IBM's Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe IBM is cracking down on remote workers, ordering unlucky employees to either come into one of six main offices and work "shoulder to shoulder" – or leave for good. In a confidential video message to staff seen by The Register on Tuesday, chief marketing officer Michelle Peluso told her US marketing troops they must work at "a …
Would it be wrong to suppose that once they've got stats on who actually turns up for work (rather than saying they "telecommute") that they'll be some nice performance comparisons between the teams and pretty swiftly after that, a realisation that having 6 separate marketing teams in one country is probably 5 too many?
The US market is a little different to other countries. It's heavily city based, and one city responds differently to another. Compare San Francisco to Princeton, Texas, for example. Or even Ann Arbor to Detroit.
There is a much stronger argument for regional marketing in the US than in the UK. We have regional differences but they are less significant and the borders are much softer. The only real US style boundary we have is the Severn and even that doesn't stop people commuting to Cribs Causeway.
You can have multiple marketing teams. It depends on the number of products and the size of a team.
There are a couple of issues though.
1) Who pays for the relocation costs?
2) Does their salary change based on the difference in cost of living?
Going from Podunk Indiana to New York City... doesn't work.
This is in fact a stealth RIF. She's counting on a majority of staff saying Alpha Mike Foxtrot to the borg.
Posted Anon for the obvious reasons... I escaped from the borg and they are still hunting for me. ;-)
Yeah, did you read my post?
RIF == Reduction In Force.
If its voluntary, it doesn't have to be reported. Some could keep an open headcount slot and be instructed not to fill it. (HR plays some weird games)
Relocation can be expensive and while they may pay some of the costs, some may be a small fraction.
And the lack of salary adjustment is the true sign that this is a stealth RIF action.
I can remember when IBM ran a program that would relocate those able to work in a foreign country to move back to the foreign country but work at local rates. (In short, you get sent packing, and your salary drops. ) See South Africa and India.... I don't know how many, if anyone took advantage of this.
Probably six too many in fact. I can recognise a death spiral when I see one. Back in 1990-3 many people were saying that IBM had had it. I disagreed: "a legacy system is one that works".
But this kind of management behaviour is a dead giveaway of a dying company. The managers get paranoid and want to haul everyone into the office so they can spy on them, micromanage them, and do their best to drive them mad. Then they can fire them for poor performance and blame the company's demise on them.
Straight out of Dilbert. (Although, to be fair, most of Dilbert is straight out of the real world).
The part that I find odd is that a person could live in a suburb of Atlanta, but be working on a team on LA, and instead of going to the Atlanta office, be forced to move to LA, despite living within a semi-reasonable distance of *an* IBM office. Too much to hope for that the unlucky person would be permitted to switch to the team based at the office already nearby, rather than moving to where the cost of living is three times higher? This isn't about being "competitive" or "x factor" or any of the other buzzword-bingo terms used here, this is so a managerial person that reports up the chain to our videogenic friend here can go and count noses and shoulder surf to make sure people are working, to keep the minions firmly under thumb. If you're looking to get someone to spend seven figures on an AS/400 upgrade, you don't work that deal over the phone from the other side of the country. And airplanes, hotels, rental cars...they add up fast, especially if the saleperson has to make several trips. Add in more of the same for "presales engineering" on at least some of those trips, you can quickly find expenses exceed the "savings" of putting everyone in to one location.
Fact is, it boils down to trust..or lack thereof, in one's employees. So you gather them together where you can watch them...c'mon, these the salespeople, they're on commission. If they goof off, they don't get paid...at least, not very much. Besides...if "A" has zero sales for very long, its not hard to think "Gee, maybe we should be talking to A, find out what's going on." Maybe there's leads A is chasing but the customer has to work the budget, and pry more money out of the accountants, maybe A is watching Youtube all day. Either way, A isn't getting much income. That's a self-correcting situation...A will eventually need money and get busy selling stuff, will drum up new leads for the stagnant ones, or move on to some other job where doing nothing pays well and is appreciated...like being a member of Congress. They're paid well and, generally, the less they do the better since everything they do ends up costing billions of dollars for no return or make life less happy for the average taxpayer.
Actually, I was a contractor there on two separate occasions - once for 18 months or so, another for just under five years. The first time I switched teams once, and the second time twice, and possibly a third was pending at the time I resigned. But...in the sense you mean of actually being an IBM employee, no; I was a yellow-stripe.
This is class.. I mean.. it's been 15 years since I watched a TV advert,
but around 2000, IBM were the ones flogging remote working, with IBM technology making it all work!
Are they still doing that ?
some message.. look - we make technology that allows folk to work at home (I mean it's shit like.. we don't even use it... but you know.. if you want to buy it we'll sell you it for a small fortune).
(p.s. I happily work 50%+ of my time at home - not for IBM! - and get a shit load more work done than in an office... but then I work for a company where my boss has a real job as well as looking after me..)
DIE IBM DIE.
but around 2000, IBM were the ones flogging remote working, with IBM technology making it all work!
Are they still doing that ?
Probably, but as is the way with ALL heavily-flogged products from IBM, they know better than to rely on anything internally they sell for excessive dollars externally. Forget eating their own dogfood, they RA'ed the dog.
But sometimes the reason they have folks doing full-time telecommuting is they don't want to cough up the expenses of providing actual on-site office space. The only people making money at IBM are the ones charging for office space and site fees for on-site employees (or even the fees for email and badges for those telecommuters)
Have to laugh at the comment from their Chief Mangling Officer:
"...But we have gotten to a place where we're excited about the path forward..."
I think the path is downwards, not forward. Has been for 20-25 years now.
a realisation that having 6 separate marketing teams in one country is probably 5 too many?
There's something to be said for having a marketing team on site that knows your local capabilities.
I used to work at an R&D firm with a number of different activities at different sites. Most of the exciting engineering work happened at the Pennsylvania HQ, but I worked in a southerly lab site bought on the cheap when the Cold War ended. It had some great lab facilities and worked on military programs for composites and corrosion abatement. Which meant I got to do such exciting things as watching steel rust over a period of months and write reports on the experience. My office gradually withered over 9 years from 120 personnel to 10, when I was laid off. It closed a few months after I was booted out the door.
My site's chronic problems were:
1) The rest of the company didn't know we existed, and
2) The marketing folks couldn't sell us to customers when they remembered we existed.
Predictably, marketing people were based out of the Pennsylvania HQ. Marketing is a reasonable HQ function. But if those marketing people found out we existed, we were a bullet in their 20-page presentations ("excellent accelerated environmental testing lab") and they never reminded the HQ engineers we were supposed to be used on the new contracts. Sometimes we invited marketing folks down to our facility, where they got the deluxe tour, a vacation on sunny beaches, and learned what we did. ("So...you make metals rust?") They never never quite figured out how that was important to marketing an R&D firm. (Like the larger US economy, the DoD loses about 5% of its annual budget to corrosion-related hardware wear and tear. There's research money in them thar hills.) Being based out of the HQ, they were immersed in very different engineering capabilities than an environmental test lab.
I would really have loved to have seen an on-site marketing team who knew local capabilities inside and out, and how to market environmental test capabilities. Instead we got military retirees hired for their contacts and networking in the DoD, plus rural Pennsatuckey used car salesmen who wouldn't know ASTM B-117 salt fog testing from design of experiments.
Hell, I would've liked it if the rest of the company knew we existed. It was awesome to coordinate testing with the facilities at HQ and have a lab minion say, "Well, we can't start the corrosion testing for three months."
Me: "Er, why?"
HQ lab: "Well, our tiny salt fog chamber is backed up for three months. It's in high demand since it's the only salt fog chamber in the company."
Me: "...We have three giant, programmable, humidity / temperature / salt fog chambers down here hungry for work."
HQ lab: "Really, I never knew about those."
Me: "We sent pamphlets and gave presentations to you."
HQ lab: "Oh, those. That was five years ago and we forgot."
On site marketing hacks who knew and understood our capabilities would've been great. Centralized personnel can lose touch with local capabilities of big organizations.
The writing was on the wall when they started their GD drive, sourcing cheap labour elsewhere did all the harm, I suspect many customers dropped IBM due to this.
Somewhere an ex-IBM bean counter executive is walking around bragging on his CV how much he saved IBM in salary costs. Unfortunately he isn't around to see how he ruined the business...
The IBM PC was, for the time, a good product - PS/2 was CRAP. Proprietary *everything*...damned Microchannel...back in the day you could get a good sound card for $90...ISA. An entry-level MCA card, $160...and that was in 1991ish. Monitors...mine lasted a year before one of the guns went out, necessitating replacement. Pins on the video card so fragile they bent if you looked at them wrong. I suppose it was a decent system when it worked, but it was expensive to buy and more expensive to upgrade. I was very happy to retire my 8088 PS/2 70 for a self-built 386SX...with a ****ing ISA bus.
Great idea.
Then I happen on this article, telling me that an IBM BlueMix cloud thingy is now free.
I'm sure IBM is going to have a roaring success if they manage their cloud like that.
"IBM - I've been Moved"
Somebody knows.
Many years ago, like 1981-1984, I lived for a few years in the home of IBM, Endicott, NY. Large parts of the centre of the town (sorry, village) were either IBM plants or offices, or car parks for IBM employees. At one point, there was a dead-end street in between two car parks (not multi-storey, duh), and IBM bought the street from the Endicott trustees and converted the two car parks and the street into one big car park.
Consequence: you got to hear all the dumb jokes made about IBM. And that was one of them. The company even had a special subsidiary or something whose role was to buy employees' houses when the company asked them to move to another location, so that they didn't have to wait for the house to sell on a person-to-person basis.
So if they are being told they may have to move to a location far from where they are now, well, that's not a surprise.
Ah, good old Endicrotch. I passed through a few years ago and it was a real hole, worse than ever. At least they're not making anyone move there, or Armonk.
That was the reason Gene Amdahl quit and started his own computer company.
I suggest that newly disaffected employees do the same.
P.S. this is what Mountain View will be in 30 years.
"IBM - I've been Moved"
Remember once at a conference in the US hearing one attendee tell another how as a child he'd moved house almost every year - and the person he was talking to asked if this was because his father had been in the militarybut got the reply "no, worse than that, he worked for IBM".
I follow the mantra "Never trust a salemen, Why? because it saves time later"
But really, would you even allow anyone through the door trying to sell a product where the supplier rejects some of the benefits themselves.
Only a marketing 'genius' could come up with that pitch Mind you once the marketing dept has been converted to a call centre it would be ripe for outsourcing...
Evil marketeer here.
Having preyed on many a clueless PHB over the years you are right not to trust any of them. Always remember that "Award Winning Salesman" means awarded for sucking money out of customers. Like a successful paedophile being promoted to Head of Social Services, this is not a good thing for the customers.
Smart managers start with a problem they want to solve, not a new piece of shiny they want to buy. They listen to salespeople and watch their pitches but they always remember it's been tailored to make that product look good and should be aware that the product may right at the edge of what it can do without massive extra work.
"...Smart managers start with a problem they want to solve, not a new piece of shiny they want to buy..."
This!
This has always been part of my approach to interviewing consultant level staff.
First off for anything technical, ask what they feel strongest in - that way you avoid asking questions on their weakest subject by accident. And if they're crap at that, chances are they suck at everything else, too.
I would expect anyone at that level to be able to sketch me out a quick back of the napkin design on a chosen bit of tech. The next question can be the toughest though..."Ok...so now pretend I am the FD of a company...tell me _why_ I should buy that..."
I'm looking for the ones who can say you shouldn't or asking me what I hope to achieve or...what are the problems we are having and let's approach it from that perspective rather than selling shiny.
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