Whenever companies get in trouble, they reorganize. Sometines they don’t even have to be in trouble, they do it for the fun of it. In my 31.5 years with IBM, I went through a lot of reorganizations, but the trend accelerated, in the late 80’s when IBM started going down the tubes. Then we really reorganized a lot. Of course, a lot of the reorgs followed trends started by professors at business schools who knew next to nothing about actually running businesses. Yannow, like this guy.
Near the end of John Aker’s disastrous reign as IBM’s CEO, one of the latest fads was splitting your company up into small units so they could react to changes in the market place faster. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame called these units battling business units which is what they were. Units of IBM started selling goods and services to each other. Whereas, I used to be able to get my software free, now my business unit would have to pay for it, just like a customer did. Granted, we would get a discount but still. When Lou Gerstner took over he said, “This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen. You can’t make money selling goods and services to each other.
Any way, the New York Slimes (Motto: All the fake news that’s fit to print) is going through a reorganization and is trying to put a good face on it.
The New York Times is planning to offer up at least eight floors at its Eighth Avenue headquarters on the sublet market in an effort to generate some rental income.
This will prolly be the only profitable part of the New York Slimes (Motto: All the news that’s fit to distort).
…
About 400 employees will relocate to a temporary office while the architecture firm Gensler reorganizes the paper’s office.
“The coming redesign will introduce more team rooms and common spaces,” publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and president and CEO Mark Thompson wrote in a company memo Friday. “And, we will do away with big corner offices, like the ones you see on the 16th and 17th floors, including, yes, the publisher and CEO’s offices. We don’t need to preserve those vestiges from a different era, so we won’t.”
“We expect a substantial financial benefit as well,” they added.
Yeah. From the rent. I love how they try to make this sound great like “will introduce more team rooms and common spaces”. In other words, we are gonna cram as many of you into the smallest footprint that we can to free up space to rent.
Heh! I love feel good stories like this.
…Tell Mayor Wimpy Wilhelm we’ve found a new homeless shelter for the poor, the helpless and the stinky. For all the illegals yurning to pee free.
Best idea yet.
Sounds like when I worked at Contel in Atlanta. Was there for about 5 or 6 years and we reorganized most of the footprint on all but the Headquarters floors several times.
Once there was a major shuffle and a lot of offices were removed and cubicles were installed where the masses were almost seemed to be crushed.
Then the GTE purchase / reorganization eventually became Verizon.
John Akers also did a helluva job on the Board of Lehman Brothers.
That Rodney Dangerfield real world economics lesson sounds like the
model for liberal economics. I see Donald Trump as a more powerful
version of Sonny Bono. When he attempted to establish a restaurant
in Palms Springs, he found he had to grease the palms of most of the
elected figures in city hall. That is why he ran for mayor and cleaned
out the cesspool.
I cannot wait to see leaks of Democrat corruption that winds up being
unearthed in the coming year. Hell, I hope bury every establishment
RINO in the process as well!
Good old Blue Dollars…