IBM CEO Tells Employees to Move Faster

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Following IBM’s poor Q1 financial report, CEO Virginia Rometty had some tough words for the company’s employees. She says they need to move faster and is encouraging them to “step up.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Spencer E. Ante reported, “International Business Machines Corp. Chief Executive Virginia Rometty delivered a rare companywide reprimand in the wake of a poor earnings report last week, saying the sprawling technology company needed to move faster and respond more quickly to customers. The comments came in a five-minute internal video message to the company’s 434,000 employees. In the video, Ms. Rometty salted the praise for employees in her regular post-earnings pep talk with unusually blunt comments that the company needs to speed its shift to new computing models to get back on track.”

The Register quoted Rometty, who said, “As the quarter ended, hundreds of millions of dollars of software and mainframe opportunities, they didn’t close – and in a number of cases because we didn’t move fast enough.” She added, “I know we will confront this honestly and with urgency, and moments like this are when IBMers rise to the occasion. We don’t retreat; we go on the offense.”

A Reuters report said, “Rometty set a new rule. If a client has a request or question, IBM must respond within 24 hours…. ‘Where we haven’t transformed rapidly enough, we struggled,’ Rometty said in the video published on IBM’s internal website, reviewed by the newspaper. ‘We have to step up with that and deal with that, and that is on all levels.'”

CRN’s Rick Whiting also noted, “IBM (NYSE:IBM) is reshuffling two of its top executives, moving Rod Adkins from head of the company’s hardware operations to become senior vice president of corporate strategy, while Tom Rosamilia, who held that post until now, is the new head of the Systems & Technology Group.”