We win, you lose: How shareholder value screwed the middle class

The American Dream changed somehow in the 1970s when real wages for most of us began to stagnate when corrected for inflation and worker age. My best financial year ever was 2000 — 18 years ago — when was yours? This wasn’t a matter of productivity, either: workers were more productive every year, we just stopped being rewarded for it. There are many explanations of how this sad fact came to be and I am sure it’s a problem with several causes. But this column concerns one factor that generally isn’t touched-on by labor economists — Wall Street greed.

Lawyers arguing in court present legal theories—their ideas of how the world and the law intersect, and […]

By |February 26th, 2018|2018, Economy, history, investing|95 Comments
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Ginni the Eagle: IBM’s Corporate “Transformation”

IBMI promised a follow-up to my post from last week about IBM’s massive layoffs and here it is. My goal is first to give a few more details of the layoff primarily gleaned from many copies of their separation documents sent to me by laid-off IBMers, but mainly I’m here to explain the literal impossibility of Big Blue’s self-described “transformation” that’s currently in process. My point is not that transformations can’t happen, but that IBM didn’t transform the parts it should and now it’s probably too late.

First let’s take a look at the separation docs. Whether you give a damn about IBM or not, if you work for […]

By |March 22nd, 2016|2016, cloud computing, Companies, Industry, Intellectual Property, strategy|146 Comments
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How to fix IBM

IBMGiven IBM’s earnings miss last week and the impact it had on company shares I thought rather than just criticizing the company it might make better sense to consolidate my ideas for how to fix IBM. Here they are.

Early in his tenure as CEO, Sam Palmisano made changes that created IBM’s problems today. IBM customers are buying fewer products and services. Revenue has dropped each quarter for the past ten. Sam’s changes alienated IBM customers, many of whom are ending what has been in many cases a multi-decade relationship. No amount of earnings promises, no amount of financial engineering, will fix this problem.

IBM forgot the most important part of running a business. While shareholder value […]

By |October 27th, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, strategy|149 Comments
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Ginni comes to her senses, but too late for IBM?

Ginni_RomettyThis week, of all weeks, with IBM seemingly melting-down, you’d think I’d be writing about it and I have been, just not here. You can read two columns on IBM I published over at forbes.com, here and here. They are first day and second day analyses of IBM’s earnings announcement and sale of its chip division to GlobalFoundries. I could publish them here three days from now but by then nobody will care so instead I’ll just give you the links.

One thing I can do here is consider the way IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is spinning this story. She was all over the news […]

By |October 21st, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, strategy|106 Comments
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