Renowned business leader Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. will become the next chairman of the Broad Institute’s Board of Directors. Mr. Gerstner served as CEO and chairman of the board of IBM Corporation from 1993 to 2002. He is widely recognized as the chief architect of the company’s transformation, reinventing both its organization and its culture.Going by IBM's experience, the Broad's choice of Louis Gerstner as the new chairman of the board looks like it's going to have some impact. At IBM, Gerstner was transformative in major decisions that in hindsight set up IBM to become the robust company it is today: Abandoning the money-losing OS/2 operating system, ditching IBM's position in a commoditized PC hardware market, and shifting IBM's employees away from a lifetime employment mindset to one of lifetime employability.
Gerstner's experience as the former Chairman of The Carlyle Group will probably play out to the Broad's advantage give the institute a tailwind in research commercialization. Carlyle is an asset management company overseeing $157 billion in investments across 11 industries, including healthcare.
So it seems that in retaining Gerstner, the Broad Institute has moved to up the bar that research administrators will be measured against.
