IBM 2000 Annual Report Download - page 49

page no.
forty-seven
corporate initiatives
It’s leadership by serving; leadership by caring;
leadership in the community. It’s the kind of
leadership we think about when we think
about the world our work will leave for our
children. At IBM, it’s how we apply our finan-
cial strength, resources and minds
— more than
300,000 of the most talented people in any
industry, and one of the most storied and
aspirational of business enterprises
— to change
things, to make our planet a better place.
That’s true now more than ever. The
arrival of a networked world brings with it the
requirement for enterprises, governments and
entire societies to establish new frameworks
on virtually every vital public policy issue
—
not simply to foster the development of an
important new platform for our economy, but
to take responsibility for how its consequences
will affect people and the planet.
Of special urgency with the rise of the Net
are protections of the individual’s right to pri-
vacy. In 2000, we appointed IBM’s first chief
privacy officer
— a senior executive charged
with guiding all our policies and practices in
this area, and with working across the public
and private sectors to advance workable pro-
tections of consumer and citizen privacy.
Our largest ongoing corporate commit-
ment remains the $45 million grant program
Reinventing Education
— which has the
potential to touch one in five children in
U.S. public schools, as well as children in
seven other countries, including Singapore,
site of our latest grant.
Independent evaluations tell us that our
Reinventing Education efforts are doing
what we set out to do
— drive higher student
achievement. In West Virginia, high school
students using standards-based math lessons,
created via online technology developed
through the grant partnership, scored signif-
icantly higher on statewide exams. And in
Houston, first-graders using an innovative
speech-recognition technology called Watch-
me!-Read scored significantly higher on
comprehension and word recognition.
Underlying it all, IBM is perennially among
the world’s most generous corporations. In
2000, we contributed more than $126 million
to programs around the world that help people
in need. Individual employees added another
$49 million through matching grants and
donations to nonprofit organizations and
educational institutions. And of incalculable
value was the more than 4 million hours of
their time and expertise IBMers volunteered
to a broad range of local causes.
IBM continued its longstanding commit-
ment to environmental leadership last year,
ensuring that its operations and products
provide ever greater value to society while
minimizing their potential impact on the
environment. Our participation in voluntary
initiatives to address global climate change
and our latest offering to facilitate the reuse
and recycling of PCs are just two examples of
environmental efforts that contributed to the
significant recognition the company received
in 2000 for environmental excellence.
We do all this because we know that people
have high expectations of leaders. High, but
appropriate. We understand that if we aspire
to lead in the creation of the networked world,
we have to demonstrate the courage and wis-
dom to step up to the grand societal challenges
it raises
— both those as new as today’s head-
lines, and those as timeless as human society.
Because that’s what it really means to lead.
what does it mean
to lead?
In our business, there’s technical leadership, thought leadership,
financial leadership, marketplace leadership
— all the things docu-
mented in this report. But any company that aspires to make a
lasting contribution to the world must lead in ways that spread far
beyond the confines of the marketplace, and winning, and profit.