#transformation

First, they let go of the very people who were delivering things. Teams and leaders who were delivering agentic solutions were let go.
The worst part is that they retained bootlicker SDs who wouldn’t deliver a single feature but were good at playing politics.

Those SDs retained their useless teams, many of whom have little to no exposure to technology beyond community college, and they are now responsible for designing some of the worst customer experiences. We are expecting to be AI first company with these kind of people.

But hey, thanks, Tanya and Nancy, for this brilliant display of leadership.

Orchestrate cross-functional alignment, manage transformation frameworks, and maintain status/OKR reporting for executive leadership

No M&A possible until after 2027 but why should that stop the cutting to hire this position

Remember what employees were told when this started?

“When our membership shifts, we need to shift our organization accordingly.”

That was the story.

Membership changed. The healthcare environment changed. Centene had to respond. The VSP was presented as part of adapting to those realities and positioning the company for the future.

For the people actually living through it, that meant deciding whether to take a separation package, watching friends and coworkers disappear, wondering whether layoffs were next, and being told over and over about transformation, simplification, and the mission.

It sounded like Centene was reacting to circumstances.

Now listen to the story Sarah London told investors. Centene chose not to “hunker down. Instead, leadership decided to “redesign and transform the company.”

They are asking:

“What are the capabilities that we need and what talent do we need?” And the destination?An “industry-leading cost structure.”

That's not quite the same effin’ story, is it?

One story sounds like: Membership changed, so unfortunately the organization has to change with it.

The other sounds like: We are deliberately redesigning the company, deciding which capabilities and people we need, exiting business that doesn't produce sufficient returns, and engineering a lower cost structure.

And here's what really pi---s me off. While employees were living through all of this uncertainty, Centene's financial condition was improving.

Q2 net earnings: $1.09 BILLION.
Operating cash flow: $3.59 BILLION.
Adjusted EPS guidance: raised to more than $4.80.

Marketplace strategy: margin over membership. Businesses that can't produce sustainable economics? Leave them.

People and capabilities that don't fit the redesigned company? Well, now we know the question leadership says it has been asking.

What happened to our membership?
What talent do we need?
How do we get through this difficult period together?
What capabilities do we need?
How do we protect the people carrying out the mission?
How do we achieve an “industry-leading cost structure”?

And THAT is the part every Centene employee who survived should understand. This wasn't necessarily a storm you survived. It was a company being redesigned around you.

And if reducing the cost structure is part of the strategy, better financial results don't necessarily mean the danger has passed. They may mean the strategy is working.

So when another town hall rolls around and you're told about the mission, transformation, simplification, resilience, or whatever this week's vocabulary is, remember the vocabulary leadership uses when the audience changes.

Employees got the story about circumstances. Investors got the story about strategy. Employees heard why change was necessary. Wall Street heard what Centene was building.

Same CEO.
Same company.
Same transformation.
Very different effin story.

And the people left behind now get to carry that mission with fewer coworkers, less institutional knowledge, more work, and absolutely no reason to believe leadership has finished asking:

“What talent do we need?”

NoCenteam free advice: You’re being fed false truths. Run as fast as you can. There’s life after these charlatans.

Minneapolis Public Schools is considering closing up to 16 schools due to declining enrollment and a significant number of empty desks. District leaders presented three options to address this issue, aiming to improve educational offerings like art and music. The proposals come amid a substantial budget deficit and face opposition from parents and the teachers' union. A board vote on a plan is expected in November, after school board elections. The district has been discussing these potential closures, termed "transformation," since 2023.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/09/16/minneapolis-looks-to-close-as-many-as-16-schools-amid-declining-enrollment/

Dropping an opinion here that I hope actually reaches someone, since I've heard senior leadership is listening for input right now. I also know a lot of people here would be curious how this might all play out. Here’s a take to sit with.

Start with the pieces. Comcast is splitting NBCUniversal and Sky off into their own company. What's left? connectivity, the broadband and cable business, becomes the core company going forward. For the first time, this business has to stand on its own in front of investors without NBCUniversal's cash flow underneath it. Right as that's happening, Jason Armstrong stood up at Goldman Sachs and called this the largest cost transformation in company history, billions in savings are coming. In the same breath, he said broadband losses aren't improving this quarter. Stock dropped over 6% that day, and it dropped on the subscriber number, not the savings number. Wall Street got both stories in the same sentence and only reacted to ONE of them. That already tells you cost efficiency isn't what moves this stock.

These moves feel like a room full of CFOs racing to cut the org chart while staying completely tone deaf to what the Customer actually experiences. That matters because cost transformation and Customer stabilization aren't the same lever. This is an internal savings story, not a Customer story, full stop. Cutting management layers or overhead shows up in margin next quarter. It does nothing to change why a household picks a $30 fiber offer over us.

Even if the program runs perfectly, it's solving a different problem than the one actually dragging on the stock, and the timing makes that worse. Connectivity is about to be judged as a standalone, and a standalone broadband company showing margin discipline while still bleeding subscribers doesn't read as disciplined. It reads like a company that got its cost base in order because it couldn't get its Customer numbers in order.

The earmarking backs this up. Armstrong pointed to wireless expansion and monetizing data as where some of this money goes, not broadband pricing, not service, not the product the Customer is actually leaving over.

Broadband lost roughly 650K subscribers last year and another 230K plus already this year, and fiber keeps expanding into our footprint.

We've also underperformed the market for close to 3 years straight now, well below where the stock sat at its highs. Trimming layers doesn't touch any of that, because none of it was ever built around the Customer to begin with.

The take is that this doesn't just fail to move the stock, it makes it worse.

Play it forward for a second, connectivity goes public on its own, still losing subscribers, still facing the same pricing pressure, now carrying a cost story instead of a Customer story. That's a demand side problem being treated with a supply side fix, and Wall Street has already shown which side it prices. The Customer sees nothing change either, same price, same service, same frustration. Cutting costs without moving those numbers doesn't buy goodwill from either side. It just proves the transformation shrank the business instead of fixing the thing that's actually been dragging it down for years, because the Customer was never the one being optimized for.

With the new leader from T-Mobile Germany reportedly moving into Anil’s TPD organization, does anyone know what the actual timeline is for the next phase?

There has been a lot of discussion that GTS is only the first step, with broader TPD/GNT consolidation and some rebadging potentially following next year as part of an AI-led transformation involving Deloitte/IBM.

If that direction is accurate, when would changes under Anil’s organization actually start, and which TPD teams/functions are expected to be affected by consolidation or rebadging?

I think one of Nike’s biggest problems is that we’ve been so dominant for so long that we became too self serving. At some point, we stopped listening enough to what’s happening outside of Beaverton. We became too confident that we knew the consumer and that what worked for us before would continue to work.

Meanwhile, a lot of other brands were actually listening. They were closer to consumers, closer to culture, and quicker to understand how the market was changing. Especially with Gen Z and now Gen Alpha, the way people discover brands, connect with products, and decide what to buy has changed dramatically. I don’t think we changed fast enough with them.

And now we’re trying to fix it, but we’re already playing catch-up.

I think that’s partly a Nike problem, but I also think it’s an EH problem. When he came back, there was a real opportunity to challenge how we operate and change the way we think. But a lot of what I’ve seen feels like we’re trying to bring back the same Nike playbook that worked a few years ago. There’s nothing wrong with going back to some of our strengths, but the world we’re operating in today isn’t the same world.

There’s also an irony to Nike being an American company. Being American was a huge part of why Nike became what it became. American sports, athletes, and pop culture had enormous influence around the world. But I think that can also be one of our weaknesses today because we still tend to look at the world through a very US centric lens.

The world doesn’t work that way anymore. People aren’t only looking up to the US to tell them what’s cool or what’s next. Sport, fahsion and culture are coming from everywhere now and sometimes I feel like there is so much happening out there that we’re simply missing because we’re too busy talking to ourselves.

That’s the part that worries me the most. I don’t think the answer is just to get Nike back to what it used to be. We need to keep what made Nike special, but also become much better at listening again. We need to get outside of Beaverton, be closer to what’s actually happening in the world, and let the world influence us as much as we want to influence the world.

But I’m also afraid this isn’t something that will change overnight. And honestly, I’m not even sure it will change at all unless there is enough pain to force real change.

That’s probably the hardest part. Big organizations don’t fundamentally change just because people know they should. They change when the cost of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.

And when you’ve been successful for this long, there are a lot of people in senior positions who grew up in the existing system and benefited from it. Asking them to think differently isn’t just asking them to change how they work. In some cases, you’re asking them to question the structure, the roles, and even the way their own value has been defined for years.

That’s why I’m not sure the people sitting in those high chairs will naturally want to step outside of their comfort zone. Because real transformation could also mean changing their own role, reducing their influence, or even questioning whether some of those roles need to exist in the same way anymore. That’s a very difficult thing for any leader to voluntarily do.

So maybe Nike needs to feel significantly more pain before we see the level of change that’s actually required. I hope that’s not the case, but I worry that small fixes, reorganizations, and bringing back pieces of the old playbook won’t be enough.

Because the problem isn’t just the playbook. It’s the mindset and the system behind it.

And unless we’re willing to challenge that, we may keep changing things around the edges while protecting the very structure that got us here.

What will we learn about today? That their idea of making people more comfortable is to add a Wellbeing center to a fully saturated, overpopulated, and loud office environment? Or pickleball for all? None of that will improve the quality of the experience for the customer, who can’t hear us on our calls due to the noise around us. The only part that makes me feel included is that it stinks for everyone.

Just saw on LinkedIn that people are getting promoted to Associate Director without having a single person report to them.
I know this person, and let’s just say “brilliant” wouldn’t be the first word that comes to mind. He has been moving teams and now in marketing.

Associate Director is a title that should have been abolished by now. But apparently, we’re calling this a “transformation.”

Does anyone know how much this transformation has cost the company? And how many Americans lost their jobs to other countries?

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/lr4q3x1fx

Anyone else see the invite for the All Hands on October 29th? Do we think that is when more layoffs will be announced?

Here's the situation, plain as I can lay it out.

Company's got a pipeline business that hit its revenue ceiling in Liquids a couple years quicker than anybody planned for — which in my experience just means somebody upstairs was doing math they wanted to be true instead of math that was true. Meantime the CEO's already halfway out the door and told the shareholders there's a dividend increase coming, like a man promising a woman flowers before he's checked if the truck's even got gas in it. Now there's a hole in the budget and a promise that's already out the door and can't be walked back without looking weak, and weak ain't a look CEOs favor.

They spent three years on some transformation program — N75, whatever they're calling it — s'posed to teach the whole company how to run leaner and smarter. What it actually did was fix a couple small things and then discover outsourcing, which is the corporate version of not doing the dishes and just eating off paper plates. Looks like progress for a while. Ain't nobody teaching anybody nothing. The people running that program were more interested in everybody feeling good about it than anybody actually being right about it — which is how you end up with three years and a stack of PowerPoints and not much else to show.

So now the CFO, decent man far as I can tell, figures somebody's gotta go first, and it might as well be him — starts gutting his own department to prove he'll make the hard calls before he asks anyone else to. Only trouble is, cutting without fixing the process just moves the hurt down the hall. Outsource the finance work, centralize what's left, and all you've done is hide where the bodies are buried, not bury fewer of 'em. Somebody else picks up that work now, some vendor who don't know the business, and the risk don't go away — it just goes quiet for a while.

Way I see it, that's a company that made a promise it couldn't keep, and it's about to spend the next year proving it, one department at a time, while everybody who saw it coming stays quiet and waits to see whose name ends up on it when the bill finally comes due.

Penny said (and I’m paraphrasing) “We are in the business of serving clients, and trust is our currency.” Well, guess what? That applies in the Field as it does in the Home Office. And the thing about trust is… it’s hard to gain, easy to lose. How does one lose trust? By over promising, under delivering, by saying you will do something and don’t do it, by putting your faith in things that aren’t real. And we are in a critical point in the firm’s history, where this currency matters more than ever. Don’t be dazzled by pretty slides. There’s a common saying in the consulting world … “death by a thousand slides”. Why does this phrase exist? Slides will not bring you the clarity you need. Nor CoPilot. Only by asking the right questions to trustworthy people, who love you and the firm enough to tell you the truth, not necessarily what you want to hear. Go and see how work is actually being done. Don’t assume your (implicit) assumptions are right. That’s how initiatives fail and organizations walk off a cliff. Read the book “Confronting Reality”. I don’t want us to end up in that book in a future edition. Learn how organizations fail in their transformational efforts…. Blockbuster, Kmart, BlackBerry… In some cases, the fall came swiftly. Blockbuster was successfully, until suddenly it’s not. In other cases, these organizations are a shadow of their formal self. Think BlackBerry. Not because they don’t have smart people. They all do, incredibly smart people. It’s because the smart people assume they’re right, and they stopped listening to the people closest to the work. It’s because they’re planning in ivory towers, completely ignoring the battlefield below. And the people bringing them the “news” so they can make adjustments to their strategies are n steps removed from the field. Watered down intel, like the telephone game we played as a kid. And guess what? It’s all entirely predictable.

“As we continue Forging the Modern Mutual, this meeting will provide leaders with an update on the company's enterprise transformation efforts, including key milestones, insights, and what you should know as we continue to shape our future operating model and ways of working.
Note: Given the topic, we've opened this meeting to include assistant directors senior directors, and vice presidents, regardless of people leader responsibilities. We are also inviting the Elevate cohort-including SLT, ELG, vice presidents, and managing directors-for awareness and the opportunity to participate.
While in-person attendance is encouraged, given the larger group, seating will be on a first come, first served basis. More details will be shared closer to the event.“

Snap. Snap.

After repeated layoffs, burnout, and a media leadership culture that seems to treat people as disposable, dropping a 20+ year media agency partner without a pitch feels completely on brand. It’s the same management philosophy applied at scale: destroy institutional knowledge, call it transformation, and assume a shiny new operating model will compensate for the human damage left behind. Then send an internal email written by AI, announcing the new media partner - an email so cringe that reads like ChatGPT huffed a whiteboard full of “synergy” and “growth driver” and vomited out a LinkedIn thought-leadership post wearing a suit

Start a list to help the CEO prepare:

1. SIU Debacle
2. Updates on the new CRCO (Chief Risk Compliance Officer)
3. Compliance Transformation 5.0
4. When is Centene rebranding to Humana
5. Secret Santa
6. .......

This is apparently my next “article,” because someone needs to do it. The starting point is Centene’s announcement of Bradley Bolivar as its new CIO.

For those who slept through history class, Simón Bolívar was “El Libertador,” the guy who helped lead multiple South American countries to independence from Spanish rule and had a habit of overthrowing the existing order. And now the new CIO is Bradley Bolivar, not Simón, and as far as I know they’re not related. But given what Bradley is walking into at Centene, the name is almost too good. So I’m calling my completely unlicensed prediction of what happens next The Bolivar Revolution.

I went digging because executive press releases tell you approximately nothing. Bolivar comes from Fannie Mae with a legitimately serious résumé in cloud, architecture, data, AI, automation, security, and enterprise transformation. And unlike some executive bios where “AI” magically appeared around November 2022, this guy appears to have actually done some of this sh-t.

The timing is also hilarious. Bolivar isn’t the only senior person leaving Fannie Mae. They’ve been going through major workforce and leadership upheaval, including roughly 1,200 departures in 2025 (8200 in 2024, 7000 now) and another recent purge of senior officials. Some of the latest eliminations were even attributed partly to increasing AI capabilities. So naturally Bradley likely looked around at that widespread organizational hellfire and apparently thought, ”You know where I’d like to go next? Centene.” 😉
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/articles/trump-administration-dismisses-dozen-officials-194058657.html

Here’s my prediction. There are four ways this could go:

A: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Bolivar inherits Brian LeClaire’s organization, Susan Moon and DXE keep rolling, Accenture keeps collecting checks, “AI” gets stapled onto a few more PowerPoints, somebody invents six new acronyms, and eventually we declare the transformation transformed. (least likely)

B: The new sheriff starts asking questions. Why does this organization exist? Who owns this capability? Why is this outsourced? What exactly does this SOW produce? Where’s the data? How are we measuring value? And my personal favorite: why can’t Centene do this ourselves? Accenture probably isn’t going anywhere, but having to prove your value to the new CIO is a little different from being embedded by the old one, given this is basically the playbook they’ve used a few times before.

C: Fannie Mae South. This is the one to watch. Fannie is shedding experienced senior people at exactly the moment Bolivar takes over Centene technology. If one or two trusted Bolivar lieutenants suddenly change their LinkedIn employer to Centene, grab popcorn. Architecture, data, AI, engineering, security, and digital could start getting redrawn around his operating model rather than the one he inherited. As previously discussed by many, Moon and several others came from Brian LeClaire’s previous orbit. That’s how executive networks work. The interesting question is what happens when the new CIO shows up with a network of his own.

D: The plot twist. Bolivar eventually discovers that eliminating internal expertise, institutional knowledge, measurement, governance, and the annoying people who knew how all the pieces actually worked together wasn’t quite the efficiency play somebody thought it was. Centene quietly rebuilds the same connective tissue under exciting new names, adds three layers of management to it, and probably pays somebody $8-20 million to explain why it’s necessary.

My completely unlicensed crystal ball says B + C eventually produces D. Bolivar didn’t build his reputation maintaining somebody else’s org chart, and Sarah London didn’t say data, technology, and AI will “shape how we operate” because she wanted a caretaker CIO. The first real signal won’t be whatever shiny AI announcement comes next. Watch who follows him from Fannie, which boxes start moving at Centene, and which consulting SOWs suddenly have to explain why they exist.

There is at least one qualification we can probably remove from Bradley’s onboarding checklist: “Ability to navigate highly matrixed organizations.” The guy is leaving Fannie Mae amid leadership turnover, workforce reductions, political intervention, AI-driven job elimination, and general organizational hellfire, and walking directly into Centene.

He doesn’t need matrix training. He needs a helmet and directions to the bathroom.

Welcome to ”OneCenteam,” Bradley. You’ll be fine. 😂🍿

Whatever the reasons behind his departure, from where I sit Dallas was one of the few senior leaders who seemed to genuinely understand how sales at NetApp needs to function — how the field, partners, customers and internal teams actually need to work together to win.

At a time when the organisation already feels like it is going through constant change, losing someone with that level of commercial understanding raises even more questions about the direction we are heading in.

People keep talking about transformation, high achievement and driving results, but you also have to ask why experienced people who understand the business are leaving.

Who is actually listening to the people on the ground?

Has anyone heard about Target simplifying the organization in September?

Good employees who see others advance while they're stuck become bad employees in the end. I've seen it happen many times at TD. This place is really good at turning good employees into bad ones.

Haters may not want to read this...
This proves how smart Eddie is. Why continue to run a bunch of dumpy brick and mortar stores that lose money, when he can see his products online and through other retailers? The transformation is nearly complete.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonethington_having-closed-out-nearly-four-years-with-activity-7494034203332972544-yO_O

Visa's recent workforce reduction is not solely an indicator of AI replacing jobs but rather a strategic capital reallocation. The company reported record financial performance concurrently with the layoffs, suggesting a business in growth, not decline. This move highlights a broader trend of companies re-evaluating their workforce in response to evolving technological landscapes. The article posits that AI and tokenization are the primary drivers of change within the financial sector. Ultimately, the focus is on how tasks within jobs are transforming, rather than a wholesale elimination of roles.

https://bizbeat.nus.edu.sg/thought-leadership/article/the-visa-story-is-not-about-layoffs-but-about-two-revolutions/

A (now former) colleague of mine was featured in promotional LinkedIn post celebrating how great they are. Same person was laid off the very next day in the name of the Canada Transformation. You can't make it up.

With all the focus on productivity and transformation, should S&T also be looking at its own organizational structure?

As more infrastructure moves to cloud, the traditional I&O footprint is changing, but we still seem to have multiple organizations with overlapping responsibilities across I&O, Common Services, Tech Strategy, Deployment and Transformation. In some areas it is difficult to understand who actually owns the work versus who coordinates, governs or gets the visibility.

India Operations is another example where the operating model and accountability are not always clear. There is a perception that resource quality has declined and that PepsiCo is increasingly being used as a stepping stone, while it is not always clear how performance and outcomes are being monitored.

Common Services also seems to overlap with Operations and other teams, without a clear understanding of what it uniquely owns.

Maybe the bigger question isn’t just whether I&O should be consolidated. Should S&T be looking at simplifying its overall structure, combining overlapping organizations and reducing some of the senior leadership layers? If we expect the rest of the organization to become leaner and more efficient, shouldn’t S&T be asking the same question about itself?

We all know an impending rebadge is coming. Chances are VZ will consider those that refuse it as effectively resigning, which means no severance and no unemployment.

I'm not a lawyer, but a rebadge could also be interpreted as "your job is now at Deloitte/Infosys/HLC". That means the VZ job no longer exists. If the rebadge is declined, it could be an involuntary separation with severance and unemployment.

I'm guessing VZ would think twice should there be a lawsuit threat.

During the 2008 VSP / Infosys rebadge, VZ wasn't offering the extended severance to those eligible for retirement but relented when enough people complained. It's not the same thing and times have changed, but nothing will happen if the affected people don't push back.

Note: what happened with Daniel's "the transformation is going to be hard work, but when you look back you'll be very proud of it"? I guess the rebadge wasn't in the cards back then.

Major telecommunications companies are implementing significant workforce reductions as a primary cost-cutting strategy. AT&T, Verizon, and O2 Germany have all announced substantial job cuts in the first half of 2026. Nokia is also continuing a large-scale reduction program aimed at substantial annual savings. While these cuts can improve short-term margins, they often fail to address underlying revenue generation issues. The article suggests that true transformation requires redeploying capital into new growth areas, not just reducing expenses.

New York, NY

https://sebastianbarros.substack.com/p/telcos-layoffs-are-just-aspirin

Burdick is out.

Another board change. Another transformation executive.

If your job depends on manual process instead of judgment and business impact, I’d be paying close attention.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/centene-announces-board-of-directors-changes-302835967.html

FactSet Announces Appointment of Chief People & Workforce Transformation Officer

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/factset-announces-appointment-chief-people-200500847.html

The majority of our jobs won't exist anymore in just a few years.

This guy is so full of it. Now he’s saying he’s going to transform central offices to data centers he’s full of it and no one believes him. Stock will go back down next week

Looking at how things have been run, it's no shock we're in this position. The whole operation is stuck in the past.

I swear, after20+ years, they say basically the same exact thing at every meeting, just change out a few buzz words.. but the subject/content is the same…..every time. So basically have made no real difference “to the lives of the people we serve”. Ugggg

This would make Verizon truly an AI-first company

“You saw our preliminary results… The first step is just to own it.” We already do. Every single one of us on the ground owns our number, every quarter, no matter how the goalposts moved that quarter. So let’s talk about ownership both ways: what exactly do you own here? Not the words “own it” in a Monday message : the actual outcome. What’s the consequence for you when the results miss? Who’s putting you on a PIP?
Nobody around you says this out loud, so I will: we had real leaders who could have told you this a year ago, and they didn’t leave for a better offer .... they got pushed out because they tried to correct you. You don’t get to say “no deflection, no excuses” while the people most likely to challenge the plan are the ones no longer in the building, because they challenged it.
Maybe IBM’s software problem isn’t the market, isn’t the customers, isn’t even the products. Maybe it’s you. Look at the CROs and software leaders actually winning out there right now. do you really think they run their orgs the way you run this one? Reshuffling structure every six months, pushing out anyone who isn’t aligned, surrounding yourself with people too scared to push back? That’s not how growth companies behave. That’s how companies behave right before they lose the people who could have saved them.
And look at how these decisions actually get made: under panic, not conviction. Every reorg lands like an emergency reaction to a bad quarter, not a plan anyone thought through. And somehow, in that panic, we’re the ones treated like zero, like we can’t understand a reorg, like we’re not agile enough, like we’re the ones resisting transformation. We are exactly those things. We adapt every single time you ask us to, on a shorter timeline than any of you have to answer for. What we’re fed up with is taking transformation advice from the worst-performing leadership in the room, delivered in a panic, and then being blamed when the panic doesn’t produce results.
And on that note: when you write “we are putting more attention on software consumption,” who exactly is “we”? You and McKinsey in a slide deck, or you and the people actually sitting in front of customers who could tell you months ago that this was coming? Because from where I sit, “we” hasn’t included us in a long time : it’s included consultants who get paid regardless of whether the plan works, and employees who inherit the plan with no say in it.
“Every Second Counts” is a good line for a kitchen sign. It’s a bad operating model for enterprise software. Nobody sells real value in one or two quarters. Value takes time to build because it’s built on trust, and trust takes longer to earn back than it takes to lose. Nobody deploys software in one or two quarters either, because deployment runs on the customer’s timeline and their business needs, not ours. If every second really counts, the first thing that should buy us is more discipline before changing structures, incentives, and coverage models mid-year : not less.
Here’s my Monday growth message back to you: a leader is accountable to the people below him, not just to the market above him. That means listening to employees and customers before restructuring around them, not after. It means being able to say “I was wrong” and “this is going to take longer than I promised,” out loud, without spinning it into a hype line for the next town hall. We show up accountable every day, on our numbers, on our customers, on our word. I’m asking you to show the same thing back .... not another recap of initiatives, but an honest account of what you got wrong and what you’re doing to fix it, including how it affects the people asked to execute it with less time and fewer resources than the plan pretends.
We’re not asking for perfection. We’re asking for the truth, and for someone to actually be willing to hear it.

IBM has a major gap in its product portfolio. We don’t make and sell devices that have GPUs. This is what enterprises are clamoring for AI training and inferencing at scale, which is way more powerful than the accelerators we have on IBMZ and Power. And IBM Cloud can’t compete against the hyperscalers, which are expensive, however ideal for running AI use cases at scale. We have a strong AI product portfolio, although so do a lot of companies. We’ve acquired a lot of companies that complement our core products and have a massive ecosystem. But most days, I wonder -
What does IBM even stand for? Where do we even belong in this rapidly evolving world?

I don’t believe IBM will fail. However we all, especially our Senior Leaders, need to really think about what we actually stand for. Not this BS hybrid cloud leader statement. It’s about crafting a real vision that inspires the world. It’s about culture change to invigorate low morale at the ranks. It’s about picking up this company and giving it a really good shake. If we don’t do something drastic, then the free fall will continue.

One NM™

Interesting. Twenty years ago we watched many greedy 1% globalists in many company leadership launch “One ___” transformations.

Different logo. Different PowerPoint template. Same promise:

• Break down silos.
• Align the organization.
• Transform the culture.
• This time it’s different.

The only real update for 2026 seems to be replacing “Digital Transformation” with “AI Transformation.”

Somewhere, a McKinsey consultant dusted off the old “One Company” deck, asked ChatBot to modernize the buzzwords, swapped “cloud” for “AI,” and sent the invoice.

The cynic in me is waiting for Phase 2:

• Announce AI.
• Hire consultants.
• Reorganize org charts.
• Explain why “global talent strategy” is the future and replace employees with offshore sweatshops and indentured foreigners.
• Celebrate short-term cost savings.
• Wonder five years later where all the institutional knowledge went.

History doesn’t repeat itself—it just gets rebranded.

State Street is implementing a workforce reduction as part of a strategic shift. The company anticipates significant severance costs through 2029. This move is tied to an overhaul of its operations utilizing cloud-computing resources. The financial giant aims to boost its profit margins through these changes. This initiative signals a significant operational transformation for the firm.

Boston, Massachusetts

https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2026/07/16/state-street-plans-large-transformation-headcount.html

Today, 7/16, Nestle laid off and reorganized again. Second part of their transformation. Happened at both Solon and Arlington.