Requests from some big shareholders for activism at IBM are likely to go nowhere. There’s no question that the company’s investors have reason to be dissatisfied. Big Blue’s top line has shrunk for 11 consecutive quarters, shares have fallen about 25 percent from their high, and there’s no hint that the company has discovered a way to reverse course. The snag is that activists don’t have an obvious playbook for IBM’s recovery either.

Pushy investors have increasingly influenced American boardrooms. In the tech industry alone, they have forced out Microsoft’s seeming chief-executive-for-life Steve Ballmer, pushed Hewlett-Packard to split into pieces and kicked numerous small companies such as BMC and Novell into selling themselves.

Success has given figures like Pershing Square’s William A. Ackman and ValueAct’s Jeffrey W. Ubben more gravitas with boards and has caused capital to flow into their funds, further increasing their clout. Mutual fund managers have become comfortable pushing activist managers to do the front-end work of confronting underperforming executives.

The problem is, despite its many woes and a $160 billion market value, IBM makes a difficult target. The company has spent the last two decades out-financial-engineering the financial engineers. It has slashed costs and sold vulnerable divisions. While some of the resulting proceeds have been used to acquire profitable and defensible software lines, it has put the remainder into buybacks and dividends and borrowed heavily to increase capital returned to investors.