Great If You’re Still ThereWith the way...
Great If You’re Still There
With the way it is shrinking, Big Blue may soon be known as Medium Blue.
Last week, new IBM Chairman Lewis V. Gerstner Jr. disclosed further cuts in jobs, with 35,000 scheduled to be eliminated by the end of 1994 on top of the 150,000 positions the computer maker has eliminated worldwide since 1986.
So it’s all the more ironic to find IBM listed in the 1993 edition of “The 100 Best Companies To Work For in America,” with four stars out of a possible five in the “job security” category. (That’s down from the five it received in the 1984 version of the book, which said that “IBM expects its people to spend their career with the company,” but still among the highest rankings.)
To their credit, authors Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz note in the book that IBM is in a state of turmoil. They also suggest even more upheaval is coming.
No True Grit With This Sale
Thrifts have been shedding a lot of assets lately, but there is one that Great Western Bank has no plans to part with: The Duke.
The thrift has put its former Beverly Hills headquarters up for sale at an asking price of $30.7 million. Not included is a 6-ton bronze statue of the late actor John Wayne riding a horse that sits outside the building entrance.
The 10-story Wilshire Boulevard building, which Great Western left when it moved to a new Chatsworth headquarters last year, does come with 203,000 square feet of office space and rights to put a sign on top of the building.
But Great Western confirmed that it will retain ownership of the statue, picking up any maintenance costs.
Wayne was the thrift’s longtime spokesman before he died in 1979. In 1984, Great Western unveiled the statue as a tribute to Wayne, and it has become something of a Beverly Hills landmark.
As for the statue, Great Western says it was cast in Italy over three years and, at 21 feet tall, is appropriately “larger than life” in size.
Re Re
The emergence of “Re-Engineering the Corporation” by Michael Hammer and James Champy as a bestseller is yet another indicator of the popularity of “Re” when it comes to management theory.
One of the more popular lately has been “reinvent,” as evidenced by President Clinton’s frequent calls to “reinvent government.”
Still another is the Lamaze-like “re” popularized recently by Harvard’s D. Quinn Mills, who coined the term “Rebirth of the Corporation.”
Briefly . . .
The $396 million that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates lost on paper in a single day Friday, when Microsoft’s stock plunged $5 a share, is more than the individual net worth of roughly 100 people on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans. . . . Richard Wolffers Auctions in San Francisco will auction a pair of boxer George Foreman’s training trunks later this month for $1,500 to $1,750. . . . A Los Angeles financial and computer expert offers “Renaissance Consulting” for “Co-Creating the Renaissance of the 21st Century.”
