I absolutely agree that innovation is no longer in this company's DNA like it used to be. But why? Is it because there is now a lack of enthusiastic talent that used to be plentiful here, or is there some other reason?
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Innovation comes from the passion of an individual but leadership has to foster a culture where innovation is encouraged, recognized, and rewarded. It does not help to have cut throats like Rob Thomas in charge of software and global markets. He will not hesitate to throw you under the bus. He will never come close being respected and loved like Tom Rosamilia who recently retired. If you don’t believe me, read all the positive comments on LinkedIn where Tom announced his retirement
IBM also measures performance for people on quota. If you miss your targets by a certain percentage over n number of quarters, you get placed on a PIP. I know some extremely talented technical people who left IBM due to this. Even though they contributed tons of intellectual capital that everyone in the field leveraged, they get put on a PIP due to missing quota targets. Many have enjoyed very successful careers post IBM at Google, AWS, Microsoft.
What's a "safe space". That sounds like something that came out of our rotting ivy league re-education centers. I see everyone wearing bunny slippers and drinking hot cocoa. We need some old school liberalism where you attack the idea and not the person. Also some folks are bring their top-down authoritative culture with them where people don't ask any questions. That is not a beneficial environment. Wall street's need to see immediate results doesn't really jive with a research like environment. Lastly getting your patents stolen in other countries makes all the money that you spent on research a waste.
The reason why IBM is not as innovative as it was in the past is because many employees DO NOT feel like they have a safe space to bring their full, authentic, whole selves to work. There are so many smart IBMers who hold back what they want to say, cower to executive pressure, and perform based on fear. There is also an unbelievable amount of complacency within the organization, putting a lot of pressure on top performers. Innovation is about exposure and vulnerability, and if people don’t feel safe to put themselves and their ideas out there, then nothing will progress. Or you can be that person that just pushes the system and brings others along for the ride. If you want something bad enough, it will happen one day.
Now that GTS has been spun out into Kyndryl, I wonder how much more effort IBM will put into management tools of any kind. The Tivoli and Candle efforts were intended to satisfy the needs of GTS for the outsourcing engagements. They failed, but that was the goal anyway. Now GTS is gone...
I used to work in the monitoring space in the UK, IBM tried to build a monitoring tool lots of time and failed big time. Brought Tivoli - ran it too the ground, built their own - total Fup, brought Candle = Fked that up adding db2 and WAS, tried to build a new tools 5 years later, FAILED - brought instana. say's it all. Instana was a "one to look out for" - from Gartner. Not sure how many - if any new logos IBM have got from that.
"The American spirit is dead. It left in 2008 when obama took office."
It is easier to make profit off of making something cheaply as opposed to creating something new. It is much much harder to innovate successfully and research costs a lot. Patents do not survive in India and China so expensive innovation is wasted. I am not trying to being dramatic here but plantation owners made a lot of money with cheap disposable labor. They created nothing new.
IBM's trajectory will put it at the same level as Freightliner, Kenworth, Peterbilt and Mack (among others)...makers of big-a** hardware with enormous carrying capacity that is used by big business to get s*** done.
All those companies are fantastic companies in their own right. However, they are NOT general-purpose manufacturers. Their products are well-known to the public, but they themselves do NOT cater to the general public...the general public are NOT their customers, nor will they ever be. They cater to select business customers with the resources to afford them.
IBM is still innovative, within its own sphere of influence. It is an extremely powerful sphere with a vast legacy in the world of IT and computing, but it is not the only sphere nor is it necessarily the biggest. IBM continues to fill a role that will probably always be there, and that nobody else can currently take on. That may change in the future, but for now IBM's place is secured.
I love IBM. I really do. I retired from IBM and had a rewarding career there for the most part, However, I do not have a high level of confidence in some of the current executives and management. Many wonder how this topic of innovation relates to the main purpose of this forum which is layoffs at IBM. The recurring quarter after quarter and year after year layoffs wears on innovative people and they leave on their own because they grow tired if it. Yes, the economy is uncertain right now with respect to technology and vendors like AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce have definitely layed off a substantial number of people this year so IBM is not alone in this regard. However, IBM has been in this recurring cycle of layoffs every year for at least the past 20 years. I truly want IBM to succeed. I do not want the company to end up like former great technology companies like Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation, one of which I was also proud to have worked for.
Yes a lot of folks don’t want to hear this, BUT the downsizings will continue until the revenue/profit margins per employee improve. At least 1/2 of IBM’s consulting engagements stray into the body shop rates that are offered by Wipro/HCL/Tata. IBM doesn’t want these engagements due to low profit margins, but they are very hard to exit as enterprise customers need help desk type services too and if you walk away from commodity services engagements, you don’t get the opportunity to bid the the real “value” delivery type of engagements that every consulting company wants. IBM offers real value type of consulting (mostly around enterprise engagements (mainframe and power)) which customers beat a path towards IBM for. The problem is there just are not the amount of engagement opportunities to support the size of IBM consulting right now. I expect IBM will have to split IBM consulting into two parts and exit or partner off the commodity side of the house just like they did for Kyndryl. NOTE IBM is also doing or has done this for HW and SW, as the non-enterprise side of the house in each of those divisions is a ghost town. The day of reckoning has arrived. Higher interest rates, and aging product offerings are driving cost pressure within IBM. How do you lower costs within Consulting. Reduce labor as that’s 85% of the equation.
Troll bait - or why don't you just join the reddit ibm forum?
This isn't even remotely about layoffs.
Let's see "The Layoff Dot Com"
Oh right
The company behaves like a vampire where it takes healthy companies (acquisitions) and su-ks the life out of them before throwing away a discarded husk. The talent they bring all leave and massive value is destroyed. It’s a parasite.
It goes back to Sam Palmisano time when innovative companies were developing their cloud which he said would never take off. Then came Ginni who picked up a few buzz words threw around and started mortgaging the house to buy companies to play catchup and destroyed those companies
The company used to respect technical skills and engineering. It used to care about innovative products but now it seems there’s a realization at the top that it’s hopeless now and it’s all about financial engineering and squeezing the last drop of free cash flow out for shareholders. Innovative “wild ducks” are now seen as cost sinks and threats to the status quo who get hunted and eradicated. The innovative culture of IBM got rotted out when they started moving more and more jobs offshore to low cost delivery centers who obviously don’t care about innovation or inventing things. You can see how the patent output collapsed and IBM then came up with some half baked story about how it was all intentional. It wasn’t. This was the result of years and years of pushing out the most talented IBMers. The patent collapse was just a symptom.
IBM replace innovation with scripting a long time ago.
Dead? No. Sleeping? Yes.
Like money, the spirit of innovation goes to where it is respected. Innovation lives, but you need to know where to look...it won't be in the usual places.
The American spirit is dead. It left in 2008 when obama took office.
Lenovo.
Innovation in China.
Simples.
Americans can't keep up.
I'll go out on a limb and say that "the reason" you don't perceive so much innovation is that expectations in our society are very unrealistic as to what is being achieved and what can be achieved. IMHO, our world is filled with legions of "college-educated" people who have been spoiled by modern inventions that have taken decades, if not hundreds of years, to come to fruition. Every invention you see in irrigation, sanitation, medicine, chemistry, physics, electronics, you name it did not just come suddenly...they took a very, very, very long time to develop over many years, by many different people.
Innovation happens every minute of every day at every company, including IBM. But as another commenter mentioned, if someone doesn't see the immediate utility of that innovation in 10 minutes then it might as well go by the wayside.
There are a lot of things that management can do to encourage more innovation...the current system su-ks in a lot of ways. But don't think for a minute that the innovative spirit isn't still there.
There are several reasons at play here. I know many former top talent IBMers who left to go to competitors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce. Some just felt their opinions and advice were being ignored by executives and management. Others felt their career path would be better at competitors. Others were tired of the recurring cycle of RAs and Reorgs at IBM. Finally some left because competitors were experiencing substantially better growth in technology and viewed opportunities would be better there. Of course some always leave because of their management.
What have you done for me in the last 10 minutes? That's why.