Another reorg. Sold as agility, felt as whiplash. Leadership didn’t even wait for the planned date — they tore up a structure barely a year old and rebuilt it mid-year, with zero regard for what that costs the people living through it. The stated reason: “boost software deployment.” The real reason is simpler and darker.
IBM has spent years buying growth instead of building it. Every quarter, another acquisition gets folded in, rebranded as “software strength,” and used to justify the next reorg. Strip out the acquisitions, and the growth mostly disappears. This isn’t a strategy. It’s a treadmill, and shareholders finally noticed — the stock just had its worst single day in the company’s history.
The money to keep buying is running out. Debt keeps climbing. Buybacks have been frozen for years because the company is still “digesting” its last purchase. Cash meant for growth is quietly being redirected to service the last deal, not fund the next one. When a company can’t return money to its own shareholders, it’s telling you something about how thin the cushion has gotten.
And the sales playbook is exhausted. For years, big renewals were “won” by reshuffling the same contract — discount here, markup there, call it a signing. Do that once, fine. Do it a third time on the same account, and there’s nothing left to move. Customers aren’t d-mb. Many are also sitting on mountains of software they were sold and never deployed. Asking them to sign another restructuring on top of shelfware gathering dust isn’t selling — it’s asking for patience that ran out a while ago. That’s the real story behind “large deals failed to close.” It was never about speed.
So here’s what a summer reorg actually buys: nothing, fast. Territory changes take a quarter just to stabilize. Real deals take six months to a year to close. Launch a reorg in July, across a holiday season when half of Europe is offline, and demand results in Q3 — and you’ve built a machine engineered to fail on schedule.
Except failure doesn’t cost everyone the same. IBM books the reorg as a clean, one-time charge and moves on. Sellers absorb the real cost: quotas that don’t shrink to match a broken calendar, commission checks that quietly get smaller because targets were unrealistic from day one, accounts inherited mid-relationship with no memory of what was promised or already burned. When the numbers come up short, it won’t be called “the reorg cost us a season.” It’ll be called underperformance. The same event, blamed upward as strategy and downward as failure — a strategy that costs nothing on the way in and everything on the way out, just not for the people who designed it.
That’s the pattern worth naming out loud: a company that has run out of things to buy, running out of ways to reshuffle what it already sold, paying for both by quietly shifting the bill onto the people closest to the customer.
Another reorg won’t fix that. Only shipping what was already sold will.
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At Arvind's IBM, mediocrity is the only aesthetic. It is non-threatening, under promises and as long as you lack appropriate measures, which is by design, can always be massaged to fit your business narrative.
If you are at still at IBM, you either su-k or you are good at hiding your achievement. There is no one else left at that empty shell company.
@a9 lol Alb is were data and truths are ignored if they don’t align with certain people’s agenda or narratives.
@ac IBM high execs don't buy the stocks the stocks are an addition to their million dollar bonuses. They have to keep the stocks x amount of years before they can sell them. Once the x amount of years are up they sell those stocks and receive their new stock option bonus
WELL DONE! Put that in your pipe, McKinsey, and smoke it!
IBM stopped being a technology company many years ago, and became a hedge fund. Powered by continuing acquisitions and the pursuit of free cash flow, IBM executives buy and sell shares. They take both sides of the transactions, and try to make money on the spread.
This strategy was initially pursued in order to buy IBM time, and for many years it did indeed buy IBM time. But somewhere along the line, company executives lost sight of of the real goal...IBM still needed to innovate and serve customers. It couldn't just churn and burn...it had to invent new stuff, make real products that customers want to buy, sell these products and bring in new customer funds.
The company hasn't really done this in a very long time, so it has become what business analysts nicely call "a mature company". Other than periodic iterations of its legacy products, it has nothing new to offer. Legacy products to legacy customers.
In Albany is simple. If you favorite, you right. If not favorite, truth also cannot help you.
There’s massive changes going on everywhere. Several new roles have been created and need volunteers literally by EOD.
The little indian AI HR rep will be here soon to tell us he read a book once.