Back in 2012 or so, Oracle announced they were dropping HP Itanium support. I thought this would be a great opportunity for IBM to win some business by affirming IBM software had no plans to also drop Itanium support.
To that end, and with the best intentions for IBM in mind, I naively sent a note to Steve Mills (who at the time was in charge of all of SWG) asking him for a statement that I could quote in a customer facing sales deck I was building. He never responded to me directly. Instead, he forwarded my note to my division GM, CC my brand VP and a few other execs, asking why I was asking him for this information.
One-on-ones with multiple execs quickly followed where I was repeatedly lambasted for going over their heads. The following February, I was told that while I had a strong year that was deserving of a PBC 1 rating, I was being given a 2+ as a lesson for what I had done.
Here's what I got out of that lesson: As a little guy, don't ever contact a senior IBM exec directly. They don't want to hear from the Plebs unless it's part of a dog and pony show.