Thomas John Watson Jr. (January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was an American businessman, diplomat, Army Air Forces pilot, and philanthropist.

Two sisters followed Thomas Jr., Jane and Helen, before a final child, Arthur Kittredge Watson, was born.

He was taken on plant inspections – his first memory of such a visit (to the Dayton, Ohio factory) was at the age of five – and business tours to Europe and made appearances at annual gatherings for the company's elite sales representatives, the IBM Hundred Per Cent Club, even before he was old enough to attend school.

[5] He claimed in his autobiography that as a child he had a "strange defect in his vision" that made written words appear to fall off the page when he tried to read them.

Toward the end of his service, Watson worked for Major General Follett Bradley, who suggested that he should try to follow his father at IBM.

Watson and Bradley were instrumental in establishing the ALSIB-Northwest Staging Route to send military aircraft from the United States to the Soviet Union.

Tom Jr. took the company in a new direction, hiring electrical engineers by the hundreds and putting them to work designing mainframe computers.

Cuthbert Hurd, brought in from the Atomic Energy Commission's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to determine if there was a market, predicted "... he could find customers for as many as thirty machines.

"[4]: 216 Even so, until the late 1950s the custom-built US Air Force SAGE computerized tracking system accounted for more than half of IBM's computer sales.

The company made little profit on these sales but, as Tom Jr. said "It enabled us to build highly automated factories ahead of anybody else, and to train thousands of new workers in electronics.

Tom Jr. saw that the Consent Decree, which sought to strip IBM of half its card-making capacity, was largely irrelevant since the future was in computers rather than cards.

By comparison, the equivalent figure for Japan was 5.1%, though its high technology companies exceeded even the IBM level, with the 1983 spending for Canon being 14.6% and that for NEC being 13.0%.

Although the initiative, and as such much of the credit for the birth of the information revolution, must go to Tom Jr., considerable courage was also displayed by his then aging father who, despite his long commitment to internal funding, backed his son to the hilt; reportedly with the words "It is harder to keep a business great than it is to build it.

"[citation needed] In 1968, Tom Jr. fired computer scientist Lynn Conway because he feared the news of her transition would affect the company's reputation.

[10] The first result of this was the IBM 7030 Stretch program to develop a transistorized "supercomputer"; it failed to meet its price and performance goals, at a reported cost of $20 million.

Despite the fact that many observers believed that Tom Jr was frittering away the resources his father had built up, these new ranges were remarkably successful, doubling IBM's sales once more over the six years from 1958 ($1.17 billion) to 1964 ($2.31 billion), maintaining IBM's dramatic growth rate virtually undiminished at approaching 30% compound.

Despite delays in shipment, the products were well-received following their launch in 1964 and what Fortune magazine called "IBM's $5 Billion Gamble," in the end, paid off.

[13] Perhaps Watson's most enduring contribution to IBM was its organizational structure, since new products, no matter how successful, carry a company for at most a few years.

In 1956, in a move that became a bi-annual event, he reorganized IBM on divisional lines, to give a decentralized organization, with five major divisions in the US.

"[citation needed] The final element of formal organizational change was the isolation of headquarters staff in Armonk, New York.

Following his return home after Carter's defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 United States presidential election, Watson gave the commencement speech at Harvard University in 1981[22] in which he warned against further escalation against the USSR.

[26] He had homes in Greenwich, Connecticut; North Haven, Maine; Stowe, Vermont; Vail, Colorado; New York City; and Antigua.

He was on the board of directors of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and helped bring a factory employing over 300 people to the community that made cables, including ones for the US space program.