IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

Banned from using the fifth floor?

"The fifth floor was "completely off-limits" from June 21 to 27, with several conference rooms set to host the visit. "Do not enter these rooms even if it appears no one is in there or it is not being used," the email added."

That's somewhat creepily reminiscent of the North Korean hotel with a fifth floor inaccessible to the public that turned out to be full of sinister offices, surveillance equipment and anti-American propaganda.

(This is also believed to be related to the detention and death of American student Otto Warmbier and may explain why the "stealing a poster" justification for his detention- which I'd previously assumed was simply him pinching some ten-a-penny propaganda from a random wall somewhere (admittedly something likely to get your average North Korean in deep shit in such a barbaric and repressive country)- was treated as such a big deal.)

Cheap attempts at humour aside, this is obviously just a coincidence and doesn't *really* say much about IBM, but it's still somewhat strange and unfortunate.

Happens everywhere but...

I worked at a Mars unit for a while when the Brothers Grimm were still in charge. We did the whole 'paint everything' schtick, only to be well-chuffed when one of the Brothers emailed about the enormous waste of time and money that had occurred in getting the place painted just for them. Shortly afterwards, a company-wide policy on maintenance was well-received...

"Should you need private meeting spaces, utilize the 4th floor. DO NOT TOUCH any items or objects you might see around the space, including signage, TVs, chairs, and tables."

Now I'm really curious as to WHY.

Why?

Why any of them would want to get too close to the "downsizer-in-chief" is what I want to know.

And so it goes

Change 'IBM' and insert CQC visit to xxxx NHS Trust

Been there and done it.

Interestingly for me on a my late visit to my usual clinical area (standing in for full time of absent colleague) I happened upon one bedspace with visitors and after I apologised/made excuses to nurse present for being late; said visitors introduced themselves as CQC inspectors. After short question and frank answer exchange I left to finish my day (I normally had daily workload that NHS regs said were 2.7 wte per day)

CQC visited my directorate head and clinical manager and within 6 weeks trust had advertised;interviewed and selected person for 2nd post (normally a 6mo process)

Perhaps CEO visits should always without entourage to get a true picture

Most effective flag officer I ever met...

...would show up in business casual, have his uniformed staff pin down the O5's, O6's, public affairs droids, strap hangers, sycophants, sociopaths, etc in 'urgent' sidebar meetings and somehow escape from the handlers. He would then walk the halls, buy lunches, help with labor... whatever people seemed to need he would just fall into doing. He would treat everyone he met with respect, and just listen. People would talk to him, and he would act on a somewhat clearer picture than possible from the wheelbarrow loads of crap that had been prepared

Sadly leaders like that are an endangered species.

Hold on a second no wonder IBM are a mess

They have one person acting as President, Chief exec AND chairman?

What sort of governance structure is this? Does she have a stick with a hand attached so she can pat her own back too each time she makes a decision?

Act normally

..like go around and fire some people.

Don't share the bathroom

She might take the mask off and reveal her inner lizard :-)

(have a sense of humour before you donwvote me!)

Pathetic

Pathetic. They should grow up.

Don't forget to hide all the Dell Pc's

that they use for their desktops

Bah!

My favorite bit is the seat-filling stand-in.

With a bit of retooling one might use this technique to avoid charging against accrued leave.

Wankers

We used to get pretty much the same communication when any big boss was coming for a 'surprise visit'. They even asked us to submit questions once that we might like to ask them so they could be approved and then the centre leader would try and pretend it was completely off the cuff. I always wanted to turn up in my y-fronts and vomit on their shoes just to see the reaction.

The tale of my pretend Asian family and the HR VP visit

I worked in a company where the new VP of HR was scheduled to visit our office. The day before, she was visiting another office, and word got back that she wasn't impressed with the place. Our local HR sent out panicked instructions that we were to have nothing personal on our desks, specifically including pictures of family. While I didn't have any such things, and everyone else busily cleared their desks, I definitely Googled "family picture", printed out the first high resolution one, and framed it. It happened to be an Asian family, and I'm not Asian, but I didn't think anything of it.

The next day, I saw the local HR Director approaching my desk with an Asian lady I didn't recognise, and I suddenly realised who it was. I just managed to slam the picture into my desk drawer before she was introduced to me.

Despite the fact that I was the most senior Web Developer in the European region at the time, I was introduced as the offices' resident poster maker for the Sports And Social club.

It later turned out that she actually had no objection to family photos or personal stuff on desks, but our local idiot HR bods had totally misinterpreted and over-reacted to some innocent remark she made.

"This means you should wear what you always wear – jeans, sport coat, polo, whatever floats your boat."

If there weren't any T-shirts with ...interesting...slogans it must have been an opportunity wasted: IBM Meant Business or How Have The Mighty Fallen would have been suitable examples.

Underpants

Trust they were also asked to wear underpants on that day.

http://nickelodeon.wikia.com/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Underpants-On-His-Head_Man

No wonder they're in such trouble if they have someone who can waste their time on this crap.

"will not be here due to [...] work travel" LUL

Wow

Are IBM employees really so bad-mannered that they require such condescension? That must be a terrible place to work.

HPE's CEO Antonio Neri doesn't appear to issues like this...

Really? If that is the case, last week at HPE Discover, I think we violated a whole bunch of IBM CEO interaction rules when Antonio Neri was around. Good thing he has no rules about taking selfies with partners, staff, and even cardboard cutouts of he staff that couldn't be in attendance...

https://twitter.com/HPE_Discover/status/1009913883631419392

https://twitter.com/DeanColpitts/status/1009918651061768192

You'd think a CEO would want to hear from their staff to determine just how well things are going, instead of be insulated from them by a bunch of kissasses and brownnosers. No wonder IBM people are so miserable...

dcc

I've encountered two types of CEO

Those who visit and walk around the office all by themselves, chatting to people about their jobs. And those who get escorted. To be fair to the people doing the escorting, I think they were doing so to insulate rank and file for good reason. IBM sounds like an absolutely ghastly company to work for.

Another indication of....

IBM going into a death spiral. In 5 years, IBM as we know it, will not exist

" high school vice-principals in charge. These folks are good at two things: playing office politics and looking good when the big boss shows up".

Disagree! The ones that are good at it quickly move on to become principles/head teachers. The ones that are good at teaching are the ones that get stuck as deputies.

Can anyone tell the difference

between a normal cup cake and a laxative infused one? If not I think an all night baking session is on order.

"This means you should wear what you always wear"

Reminds me of a couple of instances from my past.

First was a story of when INMOS was bought by ThornEMI there was a demo to be done at Thorn's HQ and the INMOS person to do it asked what he should wear - he was told to come in normal work clothes .... apparently turned out a rainbow stripe sweater was a new experience for staff at Thorn HQ!

Then a few years later we had a meeting with "important people" from HP who were presenting the architecture of a processor we might colaborate on and we were all instructured to wear suits. So we all turned up to meeting room in suits and (while admitedly a couple of senior HP management came in jackets and ties) we waited for the HP architrects to arrive (their flight was delayed) ... and they were, not unexpectedly, all wearing jeans and t-shirts!

I knew someone who worked in a UK IBM office many years ago when the company rule was all visitors from other parts of IBM (irrespective of their seniority) swapped they id badge for a local internal visitors badge. However, due to a cock-up in the configuration of the security setup there was a staircase between floors in the office which the visitors badge would allow visitoris to enter ... but not exit. So, I was told it was not unusual for local employees (who didn't have this problem) to opem the door to the staircase to find some high ranking visitor who assumed they were allowed through any door in any IBM office but had been stuck behind an non-opemign door for some time!