Lou Gerstner wrote, "People truly do what you inspect, not what you expect." … Lest we forget, these "inspection pages" exist because chief executives are "people" too.

Peter E. Greulich

Arvind Krishna's Overall Performance: 2020 Through 2024
Date Published: April 11, 2022
​Date Modified: September 18, 2025
As of September 18, 2025, this page and all its associated webpages were updated with Arvind Krishna's five-year key performance metrics (KPIs) from the beginning of 2020 through the end of 2024. ​These web pages cover the overall performance of IBM's tenth Chief Executive Officer, Arvind Krishna, and are updated once each year, as time permits, after the publication of IBM's Annual Report.

​Arvind Krishna's performance in his first one-hundred days is here. Arvind Krishna's first-year's performance is here.
Arvind Krishna’s Overall Performance Numbers: 2020-24
  • Summary of Arvind Krishna's Overall Performance in Critical Areas
    • ​Revenue and Profit Performance
    • Revenue and Profit Growth Performance
    • Revenue and Profit Employee Productivity Performance
    • Market Value Performance
    • Shareholder Risk and Returns Performance
    • Employment Performance​​
Summary of Arvind Krishna's Overall Performance as IBM's CEO
In April 2020, IBM installed its tenth chief executive officer: Arvind Krishna.
​How has Arvind Krishna performed since taking over the corner office? ​At the end of Arvind Krishna’s fifth year as chief executive officer (2020–2024) his performance continues as it started which can be described with one word: unremarkable.

After five years, Arvind Krishna's performance numbers at the end of 2024 were as follows:
  • ​​IBM Revenue has fallen -18.7% to $62.8 billion​

  • IBM Yearly Revenue Growth 2021 to 2024 (the positive years) was less than inflation in all four years
    ​
  • IBM Profits have fallen -36.1% to $6.0 billion

  • IBM Yearly Profit Growth has been exceeded by inflation in two of the three positive-growth years
    ​
  • IBM Employee Sales and Profit Productivity have become "reverse twins" of each other as individual employees produced more revenue but were significantly less profitable—sales productivity through 2024 was up 6.4% while profit productivity was down 16.5%.

    ​Inflation makes this picture even worse—up 22% over the same five years    ​
  • ​IBM Shareholder Returns increased significantly in 2024 but run significantly behind key benchmark indices in the long-term
    ​
  • IBM Shareholder Risk remains unaddressed by IBM’s corner office—goodwill and intangible assets are historically very, very high

  • IBM's Market Value in the short-term is a bright spot but if it will remain so in the long term is very much a wait-and-see game—as market value flattened in 2024.

    Since 2011, IBM Market Value is down by almost 30% while inflation was up almost 40%.
    ​
  • IBM Worldwide Full-Time Employment fell by 3.9% in 2024 and is now down by 23.6% since the end of 2019.

    With most of the highly-productive, high-wage workers from the United States and Europe now gone it is doubtful if IBM can continue to pad its bottom-line profits with layoffs as its so-called     worldwide workload rebalancing has lost, for the most part, its "worldwide” context. There are few "overpaid" workers to "lay off."​
This information is from IBM's Annual Reports.
What is provided through the links below are graphs of Arvind Krishna’s 2020-24 key performance indicators (KPIs). ​Charts are also provided for historical context that document (1) the joint performance of Arvind Krishna and Virginia (Ginni) M. Rometty from 2011-2024, and (2) IBM's overall twenty-first-century performance from 1999-2024 under the leadership of Louis V. Gerstner, Samuel J. Palmisano, Virginia (Ginni) M. Rometty, and Arvind Krishna.
You will be graphically shown that the 21st Century IBM is not Louis V. Gerstner's elephant dancing or some enlightened analyst's battleship turning; the 21st Century IBM has been a battleship taking on water faster than the crew can pump it out, and the men and women in the pilot house—the corner office, have been failing to invest in what the employees needed to “man” the “boiler rooms” productively for more than two decades. The company is fast approaching a point at which it may become powerless to control its fate.

Unless IBM can return to its sales-oriented history, it may find itself adrift at sea.
Links to the Details of Arvind Krishna's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Corporations, within a capitalist economy, are worth an investment if they fulfil their main purpose: moving products of competitively higher value off the showroom floor into a customer’s waiting hands while generating enough profits to build, grow and protect a self-sustaining stakeholder ecosystem.
Arvind Krishna Revenue and Profit ​Performance
A corporation needs to generate enough money (revenue and profits) to invest equitably to attract, hold and grow its stakeholder community of customers, employees, shareholders and their supportive societies.
​IBM positions its divestiture and acquisition strategy as moving the corporation into higher-value, higher-margin markets. ​The underlying assumption is that through these strategies the executive team will deliver increased revenues and higher profit margins: revenue and profit growth!

Is this strategy delivering?​
Arvind Krishna ​Revenue and Profit ​Growth Performance
Did it deliver for IBM's twenty-first-century chief executives?
​​In a corporation of 293,400 employees (as of the end of 2024), it is critical that each and every individual employee maximizes their productivity in generating revenue and net income. Some think that employee sales and profit productivity are an "employee" measurement, but in reality they are one of the best measurements to define the performance of a corporation's corner office.​
Arvind Krishna ​Revenue and Profit Productivity Performance
When considering these two metrics, how is Arvind Krishna performing? ​What did he inherit from his predecessors: Rometty, Palmisano, and Gerstner?
In IBM's 1990 Annual Report, Lou Gerstner wrote that market value was the corporation's “most important measure of progress to investors.”

​Louis V. Gerstner used market value as one of his key business metrics to evaluate his success as chief executive officer.
Arvind Krishna ​Market Value Performance
Has IBM's market value grown in the twenty-first century? How is this "most important measure of progress" for investors performing? ​Using this measurement, how is Arvind Krishna performing?
Since 1995, IBM has spent $201 billion on share buybacks. ​Of course, the shareholders should be happy with this reduction in the number of shares, right? So, why have the last three chief executive officers—Palmisano, Rometty and Krishna—buried their shareholder results in the last few pages of each years' annual report?
Arvind Krishna ​Shareholder Risk and Returns Performance
Has the expenditure of $100 billion for 224 acquisitions since 2001 affected shareholder risk? Is IBM a risky investment: (1) Shareholder equity less the resulting goodwill says, "Yes!" and (2) buried at the end of IBM's 2023 Annual Report is a chart that also says, "Yes!"
Being of service or caring about stakeholders other than customers—especially when it concerns employees, is sometimes called paternalism.

​When Watson Jr. talked about employment security, he did not view it as paternalistic but as a means of increasing employee loyalty, goodwill, and diligence on the job.
Arvind Krishna Employment Security Performance
Employees are less efficient when worried about their employment. Maybe that is why sales and profit productivity keeps dropping when IBM's 2021 Annual Report states, "In response to changing business needs, the company periodically takes workforce reduction actions to improve productivity."

​They should have written "to improve short-term, profits" not "productivity."

Because productivity has been in a freefall for decades.
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