Scott's approach to balancing work and family contrasts with that of his boss, Steve Himmelrich, 48, who has two children and is a more traditional-style dad, spending many long hours, free time and some weekends at the office. Himmelrich says he supports Scott's parenting strategy, but both acknowledge it has been a source of tension between them.
"We have monthly conversations, some more tense than others, about our differing attitudes to our roles at home and our responsibilities at work," says Scott, who says that "being engaged in my family life is more important to me than my career advancement. My boss … couldn't be more opposite."
UnitedHealth shareholders have certainly suffered. The company restated 12 years of earnings in the amount of $1.5 billion as a result of the backdating and said it had struck a $55 million settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. The stock is just about where it was in March 2006 before a Wall Street Journal article first questioned the timing of option grants made to Dr. William W. McGuire, UnitedHealth’s longtime chief executive.
So it seems only appropriate that Dr. McGuire will cough up options worth $418 million in addition to the almost $200 million in options he has already forfeited. The agreement also bars him from joining the board of a public company for 10 years.
Don’t fret for Dr. McGuire, though. He still holds options worth around $800 million. In a statement, he said he was happy to have the matter resolved; he neither admitted nor denied the backdating accusations.
Everyone else who works with India offshoring, including our customers, not only sees failure, they don't see significant improvement as time goes on.
BTW - System p with the Power 6, developed in the US, has been available in the US for close to 9 months, System i with the Power 6 has been since September. Only the Power 6 BladeCenters were a recent announce.
Before you challenge me with "facts", go to the internal websites and see the employee feedback surveys. They will say it all. Although the percentage varies and management has never had the guts to ask the question "Do you the employee have confidence in your management?" the tangential statistics to answers of similar questions will prove the point.
We would not have even a hint of unionization if this wasn't the truth. It may take time, but the handwriting is on the wall. IBM management has squandered their most important asset, the trust of its employees for a few years of fabricated earnings. Before Gerstner, even though the management was incompetent and sometimes felonious in the nature of some of their actions, the employee was still considered an asset. Today, the employee is a resource, a tool, to be used and consumed with no thought for their future welfare or that of their families. Despite many recent efforts from HR to repair this image, they can't fix it until there is a wholesale cleansing of executive and some of the lower management.
The unfortunate part for IBM and the unionization efforts is that when you lose confidence and trust in management, you prepare plans to leave as soon as you can. You leave and the vote is then lost for unionization. The younger folk have left in droves, and in the case of the older employee it's a balancing act to prepare for departure because of the pension issues. However, in 2008 this will change, thanks to the second to final pension theft action which is to freeze the DB pension to maximize the executive options from the 90's.
The hope is that once the Gerstner era options expire in 2008 and the geriatric long-term management in place finally leaves thinking they've gotten all they can get, the company may somehow begin to cleanse itself of the younger single minded selfish sadistic executives and regain a semblance of its past image.
Frankly, I don't give a damn for the company anymore. I'm just a happy 30+ year service employee ex-"hanger on" that made a lot of money betting against it in the market.
But the execs are getting wealthy and manipulating the business to increase profit while revenue stays constant. Every business person knows how that happens.
The wrongdoing, among other activities, involves violating federal regulations against door-to-door selling of coverage and the forging of signatures. "It's the wild, wild West out there," says Mary Jo Hudson, director of the Ohio Department of Insurance.
Buying insurance as an "individual" is nothing less than a nightmare. For starters, employees of firms that offer health insurance can use pretax dollars to purchase it; individuals can't (at least not yet). Worse, individual buyers are entitled to fewer protections than employees of large firms. In most states, insurance carriers can deny coverage to individuals with a preexisting condition like cancer or diabetes. And for the fortunate few who can afford to buy insurance on their own, there's a labyrinth of options and loopholes to navigate when choosing a policy.
Hospital administrators admit that billed charges are marked up well beyond what most insurers and patients really pay. And they agree the process of setting staggeringly high charges isn't logical. "We have an irrational pricing structure that we've created as an industry over the last 30 years," said Ned Borgstrom, CFO of Exempla Healthcare, which manages three Denver-area hospitals. "We created a monster, of course." Indeed, billed charges are so much higher than the actual costs or what insurers pay, they're practically meaningless to health care consumers.
Greg Bernica, CEO of the Harris County Medical Society, said the group had hoped to rank insurers from best to worst. Instead, the companies all scored so low there was not enough statistical difference to do an actual ranking. "They all came in last," he said. ...
The survey found:
The doughnut hole gap in 2008 begins when drug costs for an individual and his or her insurer reach $2,510 and ends when spending reaches $5,726. Only one plan, located in Florida, will provide coverage for brand-name prescription drugs in the gap in 2008.
You almost never hear that kind of talk on the other side of the aisle. With a few important exceptions, what you hear are ideas that would not help very many people and might -- quite possibly -- hurt some. A case in point is the Republican crusade against state regulation of insurance.
Many states have strict requirements for how insurance companies can price their policies and what benefits they must offer. The requirements generally apply only to insurance purchased by individuals and small businesses. (Plans for large employers are exempt because of a law called ERISA, whose history and meaning I will spare you -- because nobody whose job doesn't involve administering health benefits should have to slog through that explanation.)
Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all propose Nixon-like reforms. Their plans resemble measures that were passed and then failed in several states over the past two decades.
Limit all OT hours and additional compensation immediately.....ALL NON EMERGENCY CALLOUT OT MUST BE PRE APPROVED BY THE SDM..PERIOD! I know it's year end and there's a lot of push on install activity...but please focus hard on scheduling the work to minimize overtime and having duplicate resource assigned to the installs. (Our extra comp numbers only went down a 10th of a % YTD from Oct to Nov)
Vault's IBM Business Consulting Services message board is a popular hangout for IBM BCS employees, including many employees acquired from PwC. A few sample posts follow:
If you are expecting it to turn you into a better project manager, forget it, unless you are absolutely clueless about PM, and you just want to get an understanding of the elements of project management.
No good project manager manages by the numbers, and you either have the critical soft skills or you don't. As for the hard skills, there are hundreds of ways to effectively manage a project. Methodology is only window dressing.
The best PM's I ever had were good people person's and people who had a natural feel for managing stake-holder expectations. They enjoyed and believed in their staff - no amount of training will change you from a technical nerd, or someone who can only manage to process, to a person that likes the company of others. Life experiences might change you, but then again they might not. (Sometimes it helps to be accountable to another person who treats you the way you treat others and then you really know what it's like and how you might be perceived by others - not always a pleasant experience, but of infinitesimal value nevertheless).
Those who try to develop the soft skills but aren't emotionally tuned in come across as frauds and don't really seem to get anymore respect and subsequently don't get better productivity or trust from their staff.
You can teach most people technique, if they are willing and intelligent, but you can't teach people to like and appreciate others.
And, then there are the PM's who sell-out to the client and don't support their own staff who are lured by the idea of good client feedback at the expense of the welfare of their own people. Walking that tight-rope successfully of supporting your staff whilst delivering to the client in my opinion is one hallmark of being a good PM - some do that well, others are appalling.
That being said, some of my colleagues are either clueless in evaluating talent, or so desperate to staff projects that they roll the dice with PMs on a lot of projects.
There are a few reasons why IBM jettisons the workers before PMs. First, the PM controls the internal communication plan, and it is too easy for the blame to be pushed downward, even if the screw-ups were at the PM level, or as is more often the case, the deliverables are impossible to meet in the time allotted. Second, it is easier to replace a band 7 than it is to replace a band 9. Third, the continuity in a project will suffer more with a change in PM, both in terms of client relations, and execution. It will appear as though the firm screwed up if it pulls a PM, as opposed to the situation where problems are blamed on one of a dozen band 7s that are on the project. The latter just seemed like simple probability, while putting an incompetent PM in reflects much worse on the firm. Finally, IBM is the ultimate hierarchical organization – the higher you are, the more power and perceived authority you have. To defer to an underlying in a contentious issue is really counter-cultural.
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