[wayoutthere]

At that level of a company like IBM, everyone is purely political. The CEO can’t necessarily force specific changes, and has to work with other senior executives who have clauses in their contracts that allow them to exit with huge payoffs if certain job responsibilities are taken away from them. Those senior executives (esp at IBM) have immense power; and will easily be able to kill RedHat by a thousand cuts or just parcel out the talent at the company.

Just poach a few key folks internally from RedHat to lead “strategic initiatives” and backfill their roles with IBM lifers. The culture will degrade accordingly.