Another reorg. Sold as agility, felt as whiplash. Leadership didn’t even wait for the planned date — they tore up a structure barely a year old and rebuilt it mid-year, with zero regard for what that costs the people living through it. The stated reason: “boost software deployment.” The real reason is simpler and darker.
IBM has spent years buying growth instead of building it. Every quarter, another acquisition gets folded in, rebranded as “software strength,” and used to justify the next reorg. Strip out the acquisitions, and the growth mostly disappears. This isn’t a strategy. It’s a treadmill, and shareholders finally noticed — the stock just had its worst single day in the company’s history.
The money to keep buying is running out. Debt keeps climbing. Buybacks have been frozen for years because the company is still “digesting” its last purchase. Cash meant for growth is quietly being redirected to service the last deal, not fund the next one. When a company can’t return money to its own shareholders, it’s telling you something about how thin the cushion has gotten.
And the sales playbook is exhausted. For years, big renewals were “won” by reshuffling the same contract — discount here, markup there, call it a signing. Do that once, fine. Do it a third time on the same account, and there’s nothing left to move. Customers aren’t d-mb. Many are also sitting on mountains of software they were sold and never deployed. Asking them to sign another restructuring on top of shelfware gathering dust isn’t selling — it’s asking for patience that ran out a while ago. That’s the real story behind “large deals failed to close.” It was never about speed.
So here’s what a summer reorg actually buys: nothing, fast. Territory changes take a quarter just to stabilize. Real deals take six months to a year to close. Launch a reorg in July, across a holiday season when half of Europe is offline, and demand results in Q3 — and you’ve built a machine engineered to fail on schedule.
Except failure doesn’t cost everyone the same. IBM books the reorg as a clean, one-time charge and moves on. Sellers absorb the real cost: quotas that don’t shrink to match a broken calendar, commission checks that quietly get smaller because targets were unrealistic from day one, accounts inherited mid-relationship with no memory of what was promised or already burned. When the numbers come up short, it won’t be called “the reorg cost us a season.” It’ll be called underperformance. The same event, blamed upward as strategy and downward as failure — a strategy that costs nothing on the way in and everything on the way out, just not for the people who designed it.
That’s the pattern worth naming out loud: a company that has run out of things to buy, running out of ways to reshuffle what it already sold, paying for both by quietly shifting the bill onto the people closest to the customer.
Another reorg won’t fix that. Only shipping what was already sold will.
12 replies (most recent on top)
@OP Albany. We’ve been reorganized 5–6 times (I’ve lost count) in the last 3–4 years. It’s the same leaders and managers, just shuffled and then reshuffled into different orgs. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.
@j5 Part 1
What gets me isn’t just Arvind and Rob — it’s the entire layer beneath them, in every geo, nodding along in unison. We have a “leadership” bench that spans the globe, different countries, different cultures, different market realities, and somehow every single one of them lands on the exact same talking points the same week. That’s not leadership converging on a shared vision. That’s a chain of people who’ve learned that the fastest way to keep their own seat is to repeat whatever came down from Armonk, word for word, with a straight face.
We are paying “leaders” seven and eight figure packages to be followers. Not to challenge a bad quota model. Not to say “this mid-year incentive change is going to gut morale and we’ll pay for it in attrition by Q4.” Not to push back when a plan clearly doesn’t survive contact with reality on the ground. Just to relay it downward, smile in the town hall, and call it “alignment.” If your job title has the word “leader” in it and your actual function is to repeat what you were told without adding a single ounce of judgment, you’re not a leader. You’re a mouthpiece with a bigger bonus.
Part 2 above
@hm
yes you are right!
And that’s the part that should worry all of us more than the incentive change itself: if the people one, two, three levels above us are willing to stand in front of a room and repeat something they know is going to hurt the people listening — because pushing back might cost them their own seat — why would any of us believe a word they say about the “strategy,” the “vision,” or the next reorg? A parrot doesn’t lie because it’s malicious. It lies because it never had its own voice to begin with. We’re being managed by a chain of people who traded their judgment for job security, and now we’re supposed to trust the plan they’re reading off a script none of them wrote.
You called it right: the goalposts keep moving because it’s cheaper than admitting leadership got the target wrong in the first place. And nobody in that chain will say so, because saying so requires being a leader instead of a muppet.
Good luck with the search. A lot of us are quietly doing the same math.
@hm why aren’t more people saying this or speaking up? Now is the time. We are in a bad place. Speak up now or you might never get the chance! And you will regret it!
I don't usually post here but I've been reading posts here for years. For a long time I believed in this company. I wasn't as bad as Arvind's little pet who trolls here regularly, but I thought IBM had forward thinkers at the top. Turns out I was wrong. The last few years have rotted that out from under me. Dropping the 401K match, pointless RTO mandates across some geo's and not others, forcing good people to either move across the country or leave, unreasonable quotas that looked like they were formulated by Stevie Wonder throwing a dart at numbers on a board, and now this absolutely ridiculous mid-year incentive change which - to everyone I've talked to (brand sellers, CSEs, ATLs) - looks like nothing but a way to take even more money out of our pockets before using the missed quotas as a way to cull the herd again by U.S. Thanksgiving. Add to that no raises unless you are a member of the executive class and pull in your $30M incentive pay. With this news of the August 1 incentive change, I see the writing on the wall. IBM has taken a lot of money out of my pocket over the last year...a LOT of money. They have constantly moved the goalposts to adjust for incompetent leadership. My prediction is that I - and a bunch of other folks - will be PIP'ed on October 1 and given 3 months to "improve" based on a vague set of more moving goalposts, because there is no way we will meet my new and even more unrealistic numbers, so I'm dedicating the rest of 2026 to searching for a job elsewhere.
Fck you Arvind, Rob Thomas, and the rest of you useless piles of rotten dogsht. I hope you all rot in h3ll for eternity for destroying the lives of countless IBM'ers and their families.
At Arvind's IBM, mediocrity is the only aesthetic. It is non-threatening, under promises and as long as you lack appropriate measures, which is by design, can always be massaged to fit your business narrative.
If you are at still at IBM, you either su-k or you are good at hiding your achievement. There is no one else left at that empty shell company.
@a9 lol Alb is were data and truths are ignored if they don’t align with certain people’s agenda or narratives.
@ac IBM high execs don't buy the stocks the stocks are an addition to their million dollar bonuses. They have to keep the stocks x amount of years before they can sell them. Once the x amount of years are up they sell those stocks and receive their new stock option bonus
WELL DONE! Put that in your pipe, McKinsey, and smoke it!
IBM stopped being a technology company many years ago, and became a hedge fund. Powered by continuing acquisitions and the pursuit of free cash flow, IBM executives buy and sell shares. They take both sides of the transactions, and try to make money on the spread.
This strategy was initially pursued in order to buy IBM time, and for many years it did indeed buy IBM time. But somewhere along the line, company executives lost sight of of the real goal...IBM still needed to innovate and serve customers. It couldn't just churn and burn...it had to invent new stuff, make real products that customers want to buy, sell these products and bring in new customer funds.
The company hasn't really done this in a very long time, so it has become what business analysts nicely call "a mature company". Other than periodic iterations of its legacy products, it has nothing new to offer. Legacy products to legacy customers.
In Albany is simple. If you favorite, you right. If not favorite, truth also cannot help you.
There’s massive changes going on everywhere. Several new roles have been created and need volunteers literally by EOD.
The little indian AI HR rep will be here soon to tell us he read a book once.