IBM’s sales culture has pretty much ruined the company as many of executives have no real knowledge about the products and services they sell. They do however have a rather obsessive desire for more “high margin” sales.
The insane focus on sales and margins ruined this company - we went away from product dev, customer focus, moved all focus to sales - that's what killed IBM.
This is from six years ago:
IBM has developed growth objectives for earnings, and all indicators of the plan to achieve these aggressive targets seem to come at the expense of jobs, primarily jobs based in the USA – in favor of shipping them overseas, as this is thought to be ‘less costly’. The scale of a reduction required to achieve the aggressive growth targets for earnings suggest that while executives and sales folks will stay, most everyone else will need to go.
The staff changes will require massive cuts in technical folks. The very same technical wizards who invent the products, get the patents, establish a new and innovative technology that can create a dominant market position are the ones that will need to go to achieve the targets. IBM’s sales culture and its current strategic plan will kill IBM if Ginni can’t stop it, and so far, she is only promising more of the same.