#strategy

IBM’s problem is not that the mainframe disappears tomorrow. It is that most new workloads are being built elsewhere.

AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Linux are now the defaults for new applications, while IBM Z, AIX and IBM i increasingly depend on existing customers, transaction growth and hardware-refresh cycles.

AI is weakening the mainframe’s strongest defense: the difficulty of understanding decades of undocumented COBOL and business logic. Toyota’s use of Amazon Q to analyze legacy COBOL and support migration planning is a warning. AI does not need to replace the mainframe directly; it only needs to make leaving cheaper, faster and less risky.

IBM’s traditional software is also exposed. DataStage faces cloud-native ELT, zero-ETL, Redshift, S3 and Iceberg. Red Hat remains useful, but many customers can choose EKS, AKS or GKE instead of OpenShift—and Amazon Linux instead of RHEL.

IBM Cloud is not a credible fourth hyperscaler, and IBM is not investing in AI infrastructure at anything close to Amazon, Microsoft or Google. Its AI strategy increasingly depends on competitors owning the compute, models, distribution and economics.

Quantum offers no immediate rescue. IBM is a serious contender, not the undisputed leader, and commercial returns remain years away.

IBM has repeatedly acquired companies—Lotus, Informix, Rational and many others—without consistently creating lasting platform leadership. Continuing to buy software companies while distributing billions through dividends does not address the underlying problem.

IBM should make an honest choice: cut the dividend and reinvest aggressively, or break up and sell its valuable businesses while they still command premium value.

Harvesting legacy cash, buying another company and protecting the dividend is not a growth strategy. It is managed decline.

Dominik Asam discussed the company’s enterprise AI strategy, explaining why businesses are becoming more focused on AI cost:

There is now a recognition that AI tokens are not free. Every enterprise we talk to is grappling with the fact that token spending is going through the roof.

There is now a recognition that throwing tokens, in a probabilistic way, at every problem might not be the most efficient approach.

There is also a fear of vendor lock-in, as certain models are starting to increase their prices.

That is why SAP has chosen a completely different architecture. I checked this morning, and we now have 58 large language models integrated into our AI platform.

This allows us to take advantage of competition across models, both in terms of performance and cost. We can also route each task to the most appropriate model.

Sometimes you do not need the most expensive model.

Even more importantly, sometimes you do not need a model at all. You can solve the problem in a deterministic, algorithmic, and easily auditable way by simply crunching the numbers.

At SAP, we have the ability to leverage all of these approaches.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8JPBNvs/

The strategy is: survive the quarter. Repeat.

Verizon needs to skip Hans/DEI 2.0 and announce Verizon 3.0.

Verizon 3.0 is going back Verizon 1.0 and motivate/reward performance on results and execution. Call Denny Strygal/Ivan.

It's impossible to execute with current Board and C-Suite Team.

Go back to skip levels and ask high owrformers what needs to be done.

Start with VCG groups.. learn why desoite having superior fiber in SFU/MDUs over 25 years.. broadband still under 50%.

Then attack Small Businesx and remove sales friction.

The Vz Culture and lack of empowerment and leadership talent will ensure competition continues to as$ kick Verizon in marketplace.

JA posted on LinkedIn that Exploration is Back! Tell me how because I don’t see it from where I work wells in the upstream…..

Is he still selling pipe dreams so he can retire? Did he ever find anythind?

The enterprise software company Monday.com is reducing its global workforce by approximately 20%. This significant layoff is attributed to a strategic shift towards an "AI-driven growth strategy" and a new AI Work Platform. The company aims to create a flatter organization with more autonomous teams to compete in this evolving market. While reducing staff, Monday.com also plans to continue hiring in key focus areas. The co-CEO emphasized that the decision was not for cost reduction or to replace employees with AI.

New York, New York

https://www.businessinsider.com/monday-com-layoffs-ai-growth-strategy-2026-7

After yesterday’s presentation I still don’t know what Next 90 is.

We are evolving our structure and operating model by aligning leadership and decision-making more directly to the needs of each business, while centralizing select capabilities that create value across the organization.

At the meeting I was told my contract wont be extended and each of new-hires got the same message. So yeah, the Dell aka circus itself. Hire bunch of ppl in last half a year without actual strategy and now they are going to shut the place

Given the headcount of AEG, we are heavily investing in AI. Our strength in AI chip design lies in the vast internal data within our tools, which can be directly leveraged by AI models, a luxury that customers and other AI chip companies simply do not have. That said, it is striking that neither my team nor neighboring teams appear to be working directly with AEG to integrate this AI into our tool workflows. It seems to me that AEG is another den of scammers. Meanwhile, we are laying off many contributing employees while expanding a group that lacks profitability, clear direction, and a viable strategy.

IBM has a major gap in its product portfolio. We don’t make and sell devices that have GPUs. This is what enterprises are clamoring for AI training and inferencing at scale, which is way more powerful than the accelerators we have on IBMZ and Power. And IBM Cloud can’t compete against the hyperscalers, which are expensive, however ideal for running AI use cases at scale. We have a strong AI product portfolio, although so do a lot of companies. We’ve acquired a lot of companies that complement our core products and have a massive ecosystem. But most days, I wonder -
What does IBM even stand for? Where do we even belong in this rapidly evolving world?

I don’t believe IBM will fail. However we all, especially our Senior Leaders, need to really think about what we actually stand for. Not this BS hybrid cloud leader statement. It’s about crafting a real vision that inspires the world. It’s about culture change to invigorate low morale at the ranks. It’s about picking up this company and giving it a really good shake. If we don’t do something drastic, then the free fall will continue.

ExxonMobil has publicly stated that domestic manufacturing is a central pillar of India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, and the company has launched its own “Make in India” initiative to help realize that goal ExxonMobil+1.

Strategic Alignment with India’s Goals
India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 aims to transform the country into a self-reliant, globally competitive manufacturing hub. ExxonMobil sees strong synergies between its global energy infrastructure operations and India’s industrial ambitions, particularly in heavy engineering, shipbuilding, and specialized manufacturing ExxonMobil.

Current and Future Sourcing
Current scale: In the last two years, ExxonMobil affiliates have sourced USD 100 million worth of equipment from India ExxonMobil+1.

Future target: The company plans to scale sourcing to billions of dollars by the end of the decade ExxonMobil+1.

Focus areas:

Mega modules — large, pre-assembled units used in petrochemical plants and refineries.

Energy infrastructure equipment for LNG, refining, and chemical projects.

Shipbuilding synergies — both industries require heavy engineering, specialized suppliers, and complex logistics networks ExxonMobil+1.

Why India?
India offers:

A skilled workforce in engineering and fabrication.

Expanding connectivity (roads, ports, railways) to support large-scale manufacturing.

Resilient supply chains that can support complex, high-value projects ExxonMobil.

Impact
By leveraging India’s growing engineering and fabrication capabilities, ExxonMobil aims to:

Reduce reliance on foreign manufacturing for its global projects.

Support India’s industrial growth and energy security.

Create high-value jobs and technology transfer opportunities in the country ExxonMobil+1.

In short, ExxonMobil’s “Make in India” initiative is not just a corporate sourcing strategy — it’s a strategic investment in India’s manufacturing future, aligned with its national vision for 2047.

The most amusing part of the article is the premise itself that IBM can re-achieve any sort of relevance after this decimation.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/ibm-stock-price-fall-sell-87657335

The blue chip’s biggest wipeout on record will force the company to reinvent itself—again.

By Mackenzie Tatananni |
Updated July 17, 2026, 4:27 pm EDT / Original July 17, 2026, 1:00 am EDT

IBM has been forced to reinvent itself many times in the past. After its biggest wipeout on record this past week, it will have to do so again.

Big Blue had been riding high. Yes, there were problems in consulting, as signaled by Accenture’s woes, and in software, tipped off by weakness in ServiceNow and its sector peers. But the stock was trading at an all-time high as recently as June 2 as investors looked at the company’s near-monopoly in mainframe computing, its quantum computing effort, and its prospects as an artificial-intelligence winner.

They were wrong. IBM stock tumbled 25% this past Tuesday, its worst single-day drop on record, following a rare pre-announcement of its quarterly results. Such a move is highly unusual for the company, which is traditionally disciplined when it comes to financial reporting. The last time IBM pre-announced earnings was in October 2008, in an effort to reassure investors it was on track to meet targets during the global financial crisis.

Investors faced a different reality this time around, as IBM posted second-quarter earnings and revenue that missed Wall Street forecasts. While there were plenty of problems—slowing software and consulting sales, a massive reallocation of technology spending by its customers to chips, servers, and other AI needs—the biggest drag on the company’s performance was its infrastructure business. That includes its legacy mainframes—the massive computers enterprises like banks and credit-card networks rely on to process billions of calculations and transactions in real time.

Big Blue is undoubtedly the dominant force in this space. A 2022 study by Celent, commissioned by IBM, found its Z Mainframe Servers line processed more than half of the world’s transactions by value. But that didn’t help the division’s performance during the second quarter. Infrastructure revenue fell, as expected, but the 7% decline was significantly faster and harder than IBM had anticipated. Not only did fewer companies buy the actual mainframe hardware, they also bought less of the high-margin software required for tasks like banking and credit-card payments.

CEO Arvind Krishna attributed the results to poor execution. “We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders.

The 25% drop was massive—and partly justified, even as it erased nearly $70 billion in market capitalization. “The stock had become a crowded AI infrastructure winner and was trading near all-time highs, so any sign of execution issues was going to get punished,” says Dan O’Regan, managing director of equity trading at Mizuho Securities. “That said, a move of this magnitude suggests the market is now pricing in a much more prolonged slowdown than what management has implied.”

It didn’t help that analysts had set high expectations heading into the print. Morgan Stanley, for one, had predicted upside in infrastructure and software that was already priced into the stock. Oppenheimer, which downgraded the stock on Wednesday, had anticipated “no surprises in business trajectory,” making the sudden pre-announcement a true blindside.

Analysts were quick to move to the sidelines following IBM’s earnings miss, asserting that Big Blue would have to lean on major acquisitions or close deals that slipped past the quarter’s deadline to recover lost ground. Now Oppenheimer is questioning the company’s ability to achieve double-digit software revenue growth through 2027. The 5% growth in the latest quarter was sharply below the firm’s 12% estimate.

The bigger issue might be whether IBM’s infrastructure business itself is being disrupted. Even before Tuesday’s plunge, IBM stock had been lagging behind the broader market after stumbling earlier in the year as fears of AI disruption began to take hold. One of the most significant drops occurred in February, when AI start-up Anthropic unveiled a COBOL modernization playbook for its Claude Code tool, claiming it could dramatically streamline updates to the outdated programming language that runs on IBM mainframes. Historically, the immense complexity and cost of migrating off these systems protected IBM’s highly profitable mainframe business—a protective moat AI now threatens to dissolve.

IBM stock closed on Wednesday at 16.54 times 12-month forward earnings, its lowest price/earnings ratio since June 2024. But that says less about where IBM is now than where it was before. As recently as June 2, the stock was trading for more than 25 times, above the S&P 500’s 21.52—a premium valuation that might not have been deserved.

“Lower prices make an asset more attractive,” BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski says. “I just caution investors that, out of all the companies I cover, IBM probably has the lowest organic growth currently and the lowest organic growth outlook. That needs to be reflected in the valuation.”

Shares plunged 26% by Friday’s close, capping off their worst week in history. As tempting as it may be to scoop them up after such a tumble, IBM still has a lot of work to do.

In the worst-case scenario, investors fear that IBM’s enterprise clients—massive businesses with sprawling IT setups—are redirecting their budgets toward AI instead of Big Blue’s traditional offerings. At best, the company was simply caught off guard by a sudden capital expenditure shift, as Krishna asserted, and can reclaim that lost ground in coming quarters.

Slowinski is one of the most bearish voices on the Street, rating the stock at Underperform. “IBM’s strategy is to use its cash flow to acquire higher-growth software assets in order to improve its growth profile,” he says. “But it has a business in consulting, in software, in mainframe, where all of them are low-single-digit organic growers. And the prospects of that improving organically is very slim.”

As Mizuho’s O’Regan sees it, the setup from here depends less on the AI narrative and more on management proving it can consistently execute.

“The market wants proof that this is an execution stumble, not the beginning of a structural slowdown in demand,” O’Regan explains. “As a stock, the days of getting the benefit of the doubt are probably over for now.”

At least until the next metamorphosis begins to take shape.

Another reorg. Sold as agility, felt as whiplash. Leadership didn’t even wait for the planned date — they tore up a structure barely a year old and rebuilt it mid-year, with zero regard for what that costs the people living through it. The stated reason: “boost software deployment.” The real reason is simpler and darker.
IBM has spent years buying growth instead of building it. Every quarter, another acquisition gets folded in, rebranded as “software strength,” and used to justify the next reorg. Strip out the acquisitions, and the growth mostly disappears. This isn’t a strategy. It’s a treadmill, and shareholders finally noticed — the stock just had its worst single day in the company’s history.
The money to keep buying is running out. Debt keeps climbing. Buybacks have been frozen for years because the company is still “digesting” its last purchase. Cash meant for growth is quietly being redirected to service the last deal, not fund the next one. When a company can’t return money to its own shareholders, it’s telling you something about how thin the cushion has gotten.
And the sales playbook is exhausted. For years, big renewals were “won” by reshuffling the same contract — discount here, markup there, call it a signing. Do that once, fine. Do it a third time on the same account, and there’s nothing left to move. Customers aren’t d-mb. Many are also sitting on mountains of software they were sold and never deployed. Asking them to sign another restructuring on top of shelfware gathering dust isn’t selling — it’s asking for patience that ran out a while ago. That’s the real story behind “large deals failed to close.” It was never about speed.
So here’s what a summer reorg actually buys: nothing, fast. Territory changes take a quarter just to stabilize. Real deals take six months to a year to close. Launch a reorg in July, across a holiday season when half of Europe is offline, and demand results in Q3 — and you’ve built a machine engineered to fail on schedule.
Except failure doesn’t cost everyone the same. IBM books the reorg as a clean, one-time charge and moves on. Sellers absorb the real cost: quotas that don’t shrink to match a broken calendar, commission checks that quietly get smaller because targets were unrealistic from day one, accounts inherited mid-relationship with no memory of what was promised or already burned. When the numbers come up short, it won’t be called “the reorg cost us a season.” It’ll be called underperformance. The same event, blamed upward as strategy and downward as failure — a strategy that costs nothing on the way in and everything on the way out, just not for the people who designed it.
That’s the pattern worth naming out loud: a company that has run out of things to buy, running out of ways to reshuffle what it already sold, paying for both by quietly shifting the bill onto the people closest to the customer.
Another reorg won’t fix that. Only shipping what was already sold will.

Any news or updates for location strategy?

Thoughts? https://medium.com/@gib.bassett/alteryx-after-private-equity-customers-shouldnt-panic-but-they-shouldn-t-be-passive-18744cbfef67

Performance gap is widening.

Investors don’t see value in the integrated strategy; reason: there is not an investor base for such a company. You have the majors and then focused companies in refining and midstream. No one buys PSX unless they have to. If you want Refining exposure you buy VLO or even PBF; midstream, you buy EPC or TRGP. We are ruled by index buyers.

We will never outperform the sum of the parts.

I think AT&T is looking at WFH completely backwards. Instead of fighting it, why not use it as a competitive advantage?

Why limit hiring to a few expensive hub cities when you could recruit the best talent anywhere in the country? Why spend billions on office space and new buildings when that money could be invested in the network, new technology, or staying ahead of the competition?

It also solves a huge problem for younger employees. Not everyone can afford to live near Dallas, Atlanta, or the other hub locations anymore. Housing prices have exploded. WFH gives people the chance to earn a good salary while living somewhere they can actually afford to buy a home and build a life.

Those salaries don’t disappear either. They get spent in small towns and local communities, supporting restaurants, contractors, coffee shops, and small businesses that otherwise wouldn’t see that economic activity.

I don’t see the downside of letting managers manage by results instead of ZIP code. Keep the jobs that truly need to be in the office in the office. Let everyone else work where they’re most productive. And if someone wants to come into the office five days a week, great. No one is stopping them.

To me, that’s a much smarter long-term strategy than spending billions on offices while trying to convince people that sitting in a building creates value. Especially for a global communications company whose business is built on connecting people from anywhere.

Lenovo has confirmed layoffs within its US-based XR business unit. The company is transitioning its strategy from business-focused XR to a more consumer-oriented approach centered on AI-enabled wearables. This shift will integrate XR efforts into Motorola, aiming for a unified personal AI experience across devices. Lenovo's move reflects a broader industry trend of disinvesting from traditional VR/AR towards smart glasses and AI integration. The company's XR investments have not yielded expected returns, prompting this strategic pivot.

USA

https://skarredghost.com/2026/07/13/lenovo-vr-layoffs/

"If business demand requires hiring, what's the justification for layoffs? A balanced workforce strategy is important."

1. Startup: Bringing your business idea to life.

2. Growth: Consumers know about you and your revenue is increasing.

3. Maturity: More brand awareness and a strong presence in your target market.

4. Renewal or Decline: While every business wants to avoid a decline, it’s bound to happen to almost everyone. Reinvesting in your company can result in its renewal -- or decline can happen for a variety of reasons:
    

• Not pursuing opportunities to expand during the maturity stage
• Changes to the industry that require a change in strategy
• Competing businesses having better products or services
• Not reacting to technology updates or advances


https://www.thehartford.com/business-insurance/strategy/managing-growth/4-stages-business-growth

Can anyone share any BTC or KLTC success stories? I presume we have above average ppl at the highest levels of management. We’ve been on this TC journey now for a while and should be able to judge whether or not we should double down or reset our global talent management strategy. Are there truly tangibly positive results?

Microsoft’s gaming strategy has misfired badly

• A supply-chain crisis for Xbox couldn’t have come at a worse time*

IT IS NOT yet the PayPal mafia, but the Instacart matriarchy is making its mark. Not long after Fidji Simo, ex-head of the online grocery store, became Sam Altman’s product-focused sidekick at OpenAI, Asha Sharma, Instacart’s former chief operating officer, became Satya Nadella’s Ms Fix-it at Microsoft Gaming. Groceries are a tricky, low-margin business. So is Xbox—and Ms Sharma has wasted no time in getting to work. On July 6th, less than five months after becoming the division’s boss, she launched what she called the biggest reset in its 25-year history.

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/08/microsofts-gaming-strategy-has-misfired-badly

Ms Sharma has gone about her overhaul with a candour that is rare in the mealy-mouthed world of big tech. Declaring that Microsoft’s gaming arm is “not healthy”, she announced that 3,200 employees would be axed over the next 12 months, and that up to five loss-making studios would be shed. Her diagnosis makes two things clear: first, Mr Nadella’s gaming strategy has misfired badly; second, the entire console industry is in a supply-chain crisis. No hard-core gamer herself, the battles ahead will test Ms Sharma’s mettle.

With Mr Nadella’s attention focused on the artificial-intelligence bo-m in recent years, Xbox has suffered from neglect. Under previous management, it sought to reduce its reliance on the Xbox console and focus on its multi-platform subscription service, called Game Pass, intending to become the “Netflix of gaming”. To fuel demand, Microsoft invested what insiders say was upwards of $20bn on games and studios, in addition to the $70bn-plus it spent buying Activision Blizzard, maker of “Call of Duty”, in 2023.

Alas, Game Pass, which was meant to have 77m members this year, has fewer than 30m. Meanwhile, the multi-platform approach has undermined Microsoft’s own console business by making content available on other platforms, such as Sony’s PlayStation, which kept its own games off Xbox. Microsoft’s quarterly gaming revenue has been in decline since last autumn. Xbox’s operating margins are a meagre 3%. It has been losing market share to Nintendo, another console-maker. Bureaucracy has ballooned; in parts of the company, Ms Sharma says, work passes through 14 layers of management. Just like a real-life Pac-Woman, she intends to chomp those down to as few as three.

Her strategy is bold. The year of lay-offs will be the biggest in Xbox’s history. Her disposal of studios will end Microsoft’s attempt to hoover up indie game-developers. Yet it is not all cost-cutting. Insiders say Ms Sharma intends to invest in “Minecraft”, a hit game that was used as a cash cow rather than a growth engine and has lost significant ground to Roblox, a stable of games that competes for youngsters’ attention. She also plans to double down on mobile gaming using untapped expertise in King, creator of “Candy Crush”, which was bought with Activision.

The trickiest part will be rescuing the console. When Ms Sharma took over in February she promised “the return of Xbox”. Sales of gaming hardware have long been in decline, but insiders say Ms Sharma considers Xbox users to be her core customers, spending far more on games and services than PC players.

Yet as Ms Sharma tries to win them back, the ground is moving under her feet. When she took control of the business, AI-related demand for memory chips and other components had already caused costs to surge across the consumer-electronics industry. Within her first 50 days, input costs rose by 50%, a source at the company says. All three console-makers have been forced to announce price increases at a time when growth in the industry (excluding China) is sluggish.

The component crunch will have long-term consequences. Microsoft had hoped to increase production of consoles to support the eagerly awaited release of the latest version of “Grand Theft Auto”, made by Take-Two, a listed studio, which is rumoured to have cost a staggering $2bn to develop. The supply constraints will make it harder to increase production of consoles to meet the expected demand.

In 2028 both Microsoft and Sony are expected to launch the next generation of devices, which could also be hampered by the supply-chain chaos. Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis, a consultancy, says Microsoft may be hit harder, because Sony, as a consumer-electronics company, has stronger relationships with suppliers. On July 1st Sony said it would stop selling physical discs in 2028, a decision that Mr Harding-Rolls says was long in gestation but might help offset rising costs.

Some think Microsoft’s best response to both the strategic blunders and the hardware crisis would be to spin off the gaming business. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson, an investment firm, reckons that the lumpiness of revenue as a result of seven-year console cycles is better suited to private-equity investors than to public ones.

There are still rich seams of potential growth within Xbox that Ms Sharma will hope to mine before a final decision about its future is made. But as Ben Thompson of Stratechery, a popular newsletter, puts it, “Sometimes it’s Game Over.” ■

It amazes me how many d-mb decisions those above me in leadership make. They call in multiple 3rd party companies to direct them when they have thousands of people who have worked hand in hand with clients everyday for multiple decades and know what they want.

Investing in a POS solution wasn't Genius at all. Global put it's self in a market that immediately made all of your biggest partners leave because you are now the competitor.... Instead of increasing what was huge partnerships to just handle the payment processing. Both Tsys, Heartland, and Global all had 1000s of large partners and the companys were profitable but Global blindly decides to disrupt its own base and wonder why they are going broke... Get back to the foundations and focus on being the best payment processor and partner. You cannot compete in a software world where anyone can build their own POS now. Focus on being the payment partner of choice for every software.

A lotof cliches can be said so I'll spare you the boredom.

They did it again, stakeholder value was retained for a quarter at a cost of competency.

We knew this comany is not here to innovate, I mean the top product is a cheap SharePoint variant and the latest innovation is AI tool that saves you time in copy-paste, if you are willing to spend 6600$ a month to host it.

No one in OT asks themselves why other companies make money while we are not, they ask how can we milk a 30 year old tech with minimal effort and here we are, 2% down anda new announcement that now, this time, finally, for sure - will succeed because the problem was expensive employees not 8ncompetent accountants.

Ever heard about 3% YOY growth that never happens? Yes!
Ever heard about analysts that get fired for getting it wrong? No!
The OT way.. a graveyard for auccessful tech for sale.

Verizon is doing INCREDIBLY well. Maybe the greatest corporate success anyone has ever seen. People come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, “Sir… how do you lay off thousands of people while the stock keeps going down?” I say, “It’s called winning. You wouldn’t understand.”

The Fake News says, “The stock is down.” Wrong! It’s a beautiful strategic decline. Very advanced. The smartest people are saying they’ve never seen anything like it.

Every week there’s another reorg, another layoff, another AI announcement. Tremendous momentum. Nobody restructures better than Verizon. Nobody. Believe me.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/08/att-could-sink-as-starlink-use-soars-wells-fargo-says.html

Wells Fargo initiated coverage of AT&T with an underweight rating and set an $18 price target, implying nearly 15% downside from Tuesday's close.
In a note to clients, analyst Steven Cahall says Starlink is a near-term gainer in broadband relative to fixed wireless access and a longer-term disruptor to wireless. He says competition is likely to be fierce outside AT&T's fiber footprint, while the company's weaker market share footholds outside wireline areas leave its wireless net additions most at risk.

Cahall also says AT&T is less likely than rivals to strike a mobile virtual network operator partnership with Starlink. That leaves the company needing stronger execution in fiber and convergence to create upside for the stock, in his view.

Six years is enough time to judge a strategy and its results. Nothing has improved.

Leadership shouldn’t be evaluated by speeches, memos, or slogans. It should be evaluated by results.

Has the company become a more attractive place to work? Has it become easier to recruit top talent? Has morale improved? Has the culture become stronger? Has the strategy delivered the long-term results shareholders and employees were promised?

Those are the questions the board should be asking and the answer to every single one is NO.

I think it’s fair to ask whether the current strategy and the leadership behind it is the right one for the company’s future.

No leader should be immune from accountability. A truly market-based culture should hold leadership to the same standard it expects of everyone else. Nobody else with this poor performance would still be around. Get this loser out while there’s still something to save.

Shell has first mover advantage by selling non operated Nakika asset. This simplifies the company significantly and creates capital and capacity where it’s needed. Now BP will have Talos as a partner. Talos going to learn the hard way how slow and complex BP really operates.
Why didn’t BP sale when they had a chance?

Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term

Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term

Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term

Just gonna repost this here…
EH + ELT when you’re ready to talk legit strategy and not just reorgs hmu
I still stand by most of what I said btw and then some.

First, STOP WITH THE CONSULTANTS FOR OUR STRATEGY 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
They don’t know the business like we do. They don’t understand what has made Nike Nike.

Second, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SACRED STOP CLOUT CHASING.
It’s honestly an embarrassment at this point. We bring people and companies on that have NOTHING to do with athletics or sport. Perfect example is the skims collab. The announcement of how Nike was partnering with skims because they had knowledge and understanding of the feminine form read (to me and many others I know who think the skims brand is mediocre at best) we don’t care about investing in ourselves and innovation for female athletes - we’d rather contract that out. Next this last drop literally looked like things I could buy at a dance studio. Nothing innovative. And the Travis collabs… cmon. He’s problematic and has nothing to do with sport. Who remembers his tantrum playing kickball during JDI day? I get that we are in the streetwear arena now but our athletic styles made it into streetwear without trying and without non-athlete celebrity collabs. One offs are great or if it’s someone who isn’t problematic a regular collection is cool. But let’s be smart.

Third, LISTEN TO THE EMPLOYEES and stop protecting leadership (and yes people).
Tech was screaming at the top of their lungs how bad RL was.. we’ve heard the allegations. Then comes MD, again, SCREAMING she didn’t know what she was doing. Lower level employees see a lot more of what’s working and not than leadership; or that’s what it feels like since they do nothing to improve anything.
Fourth, OMG LISTEN TO CONSUMERS (thought this would be obvious)
Everyone complains about how narrow our shoes are. I’ve heard some explanations about this saying elite athletes have narrow feet. My solution? Standard sizing that the average person can wear and elite sizing (our current fit). Imagine the marketing antics we could pull with that. Nike wasn’t built by everyone agreeing and falling in line. To expect us to thrive with a majority yes people is absurd, but we also need more focused on collaboration. One team, best team, team Nike.

Five, MARKETING WTF ARE YOU DOING. Our brand should be in alignment.
How tf did “Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated” pass through approvals?!?!!! Especially when one of core mottos/statements is “if you have a body, you’re an athlete.” Like are we inclusive and want everyone to make sport a daily habit, or shame people who are trying to be active? Alignment is key my guys and we can’t seem to pick a lane.

Six, WE NEED A BETTER FTE/ETW RATIO, not offshore all of tech and holy cow stop with the layoffs
We are literally always under investigation by the state for not having enough FTEs. Some ETW roles need to be converted, period. It’s not staff aug/special projects/SOWs/MSAs. It’s regular day in day out work that we are contracting out. Not just that the onboarding and offboarding costs (and the pain that that is).
I worked in GT. I do see the value in having ITC. However, I see bigger issues when the tech teams are working off hours. Tickets being closed because you don’t see their response in time because of the time difference. Tickets moving slowly because you can only send/receive one response per day. And it seems like with this shift changes have come down like, when an ETW converts creating an entirely new account for them (literally seems like they weren’t trained correctly or held accountable for this issue when for YEARS converting accounts wasn’t an issue).
Layoffs are bad. We do it to please wall street then have to ramp hiring back up or have to contract more work out. Not to mention the onboarding and offboarding costs associated. Plus these decisions are usually not made at Nike based on performance and it’s pretty evident.

Anyways EH let me know if you want to talk strategy cause I think I’ve got some great suggestions on correcting the ship.

Thanks for coming to my TEDTalk

Has anyone else noticed the growing toxicity of offshore leadership toward onshore FTEs, especially Americans?Or is everyone just too afraid to say it out loud?
Today, I had an encounter with my offshore director that was so profoundly disrespectful it finally pushed me to write this. It makes me wonder: does HR even care about what’s happening on the ground, or are they deliberately looking the other way while the culture burns?
What we are dealing with right now is a leadership vacuum that has been filled by toxic office politics. With offshore Indian teams, there is a pervasive lack of transparency, a culture of deceit, and managers who think it’s perfectly normal to lie and backstab to protect their own metrics. It’s a completely corrupt way of operating, and the onshore employees who actually care about the product are the ones paying the price.
Let me be clear: I understand the business case for outsourcing specific, targeted positions. That’s just the reality of the modern tech industry. But outsourcing pretty much entire scrum teams? That is a massive, fundamental mistake.
The drop in quality isn't just noticeable; it’s alarming. The code is suffering, the communication is fragmented, and things are getting visibly worse with every new offshore hire we onboard to replace an onshore FTE.
Leadership needs to wake up. They are treating this aggressive offshore push like a brilliant cost-saving measure, but in the long run, it is going to be the most costly mistake this company has ever made. If they keep letting this toxic management style run unchecked while sacrificing quality for cheaper labor, they are going to sink this ship straight to the ocean floor.
You can't outsource a bad strategy, and right now, the strategy is broken. Of you expect people from a broken system and from one of the most corrupt countries in the world to save this company you are TOTALLY wrong. Everything they ever touch turns to dust. The ONLY thing these people are interested in is their wallet and will do anything to make sure it's fat.

Just received an invite for tomorrow morning, 55minutes long. Sent to 'ETIPS_ALL_FTEs', only tidbit is "Please join the leadership team for an update on our future operating model and strategy". Whatever that means?

Being dropped from the Dow was a wake up call. The stock has struggled, morale has taken a hit, and many employees and investors are questioning the company’s direction. CEO Dan Schulman seems increasingly disconnected from those concerns. Cutting costs can only go so far, Verizon needs a clear strategy to rebuild confidence, grow again, and prove its best days aren’t behind it.

Just checking in to make sure everyone remembers that media over networks was absolutely the future. It was clearly the defining strategic vision of the decade, and there was never any reason to question whether combining a telecommunications giant like ours with one of the world's largest media businesses would create enormous synergies and long term value for both customers and shareholders.

The Time Warner acquisition was a masterclass in strategic acquisition. The strategy worked flawlessly, shareholder value soared, and the industry has been racing to copy the playbook ever since. It has become the gold standard for how transformational acquisitions should be executed. It demonstrates how 2 large companies can great enormous synergies when they come together. The only thing acquired faster than Time Warner was our confidence.

The Bloomington Economic Development Corp. hosted a regional economy event. Phil Powell presented a report on Monroe County's economic status. He noted the economy is holding steady but faces challenges. Average hourly earnings declined, while some sectors saw job growth. Powell urged leaders to develop a stronger regional economic strategy.

Bloomington, Indiana

https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/business/columns/2026/06/25/stronger-regional-strategy-needed-for-bloomingtons-economic-success/90679476007/

Companies poured billions into AI with sky-high expectations. It was supposed to be the ultimate productivity hack — slashing costs, supercharging innovation, and delivering effortless competitive advantage. Executives bet big that generative AI and automation would be the simple solution to margin pressure, talent shortages, and sluggish growth.

Now the reckoning is here.

Early pilots looked magical. Chatbots answered queries, code assistants sped up development, and analytics tools promised smarter decisions. But scaling those wins across the enterprise is proving far more expensive and complicated than the headlines suggested.

The costs are piling up: massive compute infrastructure, eye-watering energy consumption, specialized talent that commands premium salaries, constant model retraining, and the hidden expense of integrating brittle AI systems into legacy workflows. Many organizations are discovering that AI doesn’t magically replace headcount — it often requires more people to manage, monitor, and refine outputs. Hallucinations, bias issues, and compliance risks add further friction and potential liability.

The result? A growing number of leaders are quietly coming to terms with a harder truth: AI is a powerful tool, not a plug-and-play savior. ROI timelines are stretching. Some projects are being quietly deprioritized or rightsized. The hype cycle is colliding with balance-sheet reality.

That doesn’t mean AI is a bust. Far from it. The companies that will win are the ones treating it as a long-term capability build rather than a quick-fix expense. They’re focusing on narrow, high-value use cases, investing in data quality, building human-AI collaboration models, and being honest about both the upside and the total cost of ownership.

The era of “just add AI” is ending. The era of thoughtful, disciplined AI adoption is beginning.
What are you seeing in your organization — genuine transformation or mounting costs? Curious to hear real experiences.

#AI #Leadership #BusinessStrategy #TechAdoption

Will the Board continue to increase the dividend in September, or keep it flat, now that the company is no longer part of the DJIA?

Maybe it is time to reinvest in 'the Network' instead of social justice warrior networks. Elon Musk solved the rural broadband issue, while this company bobbled the ball again.

Maybe they should keep increasing the dividend, as none of the strategy groups have come up with a single investment that has returned its cost of capital in more than a decade. See the stock price for details, should there be any doubters!