’s probably not intuitive to modern readers that, once upon a time, in a land far far away, one could expect not just a good salary but also benefits, bonuses, promotions, and a secure retirement—all from the same employer. All that’s required? Your soul (just kidding)—aka, eternal commitment to the firm for the mortal part of your time here on earth.

So that’s a little about this remarkable organization’s context. But what kind of society animated the working life of the people who built such a singular company?

Corporation-as-Society: A Story in Songs

My chief curiosity here is this: What kind of society was IBM? What did IBM admire, value, esteem, elevate? And what can their songbook teach us about these priorities and ways of life?

The songbook dramatically begins with a patriotic statement:

Immediately it pays homage to its institutional home-of-homes, the pre-conditional civilization that enabled its existence. This feels era-appropriate—aka, it’s quite a recent phenomenon that American patriotism is seen as suspect by large swaths of the American public—but also meaningful. In short, IBM likes America.

The next interesting thing is the songs for its leader. After two songs of patriotic homage, and a third song we’ll return to later, there’s four songs for its President.

Here’s one

The obvious take here after reading those lyrics is that it’s probably a simple enough exercise to replace “Watson” with “Kim Jong Un” and transform the songs into North Korean spinechillers. Yet perhaps benevolent totalitarianism just hits different for opt-in private enterprises, then as now.

Once you’re past songs for leadership, you’re introduced to an interesting concept. Can you tell what it is?

Forty years: that’s the length of time IBM elevates as significant. Which, sure, that’s a healthy career anywhere, gets you to retirement age these days—but you know what’s the more significant data to add to that equation? That in 1937, the average life expectancy in the United States was approximately 58 years for men and 62.4 years for women. So these songs weren’t just for long careers—they were basically a celebration of having given your expected lifespan to IBM. These songs elevate total commitment as part of their society’s ethos: you get a song if you (statistically-speaking) die at IBM.

Another insight as you get into the lower ranks is just what specifically gets celebrated at IBM:

It’s celebrated to have “ideas… both numerous and vast,” “[an] engineering mind [that] will answer any call,” to “[ferret] out the ways and means of doing things each day.” IBM is known for their sales team par excellence, but their regard for the builders is super evident too.

And there’s a recurring line at the end of each stanza worth noting:

“Ever look forward” his motto.

What’s that about?

Back at the songbook’s beginning, I’d mentioned we’d skip (but return to) the song after the patriotic tunes but before the leadership songs. That song was this:

This song, just by sheer placement, must be considered something like IBM’s anthem—the song that matters, the one that encapsulates its essence. And I’m sure we could spend awhile really explicating it, but for now note the general themes: desire for greatness, never settling, pushing forward, in loyalty and reverence for leadership, with a general perspective that their work is for the betterment of humanity through technology products. A fascinating artifact—and basically entirely at home in today’s tech industry.

Rather than add my commentary here (it’d be obvious stuff: about the cult vibes, about the necessity of seeking unquenchable growth for achieving what they sought to achieve, etc.), I’ll let Peter Thiel wrap this section to actually deepen the analysis:

Everybody knows that company culture is important. But it’s hard to know exactly what makes for an ideal culture. There are obviously some things that work. Even though they didn’t necessarily look like a winning investment at the time, the early Microsoft team clearly got something right.

Then there are some things that don’t work so well. A cult is perhaps the paradigmatic version of a culture that doesn’t work. Cults are crazy and idealistic in a bad way. Cult members all tend to be fanatically wrong about something big.

And then there is what might be called anti-culture, where you really don’t even have a culture at all. Consulting firms are the classic example here. Unfortunately, this is probably the dominant paradigm for companies. Most of the time, they don’t even get to the point of having culture. People are mercenaries. People are nihilistic.

Picture a 1-dimensional axis from consultant-nihilism to cultish dogmatism. You want to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. To the extent you gravitate towards an extreme, you probably want to be closer to being a cult than being an army of consultants.

Good company culture is more nuanced than simple homogeneity or heterogeneity. On the homogeneity side, everyone being alike isn’t enough. A robust company culture is one in which people have something in common that distinguishes them quite sharply from rest of the world. If everybody likes ice cream, that probably doesn’t matter. If the core people share a relevant and unique philosophy about something important, you’re onto something.

Similarly, differences qua differences don’t matter much. In strong company cultures, people are different in a way that goes to the core mission. Suppose one key person is on an ice cream only diet. That’s quirky. But it’s also irrelevant. You want your people to be different in a way that gives the company a strong sense of identity and yet still dovetails with the overall mission. Having different kinds of problem-solvers on a team, for example, can make for a stronger culture.

There’s more songs and not enough time to cover them all, but do look at the link I shared at the beginning to read them in full, if you’re curious—they certainly reward the curiosity.

Conclusion

I intend to write a quick recap essay after this one synthesizing some of the things we’ve seen across the Society Builders series so far. It’s clear that few if any of these are “societies” per se. They always take some institutional form, with some recurring set of activities as their interface with the world. But still—I contend they’re societies first, whatever-else second. They’re still these tight networks of people, unified in certain ways, that illustrate altogether (maybe even more than one-on-one) how these things work in interesting ways.

As a last comment on IBM, I don’t know a ton about the social life of 1937 IBM beyond these songs. And I find the culture they’ve created for their society strikingly and ironically Soviet in its loyalty (despite being hyper-American in productivity and ethos)—but these people also generated enormous value, and likely had wonderful lives building something great together.

It’s an easy jump to assume that, given total loyalty, these companies would also go out of their way for those more personal aspects of their employees lives too, like romance. Japan might be a modern example, with 600 of their companies making a covid era push for employees toward dating apps. It’s easy enough to imagine IBM’s social life covering the gamut too, from work to home.

These songs are a time capsule from a bygone era. Let’s welcome them as an unusual gift from an unusual time. And let’s learn what we can about building societies and cultures that can solve important and worthwhile problems, including (though hopefully not limited to!) bringing important technologies forward into the world.