Former Chrysler Corp executive Jerome York, now chief financial officer at IBM Corp, has an outsize mission to cut costs at the still-extravagant company, and the Wall Street Journal has been following him around – and highlights the issue of envelopes: the paper reports that on opening an oversized brown envelope marked IBM Confidential he pulled out a memo that hardly seemed worth any secrecy and demanded that his secretary find out how many of the things IBM used – If they buy any more, I’m not going to pay for them; eight weeks later, it seems, the poor girl was still mired in bids and discussions over envelopes, having learned that IBM uses five security levels Unclassified, Internal, Confidential, Confidential-Restricted and Registered – and must still decide whether they can all be consolidated into one reusable envelope; whether it would cost less to use envelopes that can be resealed several times before they are thrown away; or whether IBM needs any confidential envelopes – not to mention the issue of size – she still hasn’t obtained the large-versus-small breakdown she needs; she does now know that IBM buys 3m of the most commonly used Confidential envelopes, at a cost of $75,000 a year; the rest combined add up to even less.
