IBM Resource Actions Home Page
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Date Published: June 4, 2021
Date Modified: January 13, 2024 |
What are resource actions (R.A.s)? What do they have to do with rightsizing? They are as hard to explain as they are to experience, and IBM employees have been experiencing them for almost three decades. These two articles (extracted from this author's journal entries) are critical to understanding why IBM's sales and profit productivity have fallen so drastically in the 21st Century.
Here are three resource actions … rightsizing in action.
Here are three resource actions … rightsizing in action.
What Are Resource Actions?
In Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Gerstner wrote, “If we have too many people, let’s right-size fast; let’s get it done by the end of the third quarter.” He was writing about 1993, his first year as IBM’s CEO. IBM's unique form of "rightsizing," initiated by Louis V. Gerstner, has been around now for almost three decades, and IBM's implementation of "rightsizing" comes in the form that employees and the company call: "resource actions."
They usually occur quarterly and last 24 hours.
They usually occur quarterly and last 24 hours.
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A public promise was made to end the layoffs
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The press wrote of this layoff strategy:
New IBM Chairman Louis V. Gerstner Jr. announces an $8.9 billion charge against 2nd quarter 1993 earnings to fund a massive cost-cutting program, under which IBM will lay off 35,000 employees, send 25,000 more into early retirement. . . . Gerstner tells reporters over lunch that he intends the bold move to end IBM's recent practice of cutting its payroll incrementally quarter after quarter, a practice Gerstner calls “Chinese water torture.” [Emphasis added.]
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Two decades later, in 2013, Senior VP and CFO Mark Loughridge discusses his layoff philosophy with analysts—now referring to them as workforce rebalancing actions:
"However, given our first quarter performance, we now expect to take the bulk of our workforce balancing actions for the year in the second quarter, as opposed to last year when it was distributed across the quarters." [Emphasis added]
“Right-sizing” was the 1990s’ politically correct term for layoffs. Unfortunately the size never proved quite right. IBM layoffs, in the past, were usually executed over a period of twenty-four hours and have been quarterly, continual, persistent and arbitrary for more than two decades. Internally IBMers refer to them as Resource Action Days or, more poetically, R.A. Days. Such days are never about him, her or me; they are always about us.
They are the twenty-first century’s new IBM Family Day.
Here are two such "family days" I experienced.
Arvind Krishna has continued the tradition.
"However, given our first quarter performance, we now expect to take the bulk of our workforce balancing actions for the year in the second quarter, as opposed to last year when it was distributed across the quarters." [Emphasis added]
“Right-sizing” was the 1990s’ politically correct term for layoffs. Unfortunately the size never proved quite right. IBM layoffs, in the past, were usually executed over a period of twenty-four hours and have been quarterly, continual, persistent and arbitrary for more than two decades. Internally IBMers refer to them as Resource Action Days or, more poetically, R.A. Days. Such days are never about him, her or me; they are always about us.
They are the twenty-first century’s new IBM Family Day.
Here are two such "family days" I experienced.
Arvind Krishna has continued the tradition.
