Plenty of prison space!
There is plenty of space in the US Federal prison system. Why don’t I feel like that will change after these people are dished out justice?
IBM has been sued by investors who claim the company under former CEO Ginni Rometty propped up its stock price and deceived shareholders by moving revenues from its non-strategic mainframe business to its strategic business segments, allegedly in violation of securities regulations. The investors' securities fraud lawsuit [PDF …
Why don’t I feel like that will change after ...
After what?
Justice? 8^D !!!!!!
You do not feel anything will change because you know from reading about the outcome of similar cases that the best that may happen justice-wise is this:
A pennies on the dollar settlement will be reached between the accused and the US federal government, obviously at the expense of IBM shareholders.
It with be nothing but an intricately worded statement where the only thing that will be very clearly spelled out is that said settlement is being reached exclusively to avoid a very lengthy and expensive judicial process, again at the expense of shareholders and US taxpayers.
It will be spinkled with six to ten differently worded paragraphs saying exactly the same thing each time: that the accused of the wrongdoings under no circumstances accept having done anything wrong and that the settlement reached does away with any accusations of having commited a crime.
And that will be it.
Case closed.
O.
If they didn't reply, then let me have a go:
"These allegations are baseless and IBM will vigorously defend itself in court. That is, until our lawyers get together with their lawyers, resulting in a settlement that leaves plaintiffs getting nothing and the partners of law-firms on both sides shopping for new yachts and private jets".
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.
Well ...
I'm not (but yes, I do appreciate the sarcasm)
Absolutely everytime I see this photograph, all I see is a used car dealer's floor employee attempting to con someone.
Out of anything, as long as it is a con*.
*con: verb - informal
to make someone believe something false, usually so that that person will give you their money or possessions.
O.
The real outcome is that bad executives will always find a way to game the system. And managing stock prices just gave them a way to avoid shareholders putting their nose in the company actual management. The right idea should be "maximize executives accountability". No more, for example, settlements at the company expenses.
"The real outcome is that bad executives will always find a way to game the system."
I wonder what happened to the incentive bonuses of the people in charge of the areas the money was transferred from? Surely they'd be fighting tooth and claw to NOT transfer the money over?
I spent the last years of my IBM career (I left in 2008) trying to get off "bonus schemes" because they meant that I spent the last month of each financial year working towards their targets rather than what was good for IBM, its customers and for me. You could argue that better bonus schemes would not cause this behaviour.
But all bonus schemes are going to incent people to meet the letter of the requirements rather than the spirit of the scheme. Think hospital waiting list reduction; some bright spark simply came up with a new waiting list for the waiting list so the end result was that the total waiting list got longer but anyone paid on reduction of the original waiting list was quids in.
Not that I'm excusing the behaviour of course, it's simply that it's unsurprising. Companies like IBM are run by people who love bonus schemes, and they incorrectly think that people who aren't "incented" by such schemes don't have "skin in the game" and won't "go the extra mile" etc. Complete rubbish.
Many people simply want a fair wage for a good job and the motivation is the knowledge that they're able to do their best job in the circumstances. People in senior positions in companies like IBM are blind to this.
My conclusion is that the mentality behind companies like IBM, and the people who run them, is wrong, and it's not restricted to IBM. The priorities are all wrong, the customers don't come first and the employees come last.
Yes, it's strange. The best companies I have worked for have been those which were technically stimulating and interesting, with a good boss, good colleagues and approachable customers/end-users. These businesses seem to roll on their own momentum. Then they get taken over by those who (think they) know better, resulting in disgruntled employees, disappointed customers and less business.
Last time I was subject to one of these schemes, it was just depressing and infuriating. Every quarterly meeting the CEO would gush about how much money we made, added new customers, old customers buying more, everybody happy. Then the smarmy CFO would get up and explain how the gross margin in sub-Saharan Africa was two points below the target, so bonuses would only be funded at 70%.
I still work with some of those people and they joke about trying to hire me back - unfortunately I’m not in a position to be able to explain exactly where their C-suite crew can shove it.
Nicely put.
After observing these schemes for many years, I've some to the conclusion that they're thought up by people who themselves take no pride in their work and wouldn't put in any effort without the "incentive" of the bonus.
"Take the salary you agreed and do the best job you can" would seem to be a foreign concept to them.
"Think hospital waiting list reduction; some bright spark simply came up with a new waiting list for the waiting list so the end result was that the total waiting list got longer but anyone paid on reduction of the original waiting list was quids in."
Don't take this as Gospel, I was told it in a pub by a guy that worked in a hospital.
There had recently been an outcry in the national press about waiting times in A&E (true).
Orders came down from On High that everyone entering A&E had to be seen within 1 hour.
Answer - Hire a minimum wage person to stand near the door - Everyone entering was "seen".
New Order from On High - Everyone entering A&E had to be seen within 1 hour by a medical professional.
Answer - Swap minimum wage person for a nurse.
New New Order from On High - Everyone entering A&E had to be examined within 1 hour by a medical professional.
Answer - Nurse went round all the waiting patients and asked them what they were there for...
You still had a 3 to 8 hour wait after you staggered in with your broken arm to get any real treatment unless you were bleeding profusely onto the floor
Partner is a practice nurse at a surgery that had no appointments, you show up, you are seen in turn. Throughput is obviously exactly the same - but you are seen today rather than getting an appointment a week on Thursday where you have to wait anyway because they are running 2 hours late.
But thus didn't allow them to meet key waiting time metrics in accordance with NHS waiting time directive targets
They did that with PHDs. If a certain proportion didn't finish in time the dept lost funding.
So we switched to only registering students just before they finished = 100% completed in < 1 year.
Then they decided that we couldn't have unregistered students so we registered them all for other courses that didn't count toward our PHD time clock and switched them immediately before they submitted.
Basically a war of attrition between the funding body and the researchers. Or a total waste of time, money and effort
IBM SLAs and KPIs.
1. Respond to a ticket within a short timeframe? Easy - automated response.
2. Close ticket within a certain timeframe? Easy - write a load of nonsense, automatically close ticket.
It's the second part that annoys me the most. I've raised tickets where they have been automatically closed without addressing the problem. I try to re-open the ticket but I get told to raise a new one. Their SLAs remain intact but my patience certainly doesn't.
Then the audacity to produce a report with a handy 'green box' that tells us that all SLAs were met without showing the fact that people have to raise twice as many calls to get a problem resolved (and that's IF you are lucky).
Is it though? The article hints of at least correlation, if not causal relationship, of the (alleged... khm...) fraud scheme with sackings. Could it be that older staffers not allowed to apply their skills to CAMSS (sounds really IBM-ish) but still bringing home bread and butter from sales of stuff IBM actually did rather well in the past, such as mainframes, were gotten rid of to keep the lid on?
What makes you think that they're separate?
In order to hide the financial gutting of the non SI parts of the business, they've been RA'ing the people in those parts to try to hide the movement of revenue and loss of profit. And generally, these people are older, more experienced (and more expensive).
I would also say that they're probably the more ethical people who remember the 'old' IBM, who are more likely to raise complaints.
You cannot treat these things in isolation when executive bonus schemes are being discussed!
Well, as an ex-IBMer from the 1990s, I have personal experience of the time at the end of that era.
It's actually amazing how IBM tried to instill fairness into their employees. There was a very strong "Code of Conduct" document laying out what was acceptable and what was not, and the IBM employee handbook of the era was over 200 pages long, and you really were expected to read it.
I'm sure that there were ruthless people in positions of influence, and IBM tried to leverage their dominant position to drive sales. I certainly came across salespeople who would do almost anything for a sale, something that prevented me from transitioning from post-sales technical support to pre-sales (I would not have been able to lie about how unsuitable a system being proposed was)
But many, many of the people I met and worked with were honest, ethical and often some of the best people in their field.
"It names as defendants not only IBM but current and former executives including Rometty, former CFO Martin J. Schroeter (now CEO of IBM spin-off Kyndryl), current CFO James J. Kavanaugh, and current CEO Arvind Krishna."
IBM as an entity, like any other business, is owned by its investors. Why do investors persist in suing themselves? It they win all they succeed in doing is routing money from themselves to themselves less the amounts paid to two lots of lawyers - net, they pay two lots of lawyers If they lose they don't shit money from themselves to themselves but they still pay two lots of lawyers. It's lose-lose. Is there some remote possibility that this behaviour is incited by lawyers?
OTOH, suing the executives and maybe the board makes sense if the effect was to enrich specific individuals by pursuing policies detrimental to the shareholders.
Why do investors persist in suing themselves
They're not. Yesterday's investors are suing today's investors - and are unlikely to be the same people.
So rather than routing money from themselves to themselves, they're rather hoping to route money from today's share price to yesterday's share price
It's doubly annoying, as we had to re-certify each year, and do a 'Business Conduct Guidelines' course, and pass a little test, as well as complete export regulations refreshers etc etc. So doing the right thing was drummed into us proles, but it seems the upper echelons said one thiing, and did another.
"but it seems the upper echelons said one thiing, and did another."
What? You think those people do the courses too? HR mandate the course because either they have to by law or because it looks good to the outside world. I very much doubt anyone from salaried senior managers and up do any of the courses.
This has been standard practice in IBM for years now, so this is just another little incident ...
"Anything you can do I can do better; anything I can do you can do better; anything I can do I can do better; anything IBM does will cost more money." (an ASR sig from years ago).
The cynic in me assumes this is standard practice in all large corporates. I've certainly seen it.
"Hey, Mr customer, how about we give you a 90% discount on these servers if you buy a couple of cloud software licences?" No worries if you don't use them.
It's much the same as colleagues at a large corporate referring to the busiest sales day of the year as the 32nd of March.
Not just publicly traded companies.
"We need to maximize revenue in category X!"
Answer: Shift several projects having nothing to do with that category into it, then declare that category strategic and everything else "legacy" (and therefore an area to get out of, even if it makes lots of money for the company).
I've seen it at all kinds of companies. If it isn't about propping up stock price, it might be about pumping up perceived value for private equity firms.
Ah yes, the old "you get what you measure, so you damn well better make sure that is what you really want". It doesn't just apply to senior executives either. Measure your programmers on lines of code produced, and you will get lots of code, whether needed or not. Measure your project managers on meeting schedules and budgets only, and your projects will meet schedules and be on time, customer requirements be damned.
I have targets linked to financial rewards. I make it my business to hit those targets and to prove I have done so. The only difference is that I do this i addition to my actual job.
My bonuses are a small percentage of my wage.
If you pay bananas you get monkeys too.
IBM have, as the saying goes, "form".....
Has anyone else read Richard Thomas DeLemarter's book "Big Blue - IBM's Use & Abuse of Power"?
IBM know how to, and are well practised, at playing the US Department of Justice. They have better lawyers, deeper pockets and greater stamina to keep things dragging through the courts until who ever opposes them runs out of money, gives up, has had their 8 years in power... or dies....
aka a fake concept that any revenue can count towards.
Recent financial reports show "revenue growth in hybrid cloud". What does that mean? Definitely not IBM Cloud usage which we all know is close to zero. It seems like any combination of hardware software and services involving compute workloads can be flagged as "hybrid cloud" by an opportunistic sales reporter.
I am relieved to hear that the bonuses are no longer linked to the financial misreporting. But in a sense the problem of misreporting revenue to give the appearance of strategic progress has been normalized into the official company strategy by sprinkling hybrid cloud pixie dust all over everything.
Not defending IBM, but NIST actually has a fairly clear definition of different cloud models in NIST SP 800-145. They do define hybrid cloud there as well.
I started referencing the NIST definitions of what cloud means and the various models recently, ended a lot of potential arguments.
The whole IBM Cloud Pack push is also a simple fraud.
Clients are essentially forced to upgrade (aka Modernize) to CLoud Pack for Data / Integration / Security. So this revenue gets booked as new review rather than support revenue. This is massively inflating the sales for the Cloud Paks but in reality they are a product that nobody in their right mind would want let alone attempt to implement, all at the cost to S&S revenue.
This rewards the exec who are hell bent on Cloud Paks, but in reality is only smoke and mirrors...
I was production manager for a Torbarrie Road, North York, Toronto, based banking equipment manufacturer. Their main line were sales point card swipe units with a Pin-Pad on a stretchy cord.
There was an IBM contract whereby if all the units were delivered before the end of the year which, in practical terms was before Christmas given both IBM Markham warehouses and the production plant were closed during the holiday break. A large bonus was riding on completing the contract.
Shortly before Christmas it was discovered there was a software bug in the terminals which necessitated them being opened up and reprogrammed. Since there were hundreds of these units to be processed and tested, we hired foreign uni students to do the work, and unmarked trucks carried the completed units to the IBM warehouses in the evenings.
They met the deadline and everyone got their bonuses. BTW, the manufacturer was run by ex-bankers which possibly suggests where the companies moral compass was set. At that time there was a shortage of DRAMs, and over several company board meetings it was agreed black market chips (stolen) would be purchased to meet production deadlines. For self protection, I discretely recorded the meetings.
Many businesses have to cheat to survive.
Let me make sure I have this right. Huge incentives for certain results were offered to a bunch of narcissistic psychopaths with pretty much no oversight.
These narcissistic psychopaths then pulled every underhanded move that they could think of to achieve the results and claim the huge incentives.
Why is this stuff even news anymore? It seems as surprising as the sun rising in the east.
And she's still working at 65 sitting on the boards of banks (JP Morgan, Council for Foreign Relations, etc) & getting paid $10-20K/day by IBM even though she laid off tens of thousands of older worker. She should pay for her sins but probably won't see jail time. She has to be the most hated female CEO of all time.
When the SEC is involved, they should take it very seriously. No one is above crime & they are very successful at prosecuting white collar crime.. People were laid off. IBM said there was a cap on commissions at $20,000 & thousands, if not more, were denied millions in commissions. Many open doored & were put on the Layoff list & others were fired. In 2021, Kingston vs IBM (WA) sales commission case a white manager told IBM to pay his black employee his commission or IBM would expose itself to a racism lawsuit, since another white employee received his million dollar commission. IBM ignored him & wound up firing him & the employee. They both sued (the employee sued for racism as well). They won. The courts awarded them $11 million each. This corp has gotten away with too much for too long. Perhaps the emps suing for age discrimination can tack on this case to bolster theirs. Same players involved: Rometty Gherson & CFO James Kavanaugh in age discrimination. What horrible people. Hope they get jail time.
Troubles me that I don't find anything surprising in this story... I spent much of my career in the Big Blue food chain. Never "recovered" from the obsolete principles of "Respect for the individual", "Customer service", and "Quality". By the time they retired me, I was completely confused about what the company was doing, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with money and more money.
They should jail these SOBs, because Rometty, Gherson et al were involved in the 'DINOBABIES," and getting rid of the "MATERNAL WORK FORCE," scheme. In the "Layoffs" section of this article, it specifically said they cut corners and did layoffs and cut sales commissions. For what???? To pay these %^&#@! Millions weren't enough for them, but destroying people's lives was? I pray for Karma after what they did to all these laid off employees and their families.