The current ideology at IBM will likely lead to the company loosing success and could lead to the destruction of the company.
If you decide the workers you hire is not based on any measure of skill, only based on having the composition of specific ethnic groups you will not have the success.
Sure you might be luck for a time, but this will not last. As the pool of productive workers are not identical to the pool you are drawing from.
Meritocracy is the only way to make a company that works.
Hiring based on meritocracy is the only way you can give your company a chance to survive in the face of competition, but there is several ways to measure who is the best for a roll in your company. One is who is the technically best, but you can also look at who makes the whole team the best, that might be a different candidate.
Right now it seems several of the tech companies is doing everything they can to sabotage their own organisations, even to the point of doing illegal discrimination.
Yes hiring based on ethnicity or gender is illegal, regardless of who comes out on the bottom.
The only reason IBM is not seeing numbers in red is their size, otherwise they would bleed money from this 'experiment', but with their enormous size it will take time before it is visible that they are in fact sinking the ship. It might be too late when they discover the problem, who knows?