Company: IBM
Date: 2008-10-13
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Managing up at IBM
Pros: The brand that many organizations trust.  IBM is known beyond the technical market segments - which makes it easy to explain to people where I work....The benefits are solid, particularly the 401K plans.  I have worked with California based companies that provided significantly better and less expensive health care options. IBM management is pretty comfortable with acceptable levels of performance - that is - it's not necessary to really excel in the environment to stay under the radar.  Many times management has to be reminded of greater goals than simply reporting on revenue results. When things get tight management is happy to say "We are a $95B dollar organization"....
Cons: Inside baseball.  Many employees have been in the organization over 20 years.  Generally, the expiriences are not applicable in their current positions. In many ways IBM's strategy appears to be one of numbers manipulation through head count reductions, pull back of employee collaboration events, expense restrictions, etc. All necessary business practices, but odd when everyone from first line management all the way to the top lives inside of CRM looking for additional pieces of revenue.  I don't know how folks actually generate new dollars when no one is in front of the customers or our prospects. The good news is that the CRM package is really solid.