Thread regarding IBM layoffs

The commentaries to the video:

Not the most sensitive time to post this topic. I guess it's tabasco in open wounds for those being laid off instead of salt.
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Will this strategy return us to 107 bn annual revenue? When?
Yes? Cool! No? Words :(
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Thanks Rob Thomas. Best of luck to you
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Can we get a list of books on your bookshelf? Some of them are cutoff by the camera on the left-hand side of the video

Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to.”

― Richard Branson

If you look after your staff, they'll look after your customers. It's that simple.
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Can we call you Tabasco Thomas going forward?
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Love the analogies Rob as usual - learning something new everyweek! I always say you should hire those who are smarter than you and you will always look good! And if can keep 10 of those people in your hopper - only good things can happen.
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What is more important ? Retaining or recruiting the best talent ? How ? Do we know people who are able learn and practice all theirs "IT life" - we need focus on those ... no matter how old they are.
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I like the analogy. We're all part of a talent field people. Our ability to have an impact in specific areas grows, changes, and evolves over time. We all have the opportunity to ripen into the perfect 'red' across many areas, and hopefully help others to do the same in the process. Being 'red and ready' as individuals should be our goal. For those of us that lead people, spotting red talent and nurturing the red in others is equally important. Thanks for recognizing and sharing Rob.
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So much here.
I do not want to cause trouble.

This gives me much pause with other news we have been putting out.

I believe this was at best, a very badly timed moment to put this topic out.
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Attracting, retaining, and developing great talent is key to our success. This is a virtuous cycle - meaning, as we drive success, build relationships, act with integrity and values - the best people want to join and be part of that. And as the best people come, we reinforce those extraordinary outcomes again and again.
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Difficult to listen to you speak of retaining the best talent when so much of our best talent is being laid off as you speak. Terrible timing. Terribly insensitive. Not credible. Two faced.
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The Blue stick is what I use to attract the right talent to IBM. Meaning, I look for people who have great talent, passion, and who will be a good cultural fit to IBM. In some cases, these are people who were previously with IBM but left us and were regretted losses. People choose IBM because of the company and because of the person they would work for. So our own "brand" as a people manager is a large part of the recruitment process. We need to be leaders people actually want to work for.
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Interesting topic, given the current environment of lay-offs. Focus was on how to hire, didn't seem to talk to retaining talent. I guess the implication was that if you have a list of "red stick" candidates ready when hiring tickets come available, then you should also have a list of "get rid of first" when cuts are needed? I believe this is a little insulting and insensitive, if you are in the group of those laid off.
I wonder, when the market has a steady stream of (potentially unhappy) ex-IBM employees - many of them eventually working for our customers - what does that do to our long term growth and ability to hire new talent?
FWIW, if you are being laid off (or 'pushed' out in some way), I can say that (after many years at IBM), who goes seems to have little to do with ability to learn and change, or your contribution or the need for what you do. i.e. its probably not your fault, the responsibility falls somewhere above you...
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Rob, As a senior strategic leader, please look at the larger picture- Recruiting is a mentality that should include placing the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. You should not limit to looking outside of IBM for the best talent, unless you only want the cheapest talent. As an example, consider the deep data analysis around the talent that is already available for you in GTS. One tool to do such pepper picking is made visible by these IBM dashboards, of which a significant portion of those who created, maintained, and continually improved them are gone as of June 22nd, 2020
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As others have mentioned, it's remarkably tone-deaf to send this message today, the same day which a vast number of our colleagues have been told is their last at IBM.

Having said that, I'd also challenge the appropriateness of drawing comparison between a manufacturing/QA procedure and corporate recruitment practices. "Repeatability and consistency" in recruiting does not lead to a quality workforce, as you suggest. What you are describing through the "red stick" analogy is a binary process — either a pepper is fit for the sauce or not. The same principles cannot be applied to people, who not only have the capacity to quickly learn and grow into the workforce as established, but, over time, can and should change our way of doing work for the better.

If our approach to hiring people is exclusionary by nature — i.e., "How might we avoid hiring the WRONG fit?" — we will never emerge from doing business as usual. Bringing one "red stick" (or 10) into being at IBM almost certainly ensures that we will continue to approach talent acquisition with undue bias. Believing that there's nothing wrong with this means that you are not paying attention, neither to the immediate needs of our teams nor to the broader socioeconomic context(s) in which we are situated. If, when reviewing candidates, we instead ask "How will this individual change — challenge, even — our team, our BU, or IBM for the better?" we can start growing into a more successful, more diverse workforce.
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I think there is a lot we can learn about finding and retaining the best talent from TESLA and SpaceX. We should learn from them.
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Hybrid cloud ..needs hybrid peppers ..
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Insensitive message on "recruitment" today of all days when we have some great talent that was laid off and are turning in their computers, badges, etc today.
Many of us have colleagues that have been affected by the layoff.
May have been a better message for a later time.
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I'm struggling to see how the never ending cycle of lay-offs is beneficial to retaining talent.
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Rob, this is a great analogy. The only thing I might add is ensure you are looking at ALL of the peppers available to you as you build your Tobasco pipeline. If you only look at the ones that are growing next to the ones you are already harvesting, you could miss out on the other perfectly good peppers growing a little farther afield or not looking exactly the same in terms of size or shape.
(That was supposed to be an interesting way to link hiring people with Diverse Abilities into your hiring plans. ;-) )
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Rob, I quote you from your week 6 video:
"Is this the best you can do?"
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Loved the analogy. Although it is certainly consistent, as a lover of hot sauce, Tabasco if far from my favorite. We need to focus on a great standard before we focus on consistency. Also, we need more focus on retention. We can't lose top talent to layoffs just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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Why in $DEITY's name did you post this today? Thousands of people getting axed from the company and you're posting about recruitment?!?

This is tone-deaf, insulting, and frankly ignorant. It reinforces my feeling that IBM disowned me after the notice in May.

I'm (not) sorry for the venom here. Maybe if enough people speak their true feelings, you and the other execs will get it through your thick skulls that "resources" are HUMAN.
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Hmmm. Along the way, I probably will be holding that red stick up to my self as well. I definitely want to be part of the sauce.
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Just perhaps a polite suggestion, that perhaps you could have kept some of that great talent that were just laid-off and recruit people from there.

Thanks for making the text of Rob’s Tabasco fiasco video available. I was one of the many IBMers whose last day was June 22nd. One of my small pleasures in my last 30 days was deleting - unread - the onslaught of email from Rob and the 13 other executive Vice Presidents (Typical example: “Read my blog for important announcements about our strategy!”) and giving thanks each day that I was no longer subject to their mandatory education videos (God forbid you write up a crisp summary of what you want when you can compel your whole workforce to listen to you talk at length about it). Not my father’s IBM, not my IBM.

From someone else

Avery Island, the "ancestral" home of Tabasco, is not in Baton Rouge... and apparently they off-shored most of their pepper farming to Latin America starting like 50 years ago.

That's what IBM is doing too.

indeed!!!

Look forward to talking to you again soon.

Hilarious! Don't anticipate him talking to anybody soon, except perhaps his manager when he's getting the riot act read to him and then demoted. What a dumb–s.

the text:
WEEK 12: RED STICK AND RECRUITING Video Transcript
Hey Team ‐ Rob Thomas here. And this week I want to talk about recruiting.
And the way it's written in Our Winning Theory is, "Find the best. Retain the best."
Those are the t w o sides of recruiting, which is all about: how do we have the best talent in the industry? And it's something that I want all of you to think about - not every once in a while, not, you know once a year, when we start rethinking our strategy or plans; it's something that I want you to think about all the time.
And the way I would describe it is: recruiting is more of a mentality than an action.
And I think a lot of times we think about recruiting as, "Alright, we've gotta go hire somebody." This is about a mentality. Every day, what we do, the way that we communicate with our teams, the way that we talk to people outside of IBM, we're basically telling our story. And we're recruiting people to want to stay a part of it, be a bigger part of it, and we also have the opportunity to get people outside of lBM interested in what we're doing and excited about the opportunity to work with us.
Sothis is about a mentality, it’s about what we do everyday, it's not just a process or something we do every once in a while.
I want to give you an example. So, for you hot sauce fans o u t there, this is a bottle of Tabasco. And yes, I did draw this myself. Here's the story about Tabasco.
Soeach day, 729,000 bottles of Tabasco hot sauce are produced. Now if you've had hot sauce from Tabasco, my guess is, every time you get it, it tastes the same. They've done an amazing job in terms of quality control and their consistency of how they do it to - any time you get this, you know exactly what it's going to taste like, which is actually pretty remarkable if you think about it, because they literally have giant fields of these red peppers, and yet they‘re able to produce the same thing every time in a really high quality way. How can they do that?
So, little known fact, [there’s a] city in Louisiana called Baton Rouge, and "Baton Rouge" actually translates literally into "red stick." And the place that that phrase came from is, what the farmers use when they're assessing the peppers in a field for Tabasco. And they literally carry around a red stick. It's about the size of this, this marker right here. They carry this around in the field, and they're holding that red stick up to every pepper, because they know if the color of that pepper aligns with the color of the red stick, the "Baton Rouge," then they're gonna have the consistency and the quality that they would expect.
It's actually that simple, yet it's that profound. They're able to do this 729,000 times a day and do it in a high quality way, just because they're carrying around this red stick.
Sowhat does that teach usabout recruiting? Repeatability and consistency leads to quality.
50 that's about standard or performance for how we think about our own teams, and what we expect of people as part of this team, but also what we expect for people that we want to bring into IBM.
And I think, look, part of the challenge in IBM, to be honest is, I think traditionally we've kind of recruited on the sine curve, which is, "Alright, we can go hire. Okay, so go hire, go hire, go find people."..."Now we can't hire," and so it goes down..."0h, we can go hire, go hire."
And a sine curve approach does not work for recruiting, because then you lose the whole red stick concept - because to some extent, when you have that hiring opportunity, then you're kind of saying, "Well, we'll take, you know, the best available, or whoever's available" ‐ somebody that may not conform to that red stick, that standard of performance, but we have this window in which we can bring people on.
That’s why I say this is more about a mentality than an action, which is, my request to all of you is: build your network and do it with a long-term thinking in mind, not the sine curve in mind.
Meaning, if you have the opportunity to go hire people to your team, if you don't know right now who are the ten red sticks that you would go to, then you're not doing your job recruiting. Same goes for me. You've always gotta know "What's mytop ten, what's my next ten, what's my next ten," because recruiting is a longterm process, it's not a short term action.
And just to make that real, like, you take right now - the environment we live in here. I don't think we're gonna do a lot of hiring right now, because we're dealing with the whole, what's going on with COVID-19, and what that's driven in terms of financial implications for every business around the world. Sowe're probably not going to do a lot of hiring right now. That doesn't mean you can't be building your network for who the first ten would be,the next ten, the next ten, and getting them excited about our mission.
So again, recruiting is a mentality. I would ask anybody watching this: start to build your list _ your ten, your ten, your ten. You have to nurture that list over time. Because at some point, the doors are gonna be open and we'll have the chance to go do some hiring, and we want to know that we're finding the people that best conform to what we want, and people that will be successful at IBM, and help make us successful.
I hope you have a wonderful week.
Look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you.

I have the video transcript and the comments

This Rob Thomas is a total id–t... yet he is SVP of IBM Cloud!!! That tells you everything you need to know about IBM these days... stay away at all costs!

Found it at _Blogs from C&CS Leaders_ Week 12: Recruiting
Video's been pulled and all comments removed. Just this response from Rob is there:

"Team - In this week's video, I discussed the role recruiting plays in Our Winning Theory, and how we retain and attract talent in IBM. I've realized, based on your feedback, that this was poor timing for this dialogue.

I will be back with you next week, learning from your comments, and will strive to exceed your expectations."

Respectfully,

Rob
Rob Thomas
Senior Vice President
IBM Cloud and Data Platform

nobody in their right mind will go to IBM....its the employer of last resorts.

What was the 'meat' of the video? I did not see it, but sure will try to search it...

I have watched some other of these videos before, not more... that is an id–t!