Looking at Lexmark International Inc two years after its spin-off from IBM Corp, the Wall Street Journal tries to stress how difficult it has all been breaking away from the IBM culture – but the burden of the story seems to emphasise how wonderful it has been with the endless layers of bureaucracy – forms that had to be filled in for purposes that no-one could devine beyond the fact that it had always been done that way – removed: a typewriter that took eight hours to assemble now takes 75 minutes after the assembly workers redesigned their line, 100 fewer developers are working on twice as many printer projects and the overall workforce of 4,000 is down from 6,000, printers look like taking two years to design, down from three – and the company ended 1990 owing $900m – $300m less that the business plan called for at that stage, with operating profit 30% ahead of plan on sales 5% down; hardest part seems to have been cultural – when Friday was declared dress-down days and ties were banned, I kind of walked in here without a tie that first day and felt ashamed, says one engineer – I thought ‘Well I’ll just sit in my office for a while and maybe nobody will come by’ – it was actually hard.
