Corporations: Thought in Suburbia

“THINK,” commanded the framed signs in IBM’s 20-story headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The more IBM’s executives thought, the more they concluded that they and their employees might be a lot happier away from the concrete and polluted air, working somewhere out in the country. Last week IBM settled the last of its employees into its new world headquarters in the sleepy and silvan village of Armonk (pop. 1,100), located 30 miles north of Manhattan in New York’s wealthy Westchester County.

IBM’s Manhattan headquarters were inconvenient for the two-thirds of its employees who already lived in New York’s northern suburbs, and seven of its eleven divisions were already located in suburban Westchester. But such practical arguments seem minor compared with the sheer esthetic appeal of the new three-story glass-and-concrete headquarters quadrangle, which would cover a square block in Manhattan. The building rises near an apple orchard on a 443-acre estate, surrounds picturesque Japanese gardens in a courtyard designed by Sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

To take up residence in its new $12 million home, IBM had to shift 1,150 employees and tons of electronic equipment from its old Madison Avenue headquarters. For those who wished to move into houses and apartments closer to their new office, the company paternalistically assumed the role of real estate agent, absorbed legal fees, made short-term loans, and even paid for carpeting and drapery alterations made necessary by the move. IBM also carefully considered the possible discomforts of moving so far from the big city, was most concerned about the schedules of such top executives as Chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr., who is often called on to attend board sessions and meet with financial advisers in Manhattan. But a trial run in 1961, when 200 executives and employees were temporarily moved into an IBM research center in Yorktown, N.Y., went so well that IBM became convinced that suburbia poses no insurmountable problems to its THiNKing force.