#innovation

It’s hard not to notice the growing stagnation within 3M’s PSD division. For a company long known for innovation, the lack of meaningful new products coming out of this group is concerning. The pipeline feels dry, and the urgency that once defined 3M’s culture of invention seems to be missing. Just chasing lost business now.
Equally troubling is the apparent gap in leadership. Strong leadership should inspire direction, accountability and momentum and there’s a sense of drift. Without clear vision or decisive action, teams are left without the guidance needed to push boundaries or bring new ideas to life.
Employees feel it. When innovation slows and leadership doesn’t step up, morale takes a hit. Talented people want to build, create, and solve problems and not sit in a holding pattern.
3M has the legacy, talent, and resources to do better. But without renewed focus on innovation and stronger leadership within PSD, it risks falling behind where it once led.In addition commercial effectiveness is a total joke.
#3M #Layoffs #Innovation #Leadership #WorkplaceReality

With the corporate split, two major parts of HON that have high barriers to entry are now their own companies. It seems all Automation wants to talk about is software, AI, software, AI, software, AI, which any startup can also sell in. Is the “innovating by powerpoint” finally going to come home to roost, no longer able to hide in the conglomerate?

I posted my thoughts in a comment awhile back, here's my peon take on the state of things:

MGMT isn't held accountable; escape is just a re-org away.

There's zero vision at the top. JP/BH/GD are not the right guys by any metric. Our sales incentives are aligned such that sales will pressure RnD to continue hunting the same 20 banks with the same multi-year projects. That pressure will force RnD to acquiesce.

CIS continues to be a useless rube goldberg SaaS for ticket generation under their current leader.

All while leadership continues to say that we're looking to get leaner, and deliver at a higher volume etc. etc.

Within RnD we have principal developers who don't know how computers work. When I say this I mean the basics of networking, filesystems, algorithms.

I had Sr Principal dev ask me what DFS was.... this by itself is not the issue, but it certainly points to the issue: people are not held accountable for performance, nor are they expected to improve their technical acumen, and inversely, they are rewarded simply for staying.

IMO:

SAS should strive to be (in part) the AWS of data tools. There should have a simple portal such that customers can input their payment info, click on a given tool, and crank it up according to some set of configurable parameters. It should be seamless.

This will require:

CIS and RnD to merge

a real SRE program inside of the company (it's insane and an indictment of the company that no one I've spoken to in CIS has heard of the term SRE).

us to retain top talent, and purge dead weight.

sas would need to spend cycles reducing service footprint/consolidating services/improving big O performance. several gigs of RAM is insane for a login service. Not to mention the fragmentation of said service.

The same model should be followed for solutions, which means prodman will need to actually learn how to do their job. we have some of the most arrogant, yet ignorant, product managers in the business.

know your domain, know the market, and sell to that market. every solution can't do everything. boutique projects are fine, but that's not gonna move the needle.

there should be pre-configured, highly opinionated, solutions that can be delivered and adding value in under a month.

Curious to see the perspective from people around the company

https://x.com/intel/status/2041501301318766866

The only innovation is the ridiculous brand name changes and comp plan changes every quarter it seems

Return to office, a fresh new start,
A chance to reconnect, to share, to spark.
The hum of voices, ideas in flight,
Collisions of minds that just feel right.

No more the silence of screens alone,
But laughter and teamwork, fully grown.
Quick chats that turn into something more,
Innovation waiting behind each door.

Morning routines with purpose and pace,
Seeing determination on every face.
A shared momentum, a collective drive,
Where goals feel closer, ambitions thrive.

So here’s to the days we gather again,
Colleagues as more than names on a screen.
Together we build, create, and inspire
In the office glow, we rise even higher.

AI is good but our core tech and management are managed by those old school people, non competent guys. Why?

Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, has released a new book, "The Algorithm," which outlines a five-step framework for Elon Musk's high-growth business operations. Which is not applicable in OpenText.

Step 1 | Question Every Requirement
Answers like "department regulations" or "it's always been this way" are not acceptable. Even safety or regulatory requirements must be re - examined for their necessity.

In OT, permissions are limited and prevented us from doing things.

Implementation method:

• Ask: Is this requirement mandated by law, safety, or physical laws?
• Find the name of the person who initially proposed this requirement.
• Requirements with no clear source are assumed to be deletable.

—————

but our technology is still in the 80s. Forms that require standard text fields with predetermined values, which the user needs to spell out, and a highly paid analyst or manager has to manually reject for typos. No drop down, no back end data validation, no autocomplete.

BUT USE AI. lol. Because we bought Microsoft bonds, Charlie is on the board, and we are spending billions on CoPilot to keep them afloat. Or something.

How about we just spend the billions bringing our technology later into the 20th century.

Makes me wonder if we shouldn’t replace a lot of C-suite employees with AI.

This was in Fortune magazine.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/30/dells-cfo-is-using-ai-agents-to-run-his-finance-team-and-has-helped-the-ai-business-go-from-0-to-25-billion/

The painful and sad truth is that Cisco has become a company run by financial managers and lawyers. Such a company has no chance of growing and being competitive at the crazy growth rate of the AI ​​market. The facts are that there has been no innovation at Cisco for a very long time, the company has been operating conservatively and cautiously, resting on its laurels, there is no risk-taking, no innovation, but rather maintaining the status quo. This is the truth that all need to understand and know about Cisco. All the other talks of the ELT are worthless.

A simple policy clarification and ended up in a 6-week loop of "alignment calls" and "deep dives" with multiple teams. It felt like explaining basic math to people determined to make it calculus. After 45 days of overcomplicating the simplest request, they finally came back and said it’s "trivial and not applicable."

The level of incompetence and the obsession with making everything a project is exhausting. We’re not innovating; we’re just spinning tires and calling it progress.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

"The C1X elevates Apple’s in-house RF capabilities to tier 1 status. Data from Q4 2025 unequivocally demonstrates that Apple’s in-house C1X modem represents a generational leap over the previous C1 model. Our data indicates that it has achieved real-world parity in download and latency performance with the Qualcomm X80 across numerous networks in both ideal and challenging conditions, proving the silicon is a performance equalizer rather than a compromise."

https://www.ookla.com/articles/apple-iphone-air-c1x-modem-q4-2025

https://www.businessinsider.com/bny-managers-teams-humans-agentic-ai-digital-employees-robin-vince-2026-3

Is Powerflex only place like this or its across whole ISG or Dell?

In recent weeks its like AI and nothing else matters.. each meeting each demo each talk is always AI.. half of people dont even know what to do.. so they ask AI, then send AI responses to other in slack/jira. slop times.

I love when folks on demo are more focused to say how windsurf or other LLM tool help them or did all VS why and what they actually did.

Its like AI psychosis.

https://x.com/ric_rtp/status/2034623376082284958?s=10

Started in January and with all the hybrid jobs I started looking. Good luck ATT you are back in the 80’s with punch card 8 hours and 5 days office your deliverables, innovation, and appl support is out the door

Good ideas come here, get a nice funeral, and then we never speak of them again.

I am honestly asking on what the current employees (lucky ones!) think of the BNY AI "baby" - is it really useful in your daily job?
Is the agent doing all boring taks and you just supervise the agent as was imagined originally ;)?

I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with my org at Oracle right now. We’ve lost so much talent and product knowledge lately that I feel like I’m just 'running the show' rather than leading. The people who stayed are totally checked out. They do the bare minimum and won't engage unless there's a promotion or hike on the table. Had to force them pushing my leads to extract more work. I know things are broken, but I’m at a loss on how to actually fix the culture and get them motivated again. Innovation is not happening at ground level. Employees are completely dissatisfied.

The morale here has hit a new low with all the layoff rumors circulating. Initially, the team was energized by AI initiatives, but it quickly turned into internal fighting over recognition. Since those 'wins' never actually materialized, everyone has just given up. They've dropped the ball on their work because they don't see the point in competing for nothing.

With AI tools available, its just copy paste happening without a thoughtful delivery. Everyone fears on danger of providing holistic solution. Had to layoff a bunch and rehire often. Product quality going to trash. Very difficult to hire a quality candidate under specific budget, Train them and Lose them.

Priced below the proposed offering, ended the delay below the IPO price, and took Medtronic down almost the full value of the spinoff. Man Geoff, Que and the whole gang are hitting on all cylinders. This is the flywheel of innovation at work i guess.

Fiserv’s latest “innovation” is making everyone track their daily location for tax allocation. Because obviously what we all needed was another pointless workflow. Nothing like turning basic payroll into a DIY compliance project. If this is efficiency, I’d hate to see complexity.

Anyone count this project for growth?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.fastcompany.com/91501853/nike-acg-latest-innovation-is-a-fully-portable-soccer-field&ved=2ahUKEwiU28rglIyTAxW6IjQIHe54AGgQxfQBKAB6BAgLEAE&usg=AOvVaw36Xbab9srd1gqONP7UnDce

If you came up with a great idea, get in touch with the Intellectual Property department.
Not only could you get a share of any royalties, your name is on the patent - proving you innovated.

Maybe someone at Dell will forget about you - but other employers will see what you can do.

It's a serious questions. I am curious what the board thinks. I think we lost every incentive to innovate and we also see what's going on the exec level, so why bother.

Do our execs nurture innovation in any meaningful way? Do they know how to do it? All I see is folks tweaking KPIs and bragging about success. We lost our core values and we struggle to innovate. I am not even sure if we can recover from this, the board is asleep at the wheel. So, we have no innovation and we do have a rock solid layer of useless grifters at the top.

My heartfelt sympathies go out to everyone affected by the recent layoffs. I’ve followed this forum for a while, and the consensus is almost always to place 100% of the blame on management. While leadership holds the wheel, we need to have a candid conversation: a trajectory like this is rarely the fault of just one group.

The Reality of the Financials
If you look at the last 12 years of financial filings, the numbers are staggering. Until 2020, Sabre spent roughly $250M annually on software development. From 2020 onward, "Technology Expense" (payroll, support, and hosting) has hovered near $1 billion annually.

We have to ask: Where did that money go?

Was a decade of billion-dollar spending really just to "keep the lights on" or migrate to GCP?

Did we ever look at the P&L of the specific products we built?

Did our development efforts actually attract new revenue or lower operational costs?

It seems many of us grew comfortable with the pace, rarely questioning if our daily output contributed to a profit or a loss.

The "Knowledge Hoarding" Trap
There is a common sentiment that "critical knowledge" is being lost. But we should ask: What is the value of that knowledge if it couldn't save the company? If "legacy knowledge" contributed to a failure to grow, it should have been challenged years ago.

We see this in teams where individuals (such as in Connectivity) are perceived as reluctant to share information. When knowledge is used to protect a desk rather than drive growth, it becomes a liability. For example, if those with the "keys" to connectivity had been responsible for the P&L, would they have allowed millions of redundant, non-revenue-generating calls to hit our systems for a decade?

The AI Pivot vs. GDS Reality
The current pitch of becoming an "AI company" feels like a pivot to a buzzword. As a GDS—an automated aggregator—our interaction with the end-customers who actually benefit from AI-driven personalization is limited. In our current position, the impact of AI is likely to be minimal because the core business model isn't structured to leverage it.

Moving Forward
In some ways, those leaving now might be the lucky ones. You are heading into a market where "innovation" must drive key business indicators. In the real world, no one cares about a billion-dollar "Next Generation Platform" or complex CI/CD pipelines if those tools don't translate into tangible business benefits.

The abuse, pressure and threats of layoffs are intended to keep you locked into a victim mentality.

They don't want you to realize that in most cases, software services you work on can now be vide-coded and released as competition or simply given away. A lot of this stuff just implements well-known standards or is otherwise not protected through IP law or non-competes. You are still locked into a mindset that because this software was hard to produce five years ago, it is hard to produce now. It isn't.

If you were to suggest Codex or Claude vibe-rewriting bitrotted Cisco tech-debt code, most of your coworkers would sneer and ignore you, and management would put you on "a list". But right now, this is actually something that can be done. If it can be done now, what will the world be like in six months, a year?

Cisco wants you to think using AI is only something you can do in service to them, not yourself.

Get ready, other people in this world are not locked in to your victim psychology.

No surprises here, we all knew it. The cat is outside the box!

References -
https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8651387/sap-faces-skepticism-over-ai-tool-joule
https://www.cio.com/article/4086426/companies-still-unfamiliar-with-sap-joule.html

Many more articles online

Everybody knows it. Continuous layoffs. Plummeting stock price. Customers pulling Dell footprint. No innovation. No enterprise solution portfolio worh a sh-t. Quality hemoraging. Support on life support. Clueless leadership. No AI relevance. Just low-cost, low-margin cheap hardware, that's it. To be honest, that's all Dell really ever was.

Does anyone actually get anything out of this other than disgust and insult?

This has to be one of the most bizarre corporate nonsense campaigns I have seen across at least 7 employers.

Is anyone following this directive?:
" And don’t forget to share your Career Week experience on Viva Engage with the hashtag #CareerWeek2026 - let’s spotlight the innovation and energy of our office! "

My office is still 90% empty, with no innovation or energy.

Thoughts on Project Elevate?

leadership havent evolved in the last 10+ years. For a company that is hyper focused on money making strategy over and above technology strategy, the pivot should be to high margin software. IBM and HPE constantly acquire software companies and are better for it. JC is a one trick pony and every leader beneath are 'yes men' who are only concerned with their next options or rsu allocation. Bring in some fresh blood and wake up ya muppets!

Hey everyone should put Venmo QR codes on their email signature!! I guarantee you all that you would make more in tips from your customers than in commission!!!!

If Waters can afford a lavish Vegas meeting for the sales team, why can't the company provide similar recognition for the scientists, engineers, and staff driving our innovation?

Bunch of frauds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge8nd5ve00o

Galgotias University was removed from the India AI Impact Summit 2026 after falsely presenting a Chinese-made Unitree Go2 robot dog as their own, in-house, "Made in India" innovation.

Initially, the rebranding news struck me as a desperate move. However, if the new logo is a shift from the iconic Sabre red to black or graphite, it makes some sense. It is either a bold gamble or a deliberate move to align with Google branding. This is especially plausible if there are plans for deep integration into the Google ecosystem. Imagine booking flights directly through Google Maps powered by Sabre. In that context, a minimalist tech focused visual identity is not just a facelift, it is a strategic fit.

Any good acquisitions being looked at for growth in sales and gathering new innovations? For the right price Solventum could be a good value.

Why is everyone so obsessed with patents these days? Do these patents and white papers that people produce hold any value? .Most of them seem to be junk

The only tech trend that SAP will ever be on top or in front of is "SAP." We hold ourselves back in regard to real progress, implementation, innovation because we can't do a damn thing without stopping to talk about it. We are rewarded not for our tangible contributions but for our ability to blend in with broader tech culture. We work for children who have a pretend business. Not a company of responsible businessmen with ideas and proper ambition.

Updated - T, 2/10/26.

AI Innovation -

1) Software Firms.

2) Private Credit Firms.

3) Insurance Brokerage Firms.

4) Wealth-Management Firms.

While AI contributes many useful innovations towards society, and will create (some) related jobs.

The stocks of those respective industries are (currently) being sold-off within the Global markets.

The unemployment rate will increase (along with layoffs) the U.S. National debt (currently) at $38.7 Trillion (and rising) per usdebtclock will have (less) contributions from U.S. taxpayers (in general) unless Corporations, and the wealthy; pay more.

This list is going (not if) expand over time, if the job is computer dependent; AI can (and will) take its' place.