IBM Stacked and Ranked Badly, Maladministration Dooms the Company
Minutes ago: (Hyderabad)
People still speak about IBM's awful decision to go ahead with talent kryptonite, wherein the workplace becomes a contest or an episode of Survivor, maybe Big Brother.
Someone has just rightly noted: "Who ever decided to bring back this ancient and disproven style should be marked as a low performer. It doesn’t work and is just lazy work on their part."
Then there was the following list; this will probably get deleted for mentioning names (as if the mere mention is harassing):
Stacked rankings:Sydney Sweeney
Salma Hayek
Sofia Vergara
Kate Upton
Charlotte McKinney
Christina Hendricks
Denise Richards
Scarlett Johansson
Emily Ratajowski
Jayne Mansfield
Your task: please choose the bottom 15% to put on a Performance Improvement Plan.
A day or less after we mentioned Robert X. Cringely someone brought up this very old article of his, whereupon someone sounded off: "Cringely strikes again with perfect insights and "the truth" about IBM ... as opposed to the Wall Street version. This needs much wider distribution. Perhaps to Pro Publica. Glad to be rid of this group of mo--ns."
Someone then said: "Given the date and data on this article, we can judge if IBM has been successfully. What was the USA headcount in 2015? According to the 5500 IRS form approx 92k. What was the 2024 USA head count (5500 info tends to be a year behind so we have to use 2024 data). Approx 51k. So 92 - 51 =41. At 1 billion per 10k headcount means IBM has dropped 4 billion to the bottom line if those heads were eliminated. More realistically they just moved to India, so 1.3 billion needs to be added to pay the new hires in India, and IBM nets 2.7 billion. Rinse and repeat in other first world nations (Northern Europe, Australia, etc etc) and you get 5.4 billion to the bottom line. So what did IBM do with the 5.4 billion savings? They changed their business model and bought innovation vs developing it. Thus reinforcing offshoring and lowering the first world headcount populations. Nice work for the IBM exec’s if you can get it."
At one point, however briefly 15 years ago, IBM was valued as higher (in Wall Street) than Microsoft. Back then IBM was led by Sam Palmisano and promoted OpenDocument Format (ODF). What happened in years to follow was a slow-motion catastrophe. "Yeah," said the latest comment, "that post is 14 years old but IBM started to intentionally self destruct itself under Gerstner who walked away after 9 years with over $400,000,000. Cringely wrote scathing articles about IBM but the vast majority of it was spot on."
IBM has been a relic for a long time. That's why the acquisition of Red Hat was never too popular with us. This year (the start of this month, yes!) the Bluewashing is being completed. Red Hat didn't influence or change IBM (Jim AllowHurst left), it was IBM changing IBM or assimilating it. Now they stack people up for PIPs and layoffs ("RAs").█