silent clock movement with long pendulum

They throw out both the good and the bad for the sake of change.

IBM can’t seem to hold onto what is good. The new system features low cost delivery centers with terribly inexperienced teams of workers. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, though IBM has found a way to screw-up that, too. Luckily for IBM, somebody has apparently noticed this snafu. Telecommuting inadvertently turned the complex into the nearly impossible. In a very bureaucratic company like IBM, just buying something may need 4-6 approvals with a queue for each. Worse still, requests can be rejected and deleted from the queue without notice. There is no longer a way to push urgent matters through faster, no way to get them solved by the right expert, either. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country. When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency. In their haste to close offices they made mistakes, distributing teams that had been more efficient working physically together. Now people can work together for years without ever meeting in person. Then IBM decided everyone would telecommute followed by making the teams geographically dispersed. Part-time telecommuting often works best. Teams are usually more efficient when people can work together. IBM literally has more workers than desks.Īt IBM’s new delivery centers like Dubuque, IA, Boulder, CO, and Columbia MO they now want all the IBMers to work in the office, in sight of management. IBM, too, is pulling back somewhat from telecommuting, though Big Blue has no government-owned facilities for those workers sucked back into the mother ship. This is pure speculation on my part, though informed by a small role I played 30 years ago in a battle between Stanford University and the Office of Naval Research over billing for indirect costs of research, which is very similar and equally byzantine. If Lockheed wants the Feds to cover that light bill there had better be some bodies being lighted. In today’s austerity it could be that Uncle Sam wants his share of the savings from all that staying home.

In theory workers can still telecommute on an occasional basis, but only on their own dime and only if they score a three or above on L-M’s five-step performance review.Īs a defense contractor Lockheed-Martin may be a special case, not so much for the security reasons one might imagine in the wake of Wikileaks, but rather because defense plants tend to be owned not by the contractor but by the government. Lockheed earlier this year told its managers they all had to work from plant sites, then followed that by canceling any telecommuting services paid for by the company. IBM, too, is rethinking its work-at-home strategy. Lockheed-Martin, for example, effectively banned the practice recently, sucking nearly all the company’s telecommuters back into the office. But the tide may be turning against working at home for some larger companies. When you work at home you live at work, which is precisely why telecommuting has been so embraced by non-smokestack industries that love the low office rents and longer working hours. I have worked from home since the first time InfoWorld fired me in 1994.

Silent clock movement with long pendulum