When I first entered this industry decades ago I was told by a fellow associate who had been in the industry for decades themselves this is how leaders who are insecure operate. In my decades in the industry I have seen this first hand for myself to know my former fellow associate was correct. I feel this is playing out again at Edward Jones right before my eyes again. Weak leaders who are insecure about their own abilities come in and make drastic changes in order to justify their existence. Many times they are handed companies who are in great positions even making record net income (sound familiar?). I was at a company that had a leadership change. The new leadership came in from another larger company. When they took over we had a conference call. The new leadership said they were implementing this plan that did not work at their former larger company. They admitted they made mistakes, but assured us they had learned from their mistakes and were not going to make the same mistakes at our company. In the meantime they shut down our department and I was laid off. Nine months later I received a call saying they were getting the old band back together and asking if I wanted to come back. Some people went back, but most people including myself had moved on and never looked back. The leadership at this company made drastic changes, severely disrupted thousands of lives, and in the end nothing really changed. The company is still positioned in the same spot as they were before these drastic changes. Then new leadership comes in again and many times they change policy back to the original plan in order to make changes for the sake of making change in order to justify their own existence. Penny was handed a great company in a great spot. She just could not help herself. Here we go again. Let's bring in Chubak who laid thousands off at Citi and now Citi has already reversed many of his decisions. DC has been proven to be a failed leader and Penny has hitched her wagon to him. By the time Penny is done with this firm she will have spent millions of dollars and disrupted thousands of people's lives and the company will be in the same position as when she took over. Look at our past few managing partners. They stood by the firm's long tested and tried policies and we saw significant slow and steady growth to put us in the best situation we have ever been in. Even Penny has said these drastic changes are being made from a position of strength not weakness. There is an old saying in investing and business. It goes, "Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get sla-ghtered. Don't be hoggish." There is even a sign in the West entrance of the South St. Louis Campus that says, "Buy and hold". Make sure you make your money, but don't get greedy. These are the tenants that got this firm to where it is today. Slow and steady growth. A stable ship led with a stable hand. Think of JW navigating a horrible 2008 economy. The firm came out of 2008 better than when we went in. Penny is being greedy. She is burning many associates and she is going to get burnt herself.
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@3c9 My heart isn't in it anymore, after 10 years of really caring about how I showed up and contributed for clients. It's sad what we've become.
@yd As weeks turn into months, I start to wonder if we even mattered. All those years of work. Did it mean anything to anyone.
@yd pretty sure mine will be divorce. This ISP is tearing my family apart.
@fq We had some good partners in Compliance but they're all gone or leaving by year end. I can't blame them.
@kr P.S. please take their "word of the year" with them
@nz I am still here, but my money is not. There are ways around having your money in a place that is led by ethical leaders unlike Penny and her crew of merry misfits.
@af I am utterly embarrassed I am forced to keep my money here just to earn an income
@af Wowzer you are good you
@kr can we add some of the ex googlers who have been utter failures as well?
Dear Citibank and McKinsey,
It appears that several of your distinguished cultural ambassadors have wandered into Edward Jones, possibly while searching for a conference room large enough to hold their overinflated egos.
We understand the mistake as our offices do look similar to normal workplaces, which must have been confusing for leaders accustomed to the Citibank/McKinsey ecosystem, where PowerPoints reproduce rapidly in the wild and employees speak only in buzzword-based mating calls.
In a company that managed to survive a literal century without layoffs, our new guests immediately introduced “strategic workforce recalibration,” which is corporate for “Congratulations, you are now efficiency.”
We were also treated to the groundbreaking cultural innovation known as Town Halls With No Questions, which one can only assume is the logical evolution of “open communication” in the Citibank/McKinsey universe.
And the pièce de résistance:
Being told we should feel grateful to have jobs from an exec that chews up profits with his multimillion dollar partnership.
Nothing says “culture alignment” quite like a message that would fit neatly on a 1920s motivational poster next to a coal miner.
Given all this, we kindly request that Citibank and McKinsey come retrieve their roaming executives. They seem to be struggling here in Edward Jones territory, where people traditionally talk to each other, build trust, and occasionally consider humans as more than cells on a spreadsheet.
We’ll pack them up with their frameworks, their synergy pyramids, and whatever PowerPoint deck they’re currently using to explain why questions in a town hall are a “risk vector.”
Please pick them up at your earliest convenience, before they finish “optimizing” anything else. Otherwise we will be forced to send our Ted Jones to haunt you.
Warmly,
Every Associate That Wants The Trash That Is ELT & Their Buddies Taken Out.
@fq good point… if KJ actually knew how to do her job, we would actually be further in our transformation journey. Instead of celebrating cinco de mayo in a sombrero, she should have focused on real things that mattered.
What are you guys really hoping for? All of the executives at Edward Jones are either homegrown and got the job by kissing up, not based on work or they were kicked out sidelined mediocre leaders from other places. Name one with a track record for being really good? You expect too much from what we got. This is an average or less than leadership team, you are getting average or less than output.
Totally agree that JW handed PP the keys to the kingdom and she turned it into Venezuela. It’s a crying shame, however, that JW and DH do not have the guts to even acknowledge this fact or, heaven forbid, speak up and call this cabal of an ELT the colossal disaster it is. The fact that these two are still going around the country doing town halls means they are complicit in this runaway train wreck and every quarterly SLP check they cash removes another layer of ever dwindling credibility that might remain. If Ted were here, through his tears, he would fire every one of the ELT and put JW back on the 10th floor just long enough so he could fire him as well.
(In defense of Doug, and to add some levity to this mess, he just goes wherever they point him and repeats the same thing in every town. Kind of like Sleepy Joe. Hey, relax, we all have one in our family and, if you can’t figure out who it is in yours………well, there you go)
In the end, he wasn’t fired. He was given an umbrella and a beach chair and sent to Delaware.
What a thoughtful and well-crafted post. I hope she acknowledges these issues and avoids making further mistakes—many of the poor strategic decisions/investments are simply sunk costs at this point. I hope she chooses the right path and that the firm secures strong leadership (that is, anyone but David Chubak) moving forward.
Penny, DC, KJ, SM, JK, KC, and HM are dolts. They are tearing this firm apart. Ted would have personally fired each and every one of them before they made it to their cushy jobs they possess now.
Most leaders in Home Office are just playing the game to make it to GP for the money. They su-k up, agree with senior leaders, and drink the kool-aide knowing it’s best for the bank account. This is how companies rot from within. Nobody is here because EJ is an exciting place to work. Everybody is chasing an easy dollar.
Good stuff. It is not only at the top level where this firm is failing. We have GPs leading divisions that have no business being a leader. They were more concerned about keeping their jobs than actually being accountable to the people that they led. Just bad leadership all around. They took advantage of ER to wipe the slate clean. For sure they will botch this again but how much more leeway should these leaders get to mess with the people that they were meant to lead?