
The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived
Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
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Narrated by:
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Donald Corren
About this listen
“A compelling new biography… [The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived] spins the Watsons into near-Shakespearean figures, as if ‘Succession’ were set in the era of ‘Mad Men’.” ―The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
The enduring story of Thomas Watson Jr.—a figure more important to the creation of the modern world than Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Morgan.
Nearly fifty years into IBM’s existence, Thomas Watson Jr. undertook the biggest gamble in business history when he “bet the farm” on the creation of the IBM System/360, the world’s first fully integrated and compatible mainframe computer. As CEO, Watson drove a revolution no other company—then or now—would dare, laying the foundation for the digital age that has transformed every society, corporation, and government.
The story of Watson being “present at the creation” of the digital age is intertwined with near-Shakespearean personal drama. While he put IBM and its employees at risk, Watson also carried out a family-shattering battle over the future of the company with his brother Dick. This titanic struggle between brothers led to Dick’s death and almost killed Watson Jr. himself.
Though he was eventually touted by Fortune magazine as “the greatest capitalist who ever lived,” Watson’s directionless, playboy early years made him an unlikely candidate for corporate titan. How he pulled his life together and, despite personal demons, paved the way for what became a global industry is an epic tale full of drama, inspiration, and valuable lessons in leadership, risk-taking, and social responsibility.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2023 Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman (P)2023 PublicAffairsListeners also enjoyed...
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In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration - and long-overdue reassessment - of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture.
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Narration makes it difficult to enjoy
- By Katrine on 06-28-21
By: Sarah Schulman
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The Gates of Athens
- By: Conn Iggulden
- Narrated by: George Blagden
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Evoking two of the most famous battles of the Ancient World - the Battle of Marathon and the Last Stand at Thermopylae - The Gates of Athens is a bravura piece of storytelling by a well acclaimed master of the historical adventure novel.
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One of Iggulden’s best ever!
- By Bud R on 01-15-21
By: Conn Iggulden
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Split Decision
- Life Stories
- By: Ice-T, Spike, Douglas Century
- Narrated by: Ice-T, Spike, Douglas Century
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Ice-T rose to fame in the late 1980s, earning acclaim for his music before going on to enthrall television audiences as Odafin “Fin” Tutuola in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But it could have gone much differently. In this “poignant and powerful” (Library Journal, starred review) memoir, Ice-T and Spike, his former crime partner—collaborating with New York Times bestselling author Douglas Century—relate the shocking stories of their shared pasts, and how just a handful of decisions led to their incredibly different lives.
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An awesome book
- By Cornelius DeMarcus on 11-30-22
By: Ice-T, and others
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The Laws of Power
- How to Use Time-Tested Truths to Get Everything You Want
- By: Brian Tracy
- Narrated by: Michael Tracy
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this book, you’ll learn about the success principles that have been the hallmark of all great achievers. Brian calls them “universal laws” because they work for anyone, anywhere, anytime, and they will work for you.
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Fantastic
- By Adolf on 06-23-24
By: Brian Tracy
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Late Admissions
- Confessions of a Black Conservative
- By: Glenn Loury
- Narrated by: Glenn Loury
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A shockingly frank memoir from a prize-winning economist, reflecting on his remarkable personal odyssey and his changing positions on identity, race, and belief.
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Engaging listen. Full of lurid details
- By Melody on 06-23-24
By: Glenn Loury
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Endurance
- A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery
- By: Scott Kelly
- Narrated by: Scott Kelly
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A stunning memoir from the astronaut who spent a record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station - a candid account of his remarkable voyage, of the journeys off the planet that preceded it, and of his colorful formative years. A natural storyteller and modern-day hero, Kelly has a message of hope for the future that will inspire for generations to come. Here, in his personal story, we see the triumph of the human imagination, the strength of the human will, and the boundless wonder of the galaxy.
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Great insights with bad audio quality
- By Marc Freudenberg on 11-27-17
By: Scott Kelly
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Resistance
- The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945
- By: Halik Kochanski
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 46 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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It's almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.
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Uneven in quality of depiction of various areas
- By K. T. Jukic on 05-17-23
By: Halik Kochanski
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City of Fortune
- How Venice Rule the Seas
- By: Roger Crowley
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise and fall of the Venetian empire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty. In City of Fortune, Roger Crowley, acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author of Empires of the Sea, applies his narrative skill to chronicling the astounding five-hundred-year voyage of Venice to the pinnacle of power.
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A Wonderful Listen
- By Scot on 06-12-14
By: Roger Crowley
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Hitler
- A Global Biography
- By: Brendan Simms
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 29 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Hitler offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive war with the United States precisely because he considered it such a potent adversary.
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A good biography with a different viewpoint
- By Timothy on 10-10-19
By: Brendan Simms
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Index, a History of The
- A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
- By: Dennis Duncan
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find "Butchers, to be avoided", or "Cows that shite Fire", or even catch "Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne". Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
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Maybe a book that should be read rather than listened to
- By Amazon Customer on 11-09-22
By: Dennis Duncan
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Bucky F*cking Dent
- A Novel
- By: David Duchovny
- Narrated by: David Duchovny
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American novel, and spends the waning malaise-filled days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent.
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David Fucking Duchovny
- By Kelly W. on 05-04-16
By: David Duchovny
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Moonshot
- A NASA Astronaut’s Guide to Achieving the Impossible
- By: Mike Massimino
- Narrated by: Mike Massimino
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When you think of a NASA astronaut, the image that probably comes to mind is one of the All-American hero. But former NASA astronaut turned business speaker and bestselling author Mike Massimino was pretty much the opposite. He was the underdog, one of the weakest swimmers during NASA training and a “gangly, scrawny, working-class kid from Long Island with bad eyesight and a fear of heights." Still, after working hard and working smart, Massimino had a successful career as an astronaut. Moonshot shares Massimino’s hard-earned lessons and how to apply them in work and life.
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The entire book was interesting!
- By chernandez1776 on 12-08-24
By: Mike Massimino
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The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women
- And Men: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It
- By: Valerie Young Ed.D.
- Narrated by: Rachel Perry
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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If you are a working woman, chances are this internal monologue sounds all too familiar. And you're not alone. A shocking number of accomplished women in all career paths and at every level feel as though they are faking it-impostors in their own lives and careers. While the impostor syndrome is not unique to women, women are more apt to agonize over tiny mistakes, see even constructive criticism as evidence of their shortcomings, and chalk up their accomplishments to luck rather than skill.
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Valuable information but vulgar with an overuse of profanity
- By EM Kaye on 04-01-25
What listeners say about The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dan B
- 08-26-24
A Great Description of a Great Era
...the era of early business computing, which IBM dominated. I am sure through the lens of anyone much less than 50 years old, this all seems like ancient history and not very applicable to today's modern miracles of technology. Just like a modern viewer might watch "Citizen Kane" and yawn seeing what they think of as standard movie-making techniques, not realizing they're seeing a ground breaking film where those "standard" techniques were invented. IBM invented many of those standard things about computers we all take for granted today.
I admit to being biased, having been employed by IBM for nearly 40 years, and my father before me for another 30 more. I knew of many of the things this book described, and lived though some of them as well. The Watsons (father and son) were a force of nature in the industry. IBM's success never came from technical knowhow, and even today IBM is not a technology company, but a sales and service company. Its influence and revenue is a far cry from what it was in its heyday, mainly because it lost sight of the need to sell something valuable and substantive rather than the lowest value for the highest price. That's a short term (the only thing IBM concentrates on these days) winning strategy for a long term drive into irrelevance.
This book was a good overview of the Watsons and IBM, and gave some great insights into how certain things in the company came to be. If you're interested in the history of computing more than just the capabilities of today, this book is a must read.
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- Raymond Polone
- 01-15-25
T J Watson, his sons and family have feet of clay
I joined IBM in the Military Products Division in Kingston, NY in 1956 following Tom Watson's death in 1956. I was always amazed that the IBM Corporation seized the initiative at the time to prepare for future growth by adding a zero to my employee serial number. I really knew nothing of T J or his sons and this book really educated me on the obvious fact that they as well as all of us have clay feet and dealt with family issues and personal failings and dangerous or destructive interests. . It is informative that his advocacy of world peace through world trade fared no better than the current sanctions and tariffs!
I was impressed that the authors were impressed with the Kingston product line of the SAGE AN/FSQ-7 and 8 based on the MIT Whirlwind I that I was hired to learn in a 9-month training course at the Neighborhood Road production factory.
It is worthwhile note that SDC began as the systems engineering group for the SAGE air-defense system at the RAND Corporation. In April 1955, the government contracted with RAND to help write software for the SAGE project. (A somewhat stifling feature is that the octal program numbering system for the SAGE computer had a positive and negative zero which resulted in some confusion in programming Numerics.)
I had assignments in installations at Topsham, Maine; Madison, Wisconsin and Tacoma, Washington. In 1962 IBM support ended when USAF blue suits assumed the functions and I returned to Kingston with a hardware support assignment for final systems testing of the IBM 7040/44 production there. Upon the announcement of the IBM System/360 production switched to the 360/65 and 360/75 which now used hexadecimal support (interesting that the later personal computers used the little-endian order of computer memory storage whereas these large computers always use the big-endian arrangement.)
I achieved the 25-year Quarter Century recognition with the accompanying awards and completed 35 years with many Dallas/ Fort Worth, Texas assignments in Field Engineering support (including a time in the Johnson Space Center mission control where Federal Systems Division managed) DOS/VSE and IBM Marketing software support. Appropriate retirement in 1991 with the Voluntary Transition Program was accepted.
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- KDN
- 02-21-24
A superficial history
Although interesting I found the history of the “Watson years” at IBM to be quite superficial. I kept wanting more depth and insight.
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- Douglas
- 12-14-23
Spun but Interesting IBM Story
I enjoyed learning about IBM's history. But this book, written in part by a member of the Watson family, seemed heavily spun in favor of promoting the legacy of the patriarchs.
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1 person found this helpful