More on the IBM saga from Cringely,
Last week’s column on IBM set what must be a modern record for the number of reader comments (more than 1,000). I evidently struck a chord. And from the high emotional content of many of those comments, I can see that whatever IBM thinks it is doing is causing a great deal of pain and anxiety among IBM employees. While my words may have triggered this outpouring, there is nothing I could write that would do so in the absence of a severely dysfunctional corporate culture. IBM as an organization — not just as a business — is in trouble.
The internal IBM folks came out swinging against Cringely in a fearsome way. From IBM’s internal response:
The blog also completely misinterpreted our efforts around Lean. To fully understand Lean, you have to view it in a strategic context — a key part of what we’re doing to reinvent service delivery to provide more value to clients and make IBM more competitive. We are using Lean, which is a commonly used methodology to conduct process design and development, to make informed decisions about how to improve and streamline processes.
OK, so this gibes with what I heard back from IBMers myself. Still, I know several IBM folks that have recently jumped ship. They are all very happy for having made the escape. This does not bode well for a company that for years was the place to work. The death by a thousand processes sounds like a very real problem for big blue. I certainly hope that they can get things back on track.
[tags]IBM LEAN, IBM layoffs, IBM layoff, LEAN, IBM[/tags]
