Boston Consulting Group
15 replies (most recent on top)
@1xeq:
I fear it's worse than that: we are the cigarette company of the future. Who TF is going to want to work for us in 10 years? I tell the bright young folks to GTFOH while they still have a choice.
@mef:
Same here, experienced hire. XOM lifers born on third base think they hit a stand up triple. They have no idea how brutal it is elsewhere as they suckle the warm XOM te-t. When I came to XOM, I was pi$$Ed to find out there were 2.5 people doing what I alone was doing at former company. All of them were payed more than I and their only skills were PowerPoint. Put on your headphones and listen to Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb.
The world moved on.
What happened to coal?
What happened to whaling?
A temporary condition.
This is the house that Rockefeller built, by golly.
The bee's wax.
But there will be bl00d.
CSR (Corporate Strategic Research, NJ) like orgs survived and were able to drag down the rest of the corporation.
We forgot to implement a "lean and mean" strategy in managing OPEX a decade ago. We are just "mean".
BP and Shell started down the path of "lean" in the 2008 credit default swap bubble. We chose to hold on to our assets and headcount in circa 2008.
We calcified and forgot how to be competitive. Pride comes before a fall, our misplaced sense of superiority and obstinacy only spell problems to come.
ExxonMobil is a sitting duck, relying on high oil prices to survive. The day when a breakthrough technology gives renewables the necessary boost will be the end of the dinosaur once known as the "golden standard" in the energy sector .
Good posts in this thread. Arrogance is #1. Having worked several other places before coming to XOM as an experienced hire, I couldn’t get over how bad it was. Internally and externally. Also, have never seen a company so inwardly focused, and the forced tanking drives that as well as discouraging teamwork. Gotchas in meetings with your peer group are the norm. If I can make myself look good and my peers look bad, that’s two for the price of one.
And as touched on above. Rapidly moving managers. A site manager is always going to cut costs and defer maintenance to feather their own cap, counting on rotating out before things fell apart. And most of the time when it did, the poor sap it happened to was reporting to multiple layers of the very managers that didn’t keep things up, so there isn’t any sharing of the blame.
We have a broken model of moving HiPos so often that they never have to deal with the consequences of their decisions and make decisions to make themselves look good in the short term but destroy long term value.
Company looks to the past to solve problems of the future. Then to slow things down and solve those problems requires so much red tape and alignment that the effort to fix things becomes unmanageable.
We then start to steward the lost opportunity then rationalize away why we aren't doing anything about it. That information is relayed to Dallas wasting people's time and still things don't change.
Darren Woods
Just let the powers that be figure out what happened. Aren't they the smartest and the brightest via the system? Isn't that what they are paid to do? But here is 1 piece of advice for these geniuses: take a good look at yourself in the mirror, not that pos exercise thing, but the one in your bathroom.
Yours truly,
Dorothy from Mobil then Exxon
Don't you know - all the gold's taken out before the cremains are made?
Management keeps expecting the same people who got us in this mess to get us out. If they were open to bringing in people who haven't been brainwashed by the "this is just the way we do things" mentality, new perspective could turn this way around. But there's too much arrogance to even suggest it amongst themselves.
"Sunflower management": the inclination of people in organizations to align themselves with the leader's real or assumed viewpoint. McKinsey said EM is the worst case they've ever seen of it.
Arrogance. A stifling, self undermining, marginalizing, cannibalistic culture.