No. So the technology. The world community had held the Olympics in Berlin in 1936. It’s formed by business associations, really in the United States and France, and other people joined. It raises the issue, if you’re a business leader, what you should do if your government does nothing. We don’t think this is right?”. BRIAN KENNY: That’s a pretty radical move, to ask the firm to remove them from their positions. The Nuremberg Laws that strip Jews of their citizenship. The patent was titled, “Art of Compiling Statistics,” and it cemented Hollerith’s rights to an invention he called the electromechanical punched card tabulator. Here below is the petition, which over 2500 people signed in one week! But there were also mixed signals. Things become more hostile with the growth of nationalism under the Nazis in the ’30s. What was he like as a leader? We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. GEOFF JONES: You know, he was a guy who exaggerated his ability to affect political events. I have to say that I was barely ever informally taught any ethics either. And that’s a tremendous moral dilemma, how you rank your moral priorities. Most of the tabulating machines used by Nazi Germany were leased by the IBM subsidiary in Germany, called Dehomag, which was 90% owned by IBM. This is a text widget. So I mean, I think it’s a torturous case in many ways, raising dilemmas that we’re still with. GEOFF JONES: Well, you know, everybody knows what happened after 1937. And whatever you conclude, you can’t help, I think, escaping that there should have been a better outcome than that. Second, we need to understand who at IBM would know what their technology was used for. How to document gang stalking for a civil lawsuit: simple counter-measures and evidence collection (Hi El Salvador). They’re the single company. It’s produced by our Business & Environment Initiative and you can find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Who is the author of researchorganizedgangstalking? BRIAN KENNY: And we still have those today, so again, you know, lessons from the past that we can learn today. BRIAN KENNY: He’s on the move. They were programmable only by experts and the machines themselves were not bought but leased from IBM (or other companies, although IBM had an effective monopoly on the technology). Dehomag [Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen] was a German based subsidiary of the US company, IBM. GEOFF JONES: Yes, and it’s just a lot of work. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. Watson is the chairman of IBM, and he’s also the president of the International Chamber of Commerce, and he’s come to talk to Hitler to persuade him that a war would be a very bad idea, and everybody should try to work to avoid it. 3) Should IBM currently be held accountable for what they did in the 1940’s? Why is the technology so important? I would say it is wrong and inappropriate for a company to do business with governments that blatantly engage in human rights abuses. The design of the punch card for a specific task was done by IBM employees in cooperation with the leasing group. If you look at the compensation of CEOs today, which is certainly a topic that we talk about here a lot at Harvard Business School and is constantly a source of frustration for a lot of people, the gap is so much bigger today. IBM, I think, transferred two senior Jewish employees to the United States. What does it do and why does it matter so much? (office) KEC 3071 These aren’t just-. —Sarah Kendzior [1]. Each case has two functions. GEOFF JONES: Watson begins life very modestly, in a small town in upstate New York. BRIAN KENNY: Thanks for listening to Cold Call. If they follow those rules, he’s quite happy, because he wants jobs. So, he doesn’t like it, and he has no choice. As a leader, he’s paternalistic. And if they aren’t taught that tragedies like the Holocaust happen because everyone was just doing their job, we are liable for the continued abuse of computer science. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed. IBM and the Holocaust — why wasn’t this on my radar? Today we’ll hear from professor Geoff Jones about his case entitled, “Thomas J. Watson, IBM, and Nazi Germany.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call, recorded live in Klarman Hall studio at Harvard Business School. Any ethical considerations I picked up during graduate school, looking back now, were not necessarily sound. I mean, there are… Every year, there are the students whose parents escaped from the Holocaust, or grandparents. BRIAN KENNY: You’ve been here a few times, Geoff. There were some personality conflicts, it sounded like, happening between the leader of Dehomag and Watson. PGP public key (fingerprint: In addition, the punch cards themselves were manufactured and supplied only by IBM for IBM machines, and they were manufactured for specific uses. Employers have to wear dark blue suits. This is about Nazi Germany. If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our. They do what they think is necessary, and everything is sweet and light again. The case considers the strategy of U.S.-owned IBM, then a manufacturer of punch cards, in Nazi Germany before 1937, and opens with IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson meeting Adolf Hitler in … And I think it’s extremely sobering, when you think of the Nazi experience, to think that capitalism was totally silent, almost totally silent. I would imagine. GEOFF JONES: He was a German immigrant. How to document gang stalking for a civil lawsuit: simple counter-measures and evidence collection (Hi El Salvador). We’re going to see in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, numerous Western companies doing business with the apartheid era in South Africa, and they’d say, again, it’s not their business to criticize governments, and the story, you can take the story on to the present day, I’m afraid. So he’s a man of ambition. He also used the census information to mobilize the French Resistance. Black makes it clear that Watson and many other executives at all levels of operations would have known specific uses of their machines. However, Carmille sabotaged the operation, preventing any information about religion from being punched into cards. Nuremburg Laws), many Jews would leave to neighboring regions, where the Third Reich would have to confront them again as they conquered neighboring territories, leading to the Nazi’s “Final Solution”: extermination. The Text Widget will do nothing to combat organized gang stalking, aka “community policing.” The rest of this blog however, will help you do that, and even indicate that a “class action lawsuit” is possible, and more. People are annoyed by it. But they call themselves the merchants of peace, and their fundamental idea was that if countries do business with one another, they won’t go to war with one another, which is an idea that’s continued to be spread. The main reason, in my opinion, for the length of Black’s book is to provide sufficient evidence that Dehomag wasn’t a rogue subsidiary, but instead was heavily micromanaged by Watson (the CEO of IBM at the time). GEOFF JONES: This case is intended for my second-year MBA course, that looks at the role of business leaders in waves of globalization from the 19th century to the present. Tabulating machines were used to understand how many “full”, “half” and “quarter” Jews lived in any district. Remember, in this period, companies are getting bigger, governments are getting bigger, they’re doing more things. In this case, the issue is what an international business should do in a country with a very bad and immoral government. Write a list of things you would never do. We’re going to see millions of people murdered, a World War. GEOFF JONES: Yes, and bad things happened if they didn’t do that. INCREDIBLE. The second extremely sobering thing about this case, which again worries students, is that there are no reputational consequences, either for IBM or for any of the other companies that were silent in this period. It raises the issue of what on Earth, as a business leader, you should do if all other companies don’t do anything. Organized gang stalking, database abuse, Hitler, Holocaust, and IBM punch cards. BRIAN KENNY: Well, it’s a terrific case, and I’m sure that people have enjoyed listening to you talk about it. BRIAN KENNY: So, by the time TJ Watson sits down to have his tea with Hitler, it’s 1937, I think you said. GEOFF JONES: Lessons from that past. So the German company, led by Willy Heidinger, can no longer pay the license fees to the U.S., and Watson swoops down and says, “I’ll take 90% of the equity, and in return, we’ll cancel the debt you owe.” So this guy, Willy Heidinger, who’s also an ambitious entrepreneur, built this German company from nothing, finds himself owning 10% of his company. He was a brilliant business leader, but he didn’t understand what was going on with Hitler and Mussolini, and that’s sobering too. I think in the past this blog believes me, but GEOFF JONES: Well, the tabulating machine, as you said, is really important. He wants motorization. GEOFF JONES: I know. What it does show is that staying and talking also doesn’t do any good at all. It’s the basis for IBM, and he’s an early globalizer, and he globalizes it by selling the technology basically, including to a company in Germany, Dehomag, which is talked about in the case. Google search if for more info. Might be a hard sell and some faculty might claim its not quite part of their course. He said, “I’m an internationalist. And they were the rules, which just makes the case interesting. It’s the basis for IBM. We have the Golden Arches theory, developed in the 1990s, that two countries with a McDonald’s in each country won’t go and go to war, and so on, but that’s their idea. 2) CS has both an advantage and a disadvantage here. I didn’t mention that. Keybase So, he’s a kind of late starter as a business leader-. So this is the most important information technology story in this whole period. GEOFF JONES: It’s often forgotten that in view of what’s going to happen, that Jews were very integrated into Germany, and they’re integrated as part of the business, even the political elite, so highly educated, talented people. I think a lot of people come to the class having absorbed the view that, you know, really, divestment doesn’t work, that it’s better to stay and engage in most situations than to just pull out or something. Right. I mean, is that sufficient for a business leader to take that stand? You’ve convinced me! And they were silent in a country where Jews are being beaten up in the streets, boycotted. The German economy is still trashed by the Great Depression and the financial crisis, so whatever he thought about foreign companies, he needs American companies. He launches a company magazine called Think, which she spent a lot of time writing articles for, and he sends every copy to every member of Congress and to every college president in the United States, because he thinks his thoughts should be shared. He has something like an 80% market share in the United States. I think that students do react emotionally. They would cross-check this with marriage forms and baptismal data held at churches. GEOFF JONES: He’s overwhelmingly a salesman. He settled in the United States. to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups. He does very well, but he’s very ruthless, and eventually gets sued and sentenced to jail term, which he never serves under antitrust law, and then he’s sacked by the company. GEOFF JONES: Technology. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable. Of course, they’ve named their data intelligence system Watson, is obviously named after him. BRIAN KENNY: You’ve discussed this in class before? Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again. BRIAN KENNY: And he starts his business in the U.S. How does Watson make his way to what eventually becomes IBM Watson?