March/April 1992 - By Andrew W. Singer Is IBM’s ‘Open Door’
still ajar? Certain management practices have an important
effect on morale, efficiency, productivity, and on corporate
ethical standards as well. International Business Machine
Corporation’s Open Door program is arguably such a practice.
Initiated back in the 1920s by the legendary Thomas Watson Sr.,
the Open Door is essentially a way of dealing with employee
grievances. When workers can’t get satisfaction from their
immediate managers—a machinist doesn’t think he is being treated
fairly, for example—they can take the problem up the
organizational ladder, to the chairman of the company, if
necessary. Most of the Open Door complaints that reached Thomas
Watson Jr. when he was IBM’s chairman from 1956 to 1971 could
probably have been resolved at a lower management level. “But I
listened anyway,” he recalls in his autobiography. “I learned an
awful lot about the problems of the working man, and I gained a
visceral sense about IBM that enabled me to hea