The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924. The formation of what soon became IBM consolidated some of the major companies in the industrial time-keeping business, but its new chief executive, Thomas J. Watson, a businessman who turned out to be just as brilliant as George F. Johnson, realized that data processing had far greater potential than just workers punching a time clock. A great motivator of salesmen, Watson sent them to a new territory of banks, corporations, and government agencies, where they explained how a database of IBM punched cards and data processing with IBM sorting machines would enable them to answer questions in a day or two that they were never even able to ask because of the months of clerk time that would have been required. By the 1930s IBM was the leading company in the world in electromechanical data processing and had contracts with a number of government agencies, notably the original Social Security contract.