It was a cost cutting measure plain and simple. There is no plan to restructure to make things more efficient or do what your job description says. They eliminated key roles without any idea how to offset the workload. They talk about increased focus on innovation with less people to commercialize the innovations. Short term stock boost but long term irreparable damage to the brand. It’s clear leadership is only concerned about the short term benefit, which will inevitably fail and then spiral out of control because of no resources to get things done in a timely manner. 3M’s biggest problem is how slow every thing is done… it’s going to get much slower unless they are open to taking greater risks for speed.
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The only strategy I see coming from senior leadership is 'spin and bankruptcy', with the latter one being unspoken but now obvious from their actions.
Has anyone directly asked Roman or a COC member about bankruptcy? I might have to ask my COC member at their next town hall.
They have always been on the 'US' SG&A, just as recharges instead of direct costs.
Our foolish GFS rules have always prevented proper accounting with any 'sub' except the US parent.
Totally agree with Wall Street consultant. There is a lot of fat still at all levels. Marketing needs to go. Easily outsourced at a fraction of the cost. Hr needs to go. Lvs needs to go. Anyone in strategy and dev needs to go. Acquisitions need to be integrated asap. And thug thulin needs to be sued for malfeasance.
What they don't talk about is they have been realigning GSC employees into US business teams. This means GSC headcount is part of US teams SG&A. Some of this is through attrition, and some seems by design to reduce US headcount (just have them report straight line into US teams and dotted line into GSC management -- instead of the previous reverse.......dotted line into US but part of GSC headcount/SG&A).
Spot on. Town hall yesterday was just "my (Kearney's) way or the highway".
Of course there is not a restructure, but they needed to say SOMETHING to sound like it was not their fault they had to do it.
There really isn’t dead weight unless you remove some of the red tape 3M has self imposed… basically others telling what businesses or organizations can and cannot do and what new systems they need to implement so that everyone from the top down can click “approve” of every single thing that needs to be implemented. That is part of the problem… and removing people isn’t going to speed things up unless you free up the individual businesses to make their own decisions regarding speed and risk. Due to the lawsuits, 3M won’t allow more risk. The reason there is “dead weight” is to push the items through the super slow 3M processes, and those processes have become the bottlenecks to getting things done. Job eliminations is basically telling the businesses to figure it out on their own without any true guidance or plan since they still expect you to follow the rigid 3M protocols.
I believe we still have massive deadweight in branding, marketing, lvs, pricing, project management. We can easily pull out another 1000. Easily! Let’s not kid ourselves. There is no need for an m&a team. Most of our acquisitions are at best average. The exception is kci, which was a failure (thanks inge!)
OP is spot on. In this last round of layoffs our team and others had to come in to the office for workshops to determine how we would divvy up and manage the work. In fact several teams were doing that. What’s worse, work isn’t being prioritized rather it’s a do more with less mentality. Also, no investment for ANYTHING, making the attainment of businesses and individual performance goals impossible.