IBM marketeers rub out chopper after visit from CEO Ginni IBM has tried to erase the photograph of the Big Blue chopper that CEO, president and chairman Ginny Rometty used to fly to the UK R&D labs recently, because it didn’t fit with the corporate austerity message. The company recently issued a directive forcing staff to seek supporting evidence before spending more than £75 on …
You can easily calculate the following:
1) How much Rometty makes per hour. (Including her millions in bonus for captaining the titanic...)
2) How much it costs per hour of flight time for the private helicopter and/or jets.
3) How much it would cost to build out a customized mini-van to drive as well as the cost of the trip in terms of gas, driver, etc ...
Then you can see how things play out...
"You forgot the cost for the accountant to figure out all of that, the auditor to make sure it's right, the executive review to change it, the accountant's time to revise..."
...and the printing costs of the 1000-page report, with 10% of pages marked "This page intentionally left blank".
No, I didn't.
That was just the beginning.
Its the raw numbers.
There's more to this in terms of accounting.
Do you own / lease the vehicles?
Depreciation? (Accelerated Depreciation?)
Yeah, the bean counters can spin this anyway they want.
They can say that the 45 min flight is faster than a 2 hour drive and that Rometty's time is more valuable and would be wasted in a drive. Or private jets for 8 people can be cheaper than 8 tickets when you consider that the plane is on their schedule and that they can do work on the flight where as on a public plane, they wouldn't be able to openly discuss work and need to be careful about their laptops being open... etc ...
And yes, even with all of the facts, that doesn't mean that they can't be over ridden ...
Rometty's time is more valuable and would be wasted in a drive.
Does she not have a laptop? Shirley, she could be adding up the savings resulting from the impending layoffs, or calculating her next bonus or something else important, during the drive.
On the train to work every day, I'm surrounded by people using their laptops.
Drivers are much less expensive than helicopter pilots.
On the train to work every day, I'm surrounded by people using their laptops.
Thomas Watson Jr. used to do that (commuting by train to NYC, I mean). And he was by that time General Manager of IBM World Corporation, IIRC the name, which was the company used for external trade by IBM.
You forgot the cost for the accountant to figure out all of that, the auditor to make sure it's right, the executive review to change it, the accountant's time to revise...
...the Project Manager to prepare the project brief, plan, work packages, budget, project board, status reports, staff impact statements, project gateways, post implementation review, project closure report.
I'm sure marketing would want to be involved as well checking that the font used in the press release was correct, the blue of the carpet was the correct Pantone colour, etc.
Whoa whoa whoa - don't forget it makes no sense to employ people like that at your company. Focus on what you're GOOD at! Outsource those positions to IBM!
***in other words, tack on a 50% markup for the same service you could've gotten by just employing that person directly
It rather assumes that she would be doing something profitable for IBM with the time saved by using a helicopter, and that the perceived "Austerity is just for you little people" message has no significant effect on the productivity of the people at IBM who aren't already spending their entire working day looking for a better job.
Also assumes that the visit itself didn't have an impact on production.
Maybe IBM is more rational than my employer, but my guess is that everybody spent the last couple of weeks running around like headless chickens to pull together presentations demonstrating how wonderful and critically important the site is.
>ginni + marissa = DISASTERz i.e., for IBMers & YAHOOers...
Yeah as Enron showed the ultimate macho culture largely free of women in leadership is so much better for shareholders in the long run. Plenty of incompetent men CEOs as well some of whom are actually committing crimes. I hope the tweet footer was satire and not the world's lamest dog whistle.
>No, GENDER is irrelevant,
Then why not point to someone like Léo Apotheker as an example who in far less time not only made a mockery of his company (and exposed their horrible board) but overpaid by nearly 10 billion dollars for a company worth less than 2? She definitely didn't drop the stock value more than 40% in less than a year. Ginni may be a failure but considering the company, turning that behemoth (especially after the stock buy back hari kari) around takes a rock star.
Personally if I was working for Big Blue I wouldn't mind seeing the CEO in a chopper at all if revenue actually had a prayer of growing ever again. My currently company has been having record quarters lately in all metrics and the stock and bonuses have made me very happy. Therefore as far as I am concerned our CEO (who build company up over two decades) can go enjoy a giant yacht (not his style though).
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I would agree that the current executive team at IBM has done about as well as an equivalent number of Irish Setters might be expected to do, but unlike the canines, allowing a mediocre-to-incompetent executive to walk gracefully into the sunset costs multiple millions of dollars/pounds/euros (doesn't really matter what currency you use when you start talking about 20-50 million units -- the figure is simply obscene).
I
That's not a setter, that's a retriever ... Totally ball-driven. For values of "ball" that include "personal wealth to the detriment of everything else", of course. Typical modern executive. Alas.
Corporate austerity (except the ruling class) is the new black ... Get used to it, it's not going away until the Nintendo Generation is out to pasture ... and maybe not then; I'm not all that impressed with the millennials.
>I'm not all that impressed with the millennials.
There are reasons to tear into them (complete lack of understanding of privacy for example) but very few of them are executives yet especially at a company like IBM. Hell most of them haven't even paid off their student loans yet.
>walk gracefully into the sunset costs multiple millions of dollars/pounds/euros
Well a lifetime of back stabbing and general sociopath behavior has to have some kind of sick value to society or you wouldn't have golden parachutes and the mouth breathers watching Survivor.
Hate to tell you - there are helicopters with ejection seats: Kamov Ka-50.
(However, there is also a little comic by André Franquin demonstrating the effect you had in mind, but I couldn't find a linky.)
Back in the late 70s the Americans were experimenting with upward seat ejection for helicopters.
In the high-speed slo-mo footage I saw the helicopter in question had a four-blade rotor. Explosive bolts sheared first one opposed pair of blades from he rotor hub, then the other, then the roof was discarded before the seat rockets fired.
As I recall, "significant challenges" were faced to make all this happen reliably and in the right order and the idea was eventually shelved as Harriers were making big inroads to the military strike helicopter market.
I think, were I piloting a failing helicopter fitted with such an escape mechanism, my first thought would be to attempt any other option before chancing the complex ejector seat mechanism built on a low-bid contract.
We only tested that on the XH-56 Cheyenne and only for the envelope expansion tests. It replaced the gunner's seat on Airframe number 9 during a phase of tests, but the program got cancelled immediately following those tests. And no, it ejected downward. I think you're talking about the Kamov Black Shark, which has a rotor blade or the entire hub explode off and then the pilot/gunner eject.
The Cheyenne never made it out of testing, though it did have a permanent model number assigned, the AH-56. It wasn't a good idea but it wasn't because of the Harrier or the promises Bell and Boeing made about the stupid Osprey, its not a good idea to have light aircraft pulling CAS duties. The Kiowas were barely usable in Afghanistan, when your air support is below you most of the time, there's a problem but at least they could actually somewhat fly.
The Cheyenne would have struggled with the jobs that the Army wound up handing to the Kiowa, Blackhawk and Apache, though it probably would have made an excellent light, high speed reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition aircraft. Thats not good enough though, not for the modern Army anyway, as the Armed Scout Helicopter and Light Helicopter Experimental projects have proven over and over.
From the article referenced by the CP - "For improved pilot survivability the Ka-50 is fitted with a NPP Zvezda (transl. Star) K-37-800 ejection seat, which is a rare feature for a helicopter.[21] Before the rocket in the ejection seat deploys, the rotor blades are blown away by explosive charges in the rotor disc and the canopy is jettisoned.[22]"
A nice to have feature but if I were a Russian helicopter pilot I might be a little alarmed at being in a vehicle which can blow off its own rotor blades.
Incidentally, what is it about women CEOs and personal air transport? There was Fiorina and the multi-jet business that turned out not to be a new printer, and now this.
I haven't seen it for myself, but I am told that there has long been a photo hanging on the wall of Hursley of a group of big-wigs at the opening with their arms raised in a curious fashion. The explanation, apparently, is that the celebratory glasses of champagne were painstakingly airbrushed out as they were in clear violation of the "no alcohol on the premises" rule. Consistent, indeed.
I heard the same story at HP, Amdahl, DEC, Western Digital and Intel regarding various grand openings. No proof of the whitewashing, of course. At best, I'd say the stories are apocryphal (especially seeing as I attended friday afternoon "beer busts" at all of the above at one time or another ...).
Posting the pic was indeed stupid, but coherent.
Removing the pic after it had attained the global Internet conscience is an order of magnitude more stupid because it demonstrates just how out of touch those responsible for this whole mess are. It shows that they have no idea of what the Streisand effect is, of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram are or how people use them, nor indeed of how the Internet never forgets.
Now, instead of Ginni being forever referred to as the CEO who cuts underlings' expenses from a helicopter, she will now be referred to as the CEO who tried and failed to hide her public use of a helicopter whilst cutting underlings' expenses.
Some people can learn from the past, some must have the lessons bashed repeatedly in their face to get through their thick skulls. Seems like those who made this dismally stupid decision are of the latter group.
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In fact the packet, Box and the whole flippin store!
Hopes people wont notice if the pic is deleted. Probably also hopes the staff don't notice that passenger on said chopper was recently awarded a 60% increase and a 30% bonus for managing the 20th straight quarter of decline.
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