inverted IBM values

Inversion of the values at the top of:

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/values/us/

Original:

IBMers value:
•	Dedication to every client’s success
•	Innovation that matters-for our company and for the world
•	Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships


Inverted.

IBMers value:

•	Our team and work culture above the demands of clients - not dedication to every client's success.  Explanation – Clients are demanding.  They want projects done in 3 weeks, not 3 months.  While our competition might work 120 hour weeks to make it happen for them, we go home by 5 to our families or friends, working 40 hours per week.  We believe this helps us retain the best and most motivated employees on planet Earth.  While it may take us 3 months to deliver our solution, it will be more robust and better-engineered, because it was built by better and more motivated people.  Meanwhile, while our competitors might have put together an A-team willing to work night and day to get a solution out the door, that team will burn out and disintegrate almost as soon as the product is out the door.  Support will be poor or non-existent.  The long-term technical debt such shoot-from-the-hips accept end up costing clients more over the long-term.  Sometimes, even their entire line of business, as more careful and less demanding clients eat their lunch.  Like in the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race.  We are never afraid of saying no to a client, to retain our special work culture, and over the long term our partners come to respect our judgment and accept it that they may not always be first.

•	Research and Development that assists our clients – not just for ourselves or for the world.  Many companies waste some of their best engineers on basic research that is better left to professors at universities which enjoy both private and public funding in order to meet their mission of advancing research.  These institutions experience publicity, good-will, and funding for themselves when they announce research results.  Some private companies have begun to explore a similar model.  Other than NASA, Google is the only company that has taken a large public research to benefit themselves and the world through investing in D-Wave systems, a company that claims to market computers with a quantum effect at the level of under 1000 qubits.  Such a computer cannot beat the computational output of traditional silicon even theoretically.  Many people believe that the effects it uses are not truly quantum in nature.  While this research is exciting and can benefit the world, and Google, it is clear that Google is not using it for the benefit of any client today.  Our philosophy is different.  At IBM, we believe in investing our research dollars for the direct benefit of our clients – never ourselves or the world.  If our client is an oil drilling company, we will help them find oil.  We will not tackle the large and open problem of mapping all the world’s ocean floors, to win points for our research or to benefit the world.  While these are noble goals, we believe that they are best left to the governments and universities that are specialized in it.  We know that we are not a University or a government research institution.  It seems to us that companies that are not keenly aware of this fact ultimately earn less benefit for their clients by behaving as though they were.  We believe in public funding of research, and our way of accomplishing this is through producing massive value for our customers – not ourselves.  All advanced economies include mechanisms to ensure that public research is funded in line with the size of private growth and profit, and the United States is a leader of these policies.  Our contribution is helping our clients make the most money possible, through researching for them – not anyone else.

•	Skepticism, not trust in all relationships. We believe that skepticism and being on guard is more important than fostering an environment of trust.   History is littered with the carcasses of companies that have been burned by unfair and underhanded tactics by other companies that were once their partner.  If IBM had not trusted Microsoft as closely as it did in the 1990s, then our own operating system, OS/2, which was superior in many ways, might have come to dominate the PC landscape. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/28/business/ibm-executive-describes-price-pressure-by-microsoft.html In the long term, this might have benefited literally hundreds of millions to billions of customers.  Instead, IBM discontinued our own product in 2006.  A key advantage and reason that IBM is able to maintain an edge in competitive markets such as mainframes and datacenters, corporate services, and many other areas, is because we do not foster relationships based on trust – but instead, based on skepticism.  This has allowed us to grow to many times our capitalization in the 1990s, while other companies have been burned in various ways in the marketplace.