Board and Leadership should be ashamed
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Hot take - Not knowing tech doesn't make you a bad leader and knowing it sure doesn't make you a good one.
Some of the worst leaders I've seen were the ones who could talk the talk all day, buzzword bingo, framework of the month, a task force for everything. Looks great on a deck. But listening to the people actually doing the work? Not a chance.
That's where it all falls apart. Blind to other perspectives, real problems get buried, people stop speaking up and before you know it, you've got a toxic culture on your hands.
The slow burn is the real ki-ler, good people quietly checking out, teams running on fumes, everyone doing just enough to not get fired.
Having self-awareness, humility and genuinely caring about your people? You either have it or you don't. No bootcamp for that.
Has to be said, Gary was a good old boy who didn't know a single thing about technology. His leadership was let every single manager and executive do whatever they wanted without any baseline of a standard.
That is the reason he was forced out. He didn't drive the ship, he sat on the pool lounge dancing a jig, drinking johnny walker all day. He was worthless.
Not saying the repetitious word salad to-ser that is there now with stephanie is any better. Since day one we had new pillars, mottos, slang, everything under the sun to following the sun and every single bit of it had zero impact to success. All of her minions she brought in, managers and executives they did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nobody spent money, nobody cleaned up, nobody did anything because everyone is afraid. Fast forward a couple of years to where she is paying a company tens of millions of dollars to just offshore and fire everybody. Not one single manager or executive was removed for not doing their job and managing their section of life. Not one.
So now FIS is at the point where they spend more than they should and have 25 cents in the bank. Yet, stephanie and the rest of the lot who are scared to breathe just do whatever they want all the while getting paid nicely and bonuses. And don't forget the floundering board that let it happen. This place is a ghost ship and the move going forward is an ai chatbot. You know, following a set of rules because ai isn't ai. It is just programming. That is our big push. How can I help you today? Cutting edge.
The lawsuits that are hitting and about to hit of her and the executive team setting the plane on fire and then taking off is going to be a good read for years to come. At least in schools, they will have a story to talk about what not to do in business aside from enron.
@bg - A lot of us would actually like to see Gary back. Agree with him or not, he had a vision and understood where the industry was heading. The place hasn’t felt the same since.
With Anthropic stepping in, there’s finally a chance for some real structure and clarity. And yes—this will definitely shake up a few folks who were trying to overplay their hand and keep all the visibility within their little group. That spotlight is about to get a lot wider.
Gary is exactly the kind of leadership this company needs if we want to rebuild a positive environment. Without someone who can reset the culture, we’re just going to keep competing internally, forming cliques and running a rat race that benefits a select few instead of the whole organization.
What a company. Largest Fintech in the world trying to use the Anthropic name to gain credibility. At least the get the Anthropic CEO on the stage if you are going to try this. My hunch is if you bring Gary back, you'd see a 30% jump in the stock. That's the better name to drive the stock over other logos.
@ax Q1 earnings call today. Every time Stephanie appears in public it takes 10% off the stock price :/
Oh, nothing important, just that the stock price dropped 8% today. Meanwhile, Stephanie is f***ing excited about all that Anthropic bs :D
@OP Why? What happened? Anything new?