Arvind, read your own headline back. “Company culture was too slow to change.” Not “I set a strategy that leaned on debt-funded acquisitions for five years.” Not “I ki-led a working deployment focus six months ago and had to rebuild it under pressure.” Not “I chased a stock price number instead of asking whether the growth underneath it was real.” Culture. As if the culture is some ambient weather system that happens to a company, instead of the direct, measurable output of what leadership rewards, funds, and tolerates.
Here’s what “culture” actually means when a CEO says it out loud: it means employees. It means the people three, four, five levels below you, absorbing blame for decisions they didn’t make and couldn’t have stopped. You don’t get to spend years building a strategy on acquisitions and mainframe timing, watch the props come due at the same time, and then, when the market notices, hand the bill to “culture.” Culture doesn’t sign off on M&A. Culture doesn’t set the incentive plan. Culture doesn’t decide which function gets ki-led in January and rebuilt in July. You do.
And the board’s own language makes this worse, not better: confident in the strategy, but will “hold leadership accountable for execution.” Read that twice. The strategy stays untouchable. Execution is the only thing on the table, and execution is exactly the layer where the people with the least power to change the strategy live. That’s not accountability. That’s a firewall, built to make sure the decisions at the top never have to answer for the results at the top.
So here’s the honest question, asked directly, not through a euphemism about culture: why is it always easier to say “we faltered” as a company than to say “I got this wrong” as the person who ran it? Why is the sentence “culture was too slow” acceptable in a headline, while the sentence “I ki-led a function I should have left alone” never makes it into one? If you were confident enough to reshuffle the entire org on a six-month clock, be confident enough to put your own name on the outcome instead of a word that conveniently has no face and no bonus attached to it.
Own it, you said. So own it. Not the culture. You
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Just look Albany culture. Unchecked for over a decade. It is the epitome of what is wrong with Ibm.
Bob Translation: Arvind su-ks.
In other words, "WE didn't execute fast enough. So the remaining US employees will be executed."
What a horrible human being!