- What reorg has accomplished the stated goals beyond short terms savings from firing people eroded when they had to hire the people back to run the business?
- What big, disruptive strategy initiatives have actually been delivered beyond some instantly outdated chatbot? What from the ET's AI roadmap has actually been delivered and successfully?
- How long does your ET get to blame people that were let go or pushed out for their shortcomings? Some have literally been doing this for years.
- How many top performers get pushed out while you just keep adding heads to compensate for chaotic programs like Salesforce as those you kept have no idea how to run a CRM, including the new CIO?
- How much money do you waste on BCG, McKinsey, etc. with no results to show for it?
- How long do you keep an ET that has a "provide customers everything and the kitchen sink" approach vs having an actual, modern, and innovative product strategy? There is 5 ways to buy every product at pricing that makes no sense to us, never mind customers.
- How many leaders can you hire that have no idea what they are doing, such as the CDO, CFO, new CIO, and many of those leading Engineering, while you fire the people that did the actual work and knew how things worked?
- How low are you willing to let morale go before the company is not longer functional?
4 replies (most recent on top)
@a5 exactly. Employees don’t understand what the PE is doing. It’s not about our ET, even though they are under qualified in their own right. Everyone should read about ToysRUs, ski resorts out West, Party City, Joann’s Fabrics, Radio Shack, Krispy Kreme, hospital & veterinarian groups- all owned or destroyed by PE. They cut deep, raise prices which inflate profits, saddle the company with debt and sell off and walk away. All apart of the plan. Apollo doesn’t want to actually understand what cengage does.
@aa Plenty on the ET, Board, and Apollo look at this site and Glassdoor. Some of the ET even reply anonymously, which is cowardly.
If an ex-employee complains on a site no one reads, is it feedback or just background noise?
Underlying this post are a lot of assumptions about Apollo's intentions for Cengage (and the intent of private equity firms in general when they acquire struggling organizations like Cengage). If that's something you'd like to understand in earnest (as in, why would a PE firm buy a company like this only to make decisions that are crippling to the long-term viability of the company, and how can they profit off of doing so?), I'd recommend picking up a copy of the book Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America by Brendan Ballou. He's a former federal prosecutor who worked in the anti-trust division of the Justice Dept. As someone with little to no previous formal education in economics/business, this was an eye-opening read and helped me to understand what was happening to the organization and why.