#leadership

Today is a difficult moment for IBM, its employees, its shareholders, and its leadership. Sharp market reactions are never easy, and there will undoubtedly be tough questions in the days ahead.

That said, I have confidence in Arvind. Leading one of the world's largest technology companies isn't about one trading day or one earnings report—it's about making decisions that position the company for long-term success. Every CEO faces setbacks. What matters most is how they respond.

IBM has overcome major challenges throughout its history because its leaders stayed focused on execution, innovation, and serving customers. I believe Arvind and his executive team will learn from this, adapt where necessary, and continue building for the future.

Setbacks are temporary. Leadership is measured over years, not a single day. I'm confident IBM will continue to innovate, compete, and succeed over the long run.

If you’re a Band 6 people leader in the CXO, you’re impacted. About 90% of Band 5 is impacted and already informed on Monday.

At this rate, I don’t have much hope for individual contributors. I also don’t know what Tanya is going to do with her VP, Digital Channels title.
Good luck everyone

I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without CEOs,, VPs, politicians, fake markets, fake wars and, A.I, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.

CEO said

‘If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”

Regarding why we have not reduced the number of the personnel, it is true that our business has its ups and downs every few years, and of course, our ideal situation is to make a profit even in the low periods, return these profits to investors and maintain a high share price. I believe we should continue working toward this ideal. If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, however, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world. I believe we can become profitable with the current business structure in consideration of exchange rate trends and popularization of our platforms in the future. We should of course cut unnecessary costs and pursue efficient business operations. I also know that some employers publicize their restructuring plan to improve their financial performance by letting a number of their employees go, but at Nintendo, employees make valuable contributions in their respective fields, so I believe that laying off a group of employees will not help to strengthen Nintendo’s business in the long run. Our current policy is to achieve favorable results by continuously cutting unnecessary expenses and increasing business efficiency. Thank you for listening

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/stock/meeting/130627qa/03.html

Why is the Women Lead session being lead by a Man? He rewords what she says and does most of the talking. Can someone tell him to he is not a woman? Another example of Optum not getting it right. I just want him to shut up.

During my time at FIS, I observed instances where individuals with limited technical knowledge were placed in leadership positions over highly skilled resources. It highlighted the importance of having the right expertise and leadership approach in place.

So why wouldn't we be notified of the people leaving or changes in leadership if we work in PHCO? Also I don't have a town hall marked in my calendar for the 29th either..is this corporate or specific PHCO departments?

These questions are making him a little jittery. Bless it.

All these leaders are jumping ship with a nice financial cushion to fall back on, while the rest of us are left waiting anxiously, wondering what’s next.

What’s going on PW UHG org? New CISO, CDO, ETIPs head …. mostly from financial institutions. Any insight?

McKinsey have been poking around on cost for years why has the T5 layer of managers not been removed. In my experience they largely work from home, demand lots of travel and are blockers to true change viewi g everything through their personal lens.

At many large enterprises like SAP, having a highly concentrated, top-heavy layer of senior executives (like the T5 band) can become a major drag on agility. While senior leadership is necessary for governance, an over-reliance on a massive executive tier often does more harm than good.
Here are some other reasons why a heavy executive management layer can be a bad idea, a waste of resources, and a massive blocker to organizational change:

1. The "Telephone Game" of Communication
   When strategic goals have to travel down from the board through T5 executives, T4 directors, and T3 managers before reaching the people doing the actual work, the original message gets distorted. Key details are lost in translation, and the boots on the ground often end up executing something entirely different from what was intended.
2. Decision Paralysis and Over-Analysis
   With too many high-level leaders wanting to leave their mark, decisions require endless rounds of reviews, steering committees, and alignments. Simple choices that should take days get dragged out for months because too many executives need to "sign off" or feel included.
3. High Compensation, Low Direct Output
   Executive-level talent commands premium salaries, stock options, and bonuses. When a company carries a bloated executive tier, a massive portion of the budget is spent on individuals who manage and coordinate, rather than those who build, sell, or support the actual product. This is a highly inefficient allocation of capital.
4. Preservation of the Status Quo
   Executives at this level have often spent decades navigating the corporate political landscape to achieve their status. Because their success is tied to the existing system, they are naturally incentivized to protect it. Truly disruptive change threatens their established domains, making them quiet saboteurs of radical innovation.
5. Silo Creation and Empire Building
   To justify their premium titles and budgets, senior managers often focus on expanding their "empires"—hiring more people under them and fiercely guarding their departmental boundaries. This breeds internal competition and political infighting rather than cross-functional collaboration.
6. Detachment from the Customer and Technology
   The higher up a leader goes, the further they get from the actual product and the day-to-day frustrations of the customer. Decisions are often made based on polished PowerPoint decks and sanitized reports rather than the raw, messy reality of the market.
7. Death by PowerPoint (The "Tax" on Middle Management)
   To keep senior executives informed, middle managers and individual contributors must spend countless hours preparing status updates, dashboards, and presentations. This "reporting tax" drains valuable time and energy that should be spent on actual execution.
8. Dilution of Accountability
   When a project involves multiple senior stakeholders, responsibility becomes diffused. If a major initiative fails, the layered structure makes it incredibly easy to point fingers, meaning no single executive is held accountable, and the organization fails to learn from its mistakes.
9. Suffocation of Grassroots Innovation
   Great ideas in tech usually bubble up from the engineers, designers, and customer-facing staff. When there is a thick layer of top-down management, these ideas struggle to get noticed. If an idea doesn't align with an executive's personal roadmap, it is often ki-led before it can even be trialed.
10. Heavy Friction for Agile Pivots
    In a fast-moving market, companies need to pivot quickly. A massive executive layer acts like a heavy anchor. Reorganizing, shifting budgets, or changing product direction requires untangling a complex web of executive egos, personal OKRs, and political alliances, making rapid adaptation nearly impossible.

Change the reitrement and offer full earlier retirement. That will lower wfh employees, reduce salary expenses, and get the older employees just hanging around till 62 on out. Paying the half or less of their salaries for a couple of years is way cheaper than them hanging around till 62. An exit package won't even be necessary.

Make sure to wear those knee pads tomorrow and plenty of lipstick… who knows, you might do such an excellent job that your title might be saved!

KD the longstanding HR legend has put a curse on bp for the way she was dispatched.

Predict how and where KD’s curse will manifest itself. It sounds silly but, we’ve seen lots of things this last year…and a little Hogwarts magic is all ways fun times.

Why does IBM hire and retain so many leaders & mgrs who are clearly unqualified for the technical areas they oversee?

Many have no relevant experience, and their lack of competence is evident in their decisions...

I just do not get it.

No wander we have problems.

Imagine if he was CEO of VZ, would he emphasize writing AI love poems to his wife?

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/zayo-announces-planned-ceo-transition-120000446.html

Did he have another one of his ok boomer rants?

Why does bill get to leave when he sc--wed everything up? He should have to sit with his poor decisions until death. What a clown.

In addition to the rolling layoffs we've seen in marketing and sales I can confirm that additional layoffs have hit roles in project management and engineering. Naturally this will never be addressed, but it would be nice to know when this can be expected to subside. Extremely disappointing approach from leadership and such a departure from the transparency of the founders and subsequent leaders.

What’s keeping GB gainfully employed? Is he special or actually a great leader?

Hey Leadership!!

Check it out… laid off employees typically want nothing to do with the company that laid them off after they leave.

Guess what else? When their families and friends hear about it, they often don't want anything to do with that company either!!

What a concept! I know if I leave. I am taking my many, many lines and going straight to TMO.

Word of mouth is coming back to haunt these id--ts. Investors take note!

This is 100% happening. Put your house up for sell if you are in Lake Mary. Leadership knows that what’s been happening in Lake Mary has helped lead to Verizon’s downfall.

Sounds like Evanko wants to start his tenure off with a layoff this Thursday. Good luck!

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/jim-cramer-ibm-inexpensive-arvind-152555444.html

Any word on Value layoffs? I have heard about a reorganization of people. But, no specific details on how people will shift around in the DK organization. I suppose with the departure of Ken this was inevitable, and with the serious reduction of resources and capex we have alot of “strategist” and product managers not really doing anything.

I wish leaders would remember how this anticipation made them feel. Please comment anonymously. Do the right thing.

The most productive thing you can do today? Embrace JOMO. We’ve all been raised on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but in the corporate world, FOMO is just a polite term for a bottleneck.

If you feel the need to be in every 30-person meeting to "stay aligned," you aren't leading; you’re hovering. If you need to be CC'd on every email thread to "feel informed," you aren't empowering; you’re slowing the engine.

At Verizon, we are architecting an AI-enabled ecosystem to eliminate "the mundane". But tech alone won't give us speed. We need a cultural pivot from "Agreeable to Accountable".

JOMO - The Joy of Missing Out —is the ultimate leadership flex. * It’s the joy of trusting your team to take "Total Ownership" of the talent lifecycle without you in the room.

When we stop trying to be everywhere, we finally give our leaders the space to be innovative and quick. Speed doesn't come from more eyes on a project; it comes from fewer, more decisive ones.

Let’s stop rewarding "presence" and start rewarding "impact."
Who’s brave enough to decline that 4:00 PM "update" meeting and trust the team to handle it? That’s the BOLD standard.

#Leadership #JOMO

In past layoffs, does anyone come to you with a list of names and you give your feedback on who you can let go? Do they look to performance reviews? Something I was informed of led me to believe that feed back from PL will be applied in this layoff.

This will be a giant black (or brown in his case. . .) mark on the AK regime. Thankfully, there's no way they can keep AK in-charge for much longer after this historical disaster.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ibm-shares-sink-18-on-earnings-warning-d115d564

Weakness in infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, as clients shifted spending to hardware and memory

By: Robbie Whelan and Robb M. Stewart |
Updated July 14, 2026 10:52 am ET

International Business Machines shares sank as much as 25% in morning trading after the company issued a profit warning citing a shift in customer spending from software to AI hardware and memory chips.

IBM said the performance of its software and infrastructure business fell short of expectations in the second quarter, and the company didn’t react quickly enough to changing market conditions. Tuesday’s share decline was the largest intraday percentage decrease for the company on record.

Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a letter to investors that the weakness in IBM’s infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, driven by a shortfall in demand for the z17, the company’s flagship enterprise mainframe designed for the artificial intelligence age. The company expects infrastructure revenue to fall 7%, after previously anticipating a low-single-digit decline.

The rapid rise of AI caught makers of memory chips, especially the building blocks of high-bandwidth memory known as DRAM and the short-term flash memory known as NAND, off guard. That led to a capacity crunch that has pushed up prices on a wide variety of products—from laptops and gaming consoles to AI data-center servers—as much as 20% to 40% over a short period of time.

Big enterprise customers like banks—a core customer base for IBM—are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in chip prices because they buy an enormous amount of computing power from cloud companies to run in-house tools.

Consumer-facing companies are also feeling the crunch. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said price increases for its devices, including the iPhone, were unavoidable. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview.

IBM said it plans to report revenue of $17.2 billion and adjusted earnings of $2.93 a share for the June quarter. Both figures are short of analysts’ expectations of $17.9 billion and $3.01 a share.

Its pretax income margin is expected to have contracted 90 basis points, to 14.4%.

IBM is scheduled to release its official second-quarter figures next week.

Krishna said that in the past few weeks of June, clients shifted their quarterly capital expenditures toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases.

“While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization,” Krishna said.

“These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered,” Krishna said. He explained that IBM didn’t adapt and move quickly enough, and a number of large deals failed to close on the timelines expected.

“IBM got hit with a triple whammy,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said in a note to clients Tuesday. “The AI buildout is concentrating capex in hardware like memory chips and diverting spend from software and services. Markets are going to punish legacy players showing signs of losing ground in the AI race.”

Bourne predicted that as more customers shift away from software as a service to more enterprise AI, investors could see more quarters like this one: “But I think it’s a disruption story, not necessarily an extinction one for legacy software companies. Spending patterns will shift from the present focus, and the vendors that adapt their products to the changing market will stay competitive.”

I have had many great years working for Target but I think that Target is well past being able to return to what it was during its "glory" years. The culture has shifted in a negative way, well-respected leaders have moved on and there is more work than people. Target culture was always a bit of a double-edged sword. It could be difficult to infiltrate, especially if you weren't from the midwest, or weren't a Type A extrovert. That being said, the pride and positivity that people felt in working for Target consistently drove the team to go above and beyond to exceed requirements.

Yes, workload continues to be a problem but it is a symptom of a bigger problem. The biggest issue continues to be Target leadership. You have leaders within Target that (A) Don't understand the work that is associated with the roles on their team or (B) Do not know how to inspire/support their team to address workload or (C) Give the appearance of not caring.

Leaders have been hired from outside Target who did not have either the business skills or people skills to manage and inspire a team. For example, the VP of my area was an outside hire who previously managed a $25M business with 1-2 direct reports for a small, but aspirational retailer. Target put her in charge of a $6B+ business and she is ill-suited to lead people or strategy. She has been a failure and until recently, there was no accountability for bad team surveys or poor sales. The team was blamed and the ex-SVP allowed this to happen. There was finally HR intervention this year but guess what? She the VP is still here and sales are still declining!

My whole point in relating this story is that why should anyone work extra hard, beyond required hours and responsibilities, for a company where you aren't respected? I would have worked around the clock for a few of my past leaders who are no longer with Target because I respected them and they respected me. Hiring a "leader" who belittles her team in meetings, doesn't appreciate all the work being done and has driven team members to seek mental health treatment does not drive productivity or sales.

Bumped from @zy+1kx1vvht4.

3M leadership, listen up. You’ve let go most of the experienced, knowledgeable employees who built this company, stripping away decades of institutional know-how. You’re bringing in outsiders for top leadership roles while longtime insiders get pushed aside. And “Everyday Excellence” looks a lot like a system designed to weed out the overworked people still carrying the load after all the layoffs. On top of that, the new CEO is sitting with weak employee approval ratings around 47%.
If you don’t change course quickly, the risks are real and severe. Innovation will dry up without the people who actually know how to create and solve tough problems. Top talent will keep walking out the door, leaving a hollow operation behind. Quality will slip, mistakes will multiply, and liabilities will grow even worse. Culture and morale are already tanking, which ki-ls execution. Competitors who keep their edge will start eating your lunch in key markets. Short-term margins might look fine for now, but the long-term damage to performance, reputation, and shareholder value will be brutal.
Time to stop the bleeding. Respect the experience that built 3M, fix the disconnect with your people, and make real changes before it’s too late.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I'm tired of leadership acting like Verizon is a great place to work when we all know the reality is completely different. The facade is going to crumble sooner or later.

Curious, if any other people leaders have been informed on those that requested the VSP yet. And if so, how is that process going?

To Humana upper management….
The recent communication encouraging employees to use our time more efficiently to better serve our members was discouraging to many of us. While I understand the intent may have been to improve efficiency, the message came across as though our efforts are not valued or that we are not doing enough to meet our members' needs.
Many employees are already working under significant pressure. We were required to work mandatory overtime to meet organizational demands, did not receive merit increases this year, are closely monitored in nearly every aspect of our work, and face disciplinary action if chart audit scores fall below 95%. These expectations create an environment where employees feel they are constantly being measured but rarely recognized for the work they are already doing.
Those of us on the front lines genuinely care about providing high-quality care to our members. We understand the importance of efficiency, but efficiency alone should not come at the expense of employee morale. Communications that acknowledge employees' hard work, recognize the challenges we face, and express appreciation alongside performance expectations would be far more motivating than messages that imply we should simply be doing more.
I hope leadership will consider how these communications are perceived by employees. Feeling valued and supported is essential to maintaining engagement, retaining experienced staff, and ultimately providing the best possible service to our members.

One of the last rats off the ship or is he sick of leading the rudderless ship? Almost nothing from the c suite and every major position has left the last six months.

No wonder it feels like no one’s driving this ship, except the CIO lighting money on fire with all these new applications and projects that have gone nowhere

but does anyone ever see Kate J come right out and address the many layoffs over the past few weeks, or just continue to RIF more workers every month until she feels the time is right to sell off the remaining parts ?

Funny how “Impostor Syndrome” keeps trending on LinkedIn, as if the real impostors aren’t sitting comfortably in the executive suite polishing their mission‑statement buzzwords. Our Lake Mary Site Lead waxes and wanes almost daily on LinkedIn about personal growth and his random musings on overcoming self‑doubt, meanwhile TheLayoff.com reads like a Greek chorus calling out leadership that’s overstayed its ethical visa. But sure—let’s all meditate on our inner saboteur while the EC perfects the art of staying in the room long after the moral fire alarm went off. Let’s focus more on our personal shortcomings while leadership turns up the midyear gaslighting campaign to identify a new collection of layoff victims.

It’s interesting, really. Employees twist themselves into pretzels wondering if they’re “worthy,” while the folks steering the ship can’t find the compass, the map, or apparently the exit.

If impostors are defined by those who shouldn’t be in the role, the syndrome isn’t in the rank‑and‑file—it’s upstairs in 240G, thriving, well‑compensated, and oddly immune to self‑reflection.

But hey, personal growth is important. Just not that personal, apparently. Give it a rest, James.

CEO at Zayo

Oracle is very poor in its operations. The management is filled with oldies who don't know how to steer . Every one travels like they boarded a flight or train rather than sitting in driver seat. Need lots of layoff at the top. All EVP's, VP's, Senior Director roles need to be evaluated for transformation they did for the company in past 3-4 years and be removed if not.