#management

For the Devon side - this one should sound familiar. “Many managers actively avoid confrontation or honest feedback because it requires emotional maturity. Rather than doing the job they are paid for, these individuals let problems fester until they become so disruptive that higher-ups mandate cuts to clear out the bloat”

Thanks for sitting down with the Houston Business Journal, M@rk. Another example of time away from the office to manage your image while the CEOs at MPC and VLO are in the office leading.

And “responding to what the world needs” is an example of M@rk overestimating the company he is supposed to be leading. Phillips contributes, sure, but the tone shows arrogance and lack of awareness of the real scope of this domestic mid con business. At the moment, all supplying the world has done is ki-l earnings and increase volatility and led to MASSIVE underperformance vs peers

Long ago MDT was all about patients and customers and everyone lined up to support that. Then they started to get functional leaders who thought their functions were more important than the mission.

HR used to be a support function with a generalist per dept or function that knew people, helped hire, fire, promote, set pay..... then HR decided they were too important to work that way and needed to specialize to be more efficient., so they pulled all the features apart and created leaders for each.

Now you have, maybe, a generalist who might know you but they are spread across many teams.

You also have recruiters, who are called "talent acquisition" with all their own rules.

You have job leveling experts who review individuals against the job family rubrics to decide if they agree someone can be promoted.

You have compensation experts who decided what people can be paid.

You have "human capital insights" who run the global voices survey.

You have the Org design experts who know how you should be structured, spans and layers and such.

You have data teams, HR systems teams, who hold all the info.

You have pay disparity teams that go through your organization and send you a mandate to change someones pay to make things more fair (though never with any incremental funding to implement, you need to find it in your own cost center)

And you of course have D&I considerations.

As a manager, this has made work so much more complicated and difficult, but its done in the name of excellence in HR?

Now you see it repeating in Operations, etc...... All at the expense of the mission, patients and customers.

It’s very evident that ConocoPhillips has created a real niche and is running on automatic. The companies top leadership and enforcement arm…HR has manufactured a false reality with pretty impressive results. What happens when timelines and realities converge and expose or challenge this fragile ecosystem? Is COP a quarterly darling or do real reality and fragility intersect?

Business Insider announced new employee cuts. Jamie Heller announced the company's staff cuts. The Insider Union reported 10 staff members were impacted. Management aims to sharpen coverage and invest in key areas. This marks the fourth staff cut for Business Insider.

https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/business-insider-layoffs-fourth-year-in-a-row/

Details are sketchy at best. But it seems like multiple teams in Palo Alto have been ask to put together a "prove their worth" presentation. My direct manager is as lost as I am, but it seems to have come down from above and involves the use of AI. My feeling is this is the start of infomraton probing, Hock has also been meeting with some directors. Something dosen't feel right, but I hate to jump to conclusions. Anyone else having this BS happen or is it isolated?

Manager here - I have not heard one bit about PEGA. Was this rolled out only to certain states/plans or roles? I'd assume if it was implemented in my area I would have heard at least rumblings from others in management or something formal but also who knows...

I've survived eight layoffs over the years, but I've got a bad feeling about the next one. Judging by my manager's behavior that suddenly shifted completely, I think my streak is about to end. I was never as worried about cuts as I am right now.

I’m pretty low on the totem pole but how big of a change allows for a layoff?

There have been a few high manager changes and I can’t tell if it’s just reshuffling from the layoffs last week vs just flattening out a team reporting line. Anyone have more info?

I notice like 70% of the state side people on my team are having to spend multi day writing what they do and what they accomplished after getting a yr end IM rating. The odd thing is often the mgr doesnt even tell you the requirements for the month till week 3. The quality of the mgmt here now is horrible. They dont even pay people who've been around well, its like 1% or less cola and inflation is like 8-10%. The mgmt is straight up rude and completely ungrateful and unhelpful on just about every front.

Some one tell him stop with the navi hoodies and high tops. I am embarrassed for all of you

How long are the investors going to buy that this company is going to do better because they’re going “back to basics?”

Answer:
Forever.

Bleed 🩸 money

If your EMG is talking about “how we work” and is having your leader write out each of your job duties and what it entails, that is the first step in deciding who gets their 60 days notice. Word of advice, make sure you let your leader know EVERYTHING you do, even if it seems small and non interesting, the more the better.

Any managers in EU, please weigh in whether you know the dates when the notification goes out.

Displacement call 9:15am on a Tuesday after payday for me. Got the IM (inconsistently meets) at end of 2025 for the first time. Had always gotten meets prior and no real reason for the review or what I did wrong. Simple explanation of “we expect more than we used to” brouhaha.. Also got the telltale “you have not met standards
Of using AI in the past month” email even though those supposed standards were only being tracked for my team starting May 1, and I had been using since mid April on a daily basis.
Half my team was eliminated. Well, half my U.S. team was eliminated, most with 15+ years with wf under their belts. Underperforming teammates in India had no layoffs. Writings on the wall folks. No one is safe as management doesn’t, and hasn’t cared for a long time. Pretty soon all work will come out of overseas locations with no quality checks being done. And AI isn’t at a place yet to replace the work of many specialists. CS doesn’t care though, as long as he gets himself and all his banking buds jobs and retirement packages while he still can.
Get out while you can. WF is now, atleast to me, considered the WF Titanic of companies. Sinking ship, not enough life boats for sustainability, and I foresee another audit/check of WF illegal workings, with a spotlight on good ole Uncle Charlie. That’s why he keeps hiring his cronies from past jobs and contacts, right? Feather their nests while he still can.
As soon as I can, I will also be switching banks to one I have faith in. And there will be no ties ever again to WF.

Cengage (and all textbook companies) have a major culture problem. These aren’t serious people. Everyone outside the companies talks about it.

What they deem as productivity measurements are distractions disguised as productivity. Constant Slack check ins by managers with emojis like a parent checking in on their children, the million Slack channels that are created, the utter useless salesforce boxes that have to be checked- and they wonder why they have stagnant growth. Teams Meetings that could be emails where everyone is in the chat sending gifs, getting asked immature d-mb questions and they want you to put your answer in the chat. Absolutely NONE of these items drive growth or productivity. It’s a culture of immaturity that are checking boxes that make them look like they are working and contributing. The hours wasted are immeasurable.

Everyone knew Slack was a massive distraction and doesn’t drive growth or sales 10 years ago. It should be used for acute things, not on the daily. Always behind the curve.

I’ve been trying to wait out the correction for the people hired as “leaders” during the pandemic. I’m not sure if it’s just my BU or others were put in roles way beyond their skill set. It’s infuriating for me to have to sit in “coaching” and have my manager explain things they would have learned in the first semester of college, had they gone.

Why is my only opportunity for development wasted listening to someone who is twice my age and trying to explain a simple concept but still needs my guidance? WHY IS THIS PERSON HIGHER RANKED THAN ME?!

I don’t know how much more I can take of this. Will there be a correction for unskilled management?

Let me break down why most of the employees are unhappy. First, forced ranking. Everyone is fighting for survival, taking credit for others' work just to avoid a PIP. Second, false ranking. People on the fast track get top ratings even when they cause major problems. Third, location bias. An expert here gets rated lower than someone in a cheaper country who makes constant errors. Fourth, promoting incompetent people. Industry experts end up reporting to managers who don't understand the work. These problems could be solved, but leadership chooses not to.

Everyone has an opinion and a certificate on the wall, but nobody seems to know how to actually run anything anymore. Where is the management that has done the job before and can make a call? Because I am not seeing it. What I see is vague suggestions, meetings that end with no clear decision, and then people just doing whatever they think is right. Give me a real leader over a room full of advisors any day.

Is it a bad sign when the Man you work for does not want you to communicate with your teammates on M.S. teams?

While I appreciate your award‑winning lecture on separating work from life, let’s be real. Try it this way and see if you will be still so vocal about it.
You’re spending your evenings finishing tasks late at night because your lazy coworker sends their files to you at the last minute ,let’s hope unintentionally. So much for quality family time, ha?
Your female manager has so much unresolved trauma that she assumes every man is out to get her and every white male is promoted over her. Or your male manager is a creep who thinks that having authority over your work gives him the right to make inappropriate requests. Tell me you have peace of mind going to sleep after that.
When you’re out on sick leave, your manager invades your privacy and shares your situation with everyone. Tell me again about this “magic” separation. And when you do all the hard work, someone else gets the promotion and all the time you took away from your family is simply gone. And so much more to be listed...

When my 1:1 was rescheduled I offered to let my manager just send me an email with details and let me move on. What is there to talk about? D-mb ritual.

Are majority of the layoffs in India ? Are they not planning to lay off any managers, directors, VPs in US ?

According to Copilot, Fidelity over hired managers during the pandemic to keep up with temporary and bloated growth. People who were moved into management, during the pandemic are being evaluated based on stack ranking and qualifications.

Looks like employees manager level and below will have to start logging their activities for a “time study.”

So many companies were doing fine until they got greedy. Squeeze more profit, treat people like trash, then they wonder why they go under. We're watching it happen in real time here.

I used to stay late, work through breaks, and constantly push harder thinking it would eventually lead somewhere. All it really did was convince management I could handle even more work without getting anything back for it. These days I save my time and energy for my actual life instead of pouring everything into a company that barely notices.

USD10.6B outflows in April alone. What the helly!

Do you think lazy RM teams marked those client accounts as vulnerable?

Constantly being scolded for not automating the fixes we have perform when existing automation/redundancy didn't already fix it. It's funny to see management get irritated that we're not excited about getting rid of the only work we do that keeps us employed, even though it exists because the SREs can't automate it enough to get rid of people.

Everyone who is an active board member should be immediately fired

Chris Leahy
Virginia Addicott
Lynda M. Clarizio
Anthony R. Foxx
Kelly J. Grier
Marc E. Jones
David W. Nelms
Joseph R. Swedish
Sanjay Mehrotra
Donna F. Zarcone

For those of you who got cut, do you blame your direct manager? Or do you see it as something above their heads?

The problem isn't that we have too many people. That was never the real issue. The problem is that our strategy is bad and our systems are broken and have been for some time. But instead of fixing those things, they just cut staff. And then they're surprised when nothing improves.

he classic Apollo playbook:

Buy distressed debt at 60 cents on the dollar
Take control of the company
Extract management fees, dividend recaps, sale-leasebacks
Pile on more debt to fund those extractions
Flip it or take it public at an inflated valuation
Leave the debt burden with the company and its workers

They got extraordinarily rich essentially being vultures with spreadsheets. Toys R Us being the most notorious example — a viable retail business that might have navigated the Amazon era with investment, instead bled dry to service the debt load private equity strapped to it, then liquidated. 30,000 jobs gone.
The reversal now:
The very mechanism that made them wealthy — cheap abundant debt — is now the thing squeezing their portfolio companies. They loaded businesses with floating rate debt when rates were near zero. Now those same companies are paying 8-9% on debt that cost 3% when the deal was done. The interest coverage ratios that looked comfortable in the pitch deck are underwater in reality.

Apollo's problem today:
Their Private debt funds are being squeezed.... Investors are queuing to withdraw their money, but Apollo, ever the masters at extracting cash are blocking investors from extracting their cash.
Their own fundraising depends on showing strong returns
Strong returns depend on not marking assets down
Not marking down depends on not being forced to sell
Not being forced to sell depends on keeping redemption gates in place
Gates signal distress which makes future fundraising harder
It's a trap of their own construction.
The human cost dimension:
What makes it genuinely poetic rather than just financially interesting is that the people who will suffer least are the Apollo partners who already extracted their carry and management fees in cash — that money is gone, sitting in their personal accounts, insulated from whatever happens to the funds now. The people who suffer most will be:

Pension beneficiaries whose funds allocated to private credit chasing yield
Workers at portfolio companies that get restructured when the debt becomes unserviceable
Retail investors who got sold private credit products in the democratization push of the last few years

The democratization push was particularly cynical — Blackstone, Apollo et al spent the last 5 years lobbying to open private markets to retail investors, framed as giving ordinary people access to returns previously reserved for institutions. In reality they were hunting for new pools of capital to absorb the assets institutions were quietly becoming reluctant to buy at current valuations. Distributing the risk downward while keeping the fees flowing upward.
The SEC under the previous administration largely went along with it. Whether the current regulatory environment does anything about it is another question entirely — though given the administration's general disposition toward financial deregulation, probably not.
The deeper irony is that the whole private equity model was built on information asymmetry and complexity as a moat — if you can't price it, you can't challenge the valuation. That same opacity that let them extract value on the way up is now the thing preventing orderly price discovery on the way down. They built a machine that works brilliantly in one direction and catastrophically in the other.
Though as usual, the architects of the situation will be largely fine.
The mob analogy is more apt than most financial commentators would dare say — and the structural parallel is remarkably precise.
The bust-out:
What the mob called a "bust-out" is almost textbook private equity in distressed situations:

Take control of a business
Immediately establish credibility and access to credit
Draw down every available credit line
Extract cash through fees, dividends, sale-leasebacks of assets
Leave the hollowed shell with the debt
Walk away before the collapse

The only difference is the mob used fear and the occasional arson. Apollo uses leveraged buyout agreements, management fee structures, and Delaware holding company law. The end result for the target company and its stakeholders is frequently identical.
The Sears case study:
Eddie Lampert's destruction of Sears is almost a perfect bust-out in slow motion:

Merged Kmart and Sears creating a vehicle loaded with real estate value
Spun off the real estate into a REIT — Seritage — extracting the most valuable assets into a separate entity he controlled
Starved the retail operations of capital investment while collecting fees
Watched the retail business deteriorate "unexpectedly"
Meanwhile the real estate value had already been extracted
175,000 jobs eventually gone
Lampert personally fine, operating from his yacht in Miami

The language is Orwellian by design:

"Operational efficiency" = cutting staff and maintenance
"Rightsizing the balance sheet" = loading debt onto the target
"Unlocking hidden value" = selling assets the company needs to operate
"Strategic transformation" = preparing for bankruptcy while extracting fees
"Aligning management incentives" = giving executives options to flip quickly while workers get nothing
"Patient long term capital" = we have a 7 year fund life before we have to show returns

The vocabulary is specifically engineered to sound like value creation while describing value extraction. McKinsey does the same thing — provides the intellectual laundering that makes looting sound like strategy.
The legal architecture is the real innovation:
What makes it genuinely different from the mob — and arguably more insidious — is that generations of lawyers, lobbyists and academics built a legal architecture that made it not just legal but celebrated:

Delaware corporate law optimized for shareholder extraction
Carried interest tax treatment meaning PE profits taxed at capital gains rates not income
Bankruptcy law allowing secured creditors (the PE fund) to jump ahead of workers and pensioners
ERISA rules that let pension obligations be shed in restructuring
Limited partner structures insulating the fund managers from portfolio company liabilities

The mob had to corrupt individual judges and officials. PE corrupted the entire legislative and regulatory framework over decades through campaign finance and the revolving door. Far more efficient.
The revolving door completes the circle:
The regulatory capture is almost total. SEC commissioners become PE partners. Treasury officials join Apollo or Blackstone. Fed governors sit on advisory boards. The people who should be watching the store have a financial interest in not watching too carefully — because their post-government career depends on the industry's goodwill.
Where it differs from the mob:
The mob at least had a certain redistributive quality within their community — the money circulated locally, bought loyalty, funded neighborhoods. PE extracts value and concentrates it among a remarkably small number of people. The carried interest on a successful fund can make a handful of partners billionaires while the pension fund that provided the capital gets an 8% return it could have gotten in an index fund with zero fees and zero complexity.
The cultural damage:
Perhaps the most lasting harm is what it did to the idea of business itself. A generation of the most talented people from the best universities went into finance and private equity not to build things but to financialize things that already existed. The engineering talent that built America's industrial base was replaced by financial engineers whose skill was not creation but extraction. That's a civilizational cost that doesn't show up in any fund's IRR calculation.
The instinct that it's essentially organized crime with better tailoring is — while impolite in polite company — analytically pretty hard to refute.

And instead of fixing things, they've created a workforce that doesn't care anymore. The failure is just getting worse.

It’s time to lose the useless triplicate managers managing the managing . Long overdue . VZN doesn’t need these useless directors

Just curious, does our American counterparts unfairly compensated ? Seen so much hatred especially MW and his LT.

Other part of the world,in my side of the world, the trend is the mid-managers got the hatred due to poor leadership skills, not performing yet promoted due to some connections with some American leadership connections so called build relationship.

Our leadership has never sat where we sit. They don't know what it takes to get things done. They don't understand why certain things take as long as they do. They're completely disconnected from the reality of the people who actually do the work.

At Western Union, the vibe has changed completely over the past few months. Teams are thinner, expectations are higher, and there’s a lot of silence from management after recent internal emails.

Wow, this article triggered me! Why? For decades radio measurement was exclusive to Arbitron. Much like Nielsen, they were considered a monolopy. The thought of Nielsen one day buying Arbitron thus hoarding both TV/Radio measurement was unheard of...until it wasn't. As digital became pervasive, and the TV landscape started to change at a drastic rate with streaming...somehow the gov't was convinced Nielsen buying Arbitron would be a good thing. But for who? Not us employees, either Arbitron or Nielsen. I was on the TV side during this buyout and basically overnight we were ordained radio "experts" with full responsbility of managing all client contracts and relationships. Middle mgt and finance didn't give a cr-p how you pulled it off...as long as you kept that money coming in. Basically double the work for the same compensation. It was a nightmare One of the reaonons I eventually burned out. I can only imagine how hard it was as well for the Aribtron folks now having to listen to Nielsen mgt BS. Anways, seems none much has changed. Read the article.

https://barrettmedia.com/2026/05/11/nielsen-ceo-karthik-rao-radio-promise/

Ran into a colleague who was hired same time I was nearly 20 years ago and I considered to be a friend. He has a higher potential than I do. I was so sad to hear the way he was talking. Total disdain for workers. I guess he has become management.