1. What factors characterized the competitive environment that IBM faced in 2003?
2. In 2003, what was IBM’s decision regarding how it planned to compete in that environment? What was going to make IBM unique? On what dimensions did IBM plan to excel, and on what dimensions did IBM expect competitors to excel?
3. Why was a globally integrated enterprise such an important organizational design goal for IBM, considering its decisions about where and how it would compete going forward?
4. What things about IBM’s culture, history, values, organization and workforce offered support for creating a globally integrated enterprise? What things offered potential hindrances to the globally integrated enterprise?
5. What specific human resource management and human capital indicators suggested that a change was needed in how IBM approached its talent management decisions? If you were an IBM business leader, would you care about improving talent management at IBM? What would be the evidence you would probably be seeing that would cause you to desire an improvement? If you were an HR leader at IBM, why would you care about improving talent management? Are the answers for a non-HR leader and an HR leader the same?
6. If you were a board member or a member of IBM’s executive team and you were presented with the vision of the “Workforce Management Initiative” shown in the case and told that implementing such an initiative would take several years and cost up to US$100 million, would you embrace the initiative or resist it? Why?
7. Consider the questions posed in the last section of the case study (pages 13-15). How would you design the change-management initiative and the WMI itself in answer to these questions? Why would you make those choices? What do you think Randy and the IBM HR and executive team decided to do?
