90,000 managers eliminated, no problem escalation

The senior executive vice president said, we used to have four hundred and ten thousand employees at IBM, and through CDQ we've reduced it to three hundred and twenty thousand without getting rid of any direct labor reports. So they'd gotten rid of 90,000 out of two hundred thousand managers. Someone asked, why'd you have so many managers? He said, well, we used to have a lot of people in place to try to keep big problems from rising up to the top. So a little bit later I raised my hand to ask, well, you said you got rid of half your people that were keeping the big problems from rising to the top — have you found more problems rising to the top? And he stopped, he thought, he says, well, no. So they had 90,000 people doing negative value-added, and they found that saved money when they got rid of them.