Where once had thrived a spirit of co-operation fusing vendor and buyer there will arise an uneasy, possibly distrustful and very likely reluctant acceptance of common burdens. Where once an IBMer had been the quintessence of Can Do, dependent users will find Won’t Do. As antipathy grows within IBM, customers will bear the consequences. Nor is the presence of one particularly vocal dissident in the ranks of IBM something that the company’s customers can afford to ignore. While the chances of a victory for organised labour within IBM seem infinitesimal, so, too, did many of the other recent events that are now established facts. L on many sympathetic ears, as IBM now seems habituated to one-time charges for staff reductions that have been made with impressive regularity during the past few years. View all newsletters Sign up to our newsletters Data, insights and analysis delivered to you By The Tech Monitor team Sign up here He cleverly points out that after IBM cuts 10% of its employees, a whole lot of people will find themselves in the new bottom layer – ready to get canned. Simultaneously, the company’s lone unionist, hidden somewhere in the IBM plant in Endicott, New York, put out an issue of his occasional organising newsletter, The Resistor. In the aftermath of the meeting, shareholders dumped their holdings, plunging the price of an IBM unit on the Big Board to its lowest level in a decade. Sadly, to most of those present, the scheme sounded not like an act of triumph but rather one of triage. In the midst of this disaster report, Akers unveiled the outline of his plan to break up IBM, rendering the company into newly responsible divisions defined by their products and services. Chairman Akers tried to minimise the mess his company was in, while his minions, one after another, damned IBM with nearly every detail of their satrapies’ disappointments. IBM finally admitted it was in trouble, but did so with inappropriate obliqueness. So, it was hardly surprising that IBM’s effort to explain itself to the investing public early in December resoundingly backfired. Wall Street’s evaluation of a company is based as much on faith in the future as it is on past performance. Trust is very important in financial circles. If Akers isn’t a prevaricator, he’ll do until the real thing comes along. In the recent past, Akers has described IBM’s business as solid, when in fact it was falling apart he has appointed executives and anointed them with praise, only to ease them out when he needed scapegoats he has publicly blamed IBM’s woes on economic conditions while privately lambasting employees and departments whose performance proved embarrassing and he has proclaimed one turnaround after another for his company while neglecting accurately to characterise its magnitude as 360 degrees. Nor is it clear that IBM’s $4.84 annual dividend is sacred, despite the promises of chairman John Akers. The body blow to IBM’s heretofore unsullied creditworthiness awaits the company’s official figures, but it now seems almost inevitable. Credit evaluation agencies have threatened to put the squeeze on IBM’s bond ratings… merely because the company isn’t taking in enough cash to pay for its dividends and expenses. Within the company, stool pigeons have turned over to the media nasty doggerel and other corporate blasphemies circulating on internal networks. Production has been severely impacted and profits have gone down the drain. Although all the evidence suggests the company could not find its most appropriate place for treatment with both hands, IBM’s management has proclaimed not only another corporate evacuation but also a rearrangement of the very bowels of its business.Īnd it has done so just in time. But how often does your newspaper leave you, as it did one rectal recreationist, talking about a wonderful release of energy? If only IBM could relieve itself so easily, and with such sublime satisfaction. This is far more than most of the newspaper’s readers normally get from their daily journal, with its persistent emphasis on such dreary topics as politics and business, although at $75 a treatment, irrigation does cost a hundred times as much. As nutritionist Roger Groos told the Independent’s health reporter, one reward experienced by many patients is the uplifting of your spirits afterward. The medical profession may poo-poo the practice, but London’s Colonic International Association remains firmly entrenched in its beliefs. Why, added the enematic expert, women come to me who are going to the loo once in three weeks. Colonic irrigation therapist Katherine Monbiot told London’s respected Independent newspaper that the British are the most constipated nation in the world. Britain’s Princesses Royal are rumoured to do it, joined (if the suspicions are justified) by enough of their subjects to provide a livelihood for 42 professional practitioners.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |