Oh yeah, more companies should be suffering such a fate.
I worked for IBM for 7 1/2 years, from 2001 through mid-2008 when (unlike so many afterward) I voluntarily left to take over a Vice Presidency at another firm in my field (high performance computing, or HPC).
I learned a lot from IBM; it was mostly a tremendous experience. I had some outstanding managers....but at the end of my time there, also had some real duds. I mean seriously clueless putzes.
I was part of a very small team that built a $1.1 billion HPC business almost from scratch in just under four years. You’d think the company and the division I worked for would have been ecstatic, no?
Wrong.
Instead, after lavishing positive attention on us for a few months once they realized what we’d done....they decided to manage the living s**t out of the business. This new crop of idiots waltzed in, an entirely new chain of command with a couple of “extra” management layers, mind you.....and, for example, never gave me 5 minutes of their precious time to ask how to get us to $2 billion...or even HOW we did what we did in the first place. They couldn’t possibly have cared less.
Nada. Zip.
IBM rewarded automotons; clueless bureaucrats who understood process (the author of this piece nailed that part) and could talk the talk. If you stuck your neck out, your head got chopped off.
It stopped being fun....and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough as I watched them starve a huge business that I put blood, sweat, and tears into for years. It was disgusting, sad, and incredibly stupid.
I don’t regret my time there; I’m grateful for the experience. That said, I’d never go back. The company is run by people who are slaves to “the almighty Quarter”; to Wall Street. They could give a damn about the people who MAKE it all happen. Your chart shows impressive shareholder value....but it doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
When a company becomes a slave to the Street, they forget who they are and what got them to a position of prominence. That is precisely what has been happening to Big Blue.
What makes it doubly sad is that some of the finest people, some of the finest minds I’ve ever known work (or worked) there.
The historical fact is that IBM was in trouble with its emphasis on mainframes back in the late 80s and early 90s. It succeeded in reinventing itself, which is very tough to do for such a large corporation.
Stock price is what you pay, value is what you get. Your argument would have worked just as well for Enron until early 2001.
As someone who has experience both inside and outside IBM, I have to agree with the author that the path IBM management is going down is unsustainable. I saw how poorly structured and problematic many of IBMs outsourcing forays were. IGS charges a lot for their services, but we found that the service was declining in quality as more and more was outsourced and strong, experienced people were layed off. A few years back the company I worked for discontinued the IGS contracts and recruited a bunch of the IBM people who supported and maintained our systems. It was a win-win for us and the support team- we saved a lot of money, started getting better service and they got more secure jobs with less paperwork.
This is a venting thread....for all of the old IBM Haters...