This is a genuine question? I am not an employee but I am puzzled with such a large cut within the industry that should be healthy. Not sure if someone can sum things up for us lurking here and trying to figure out what happened. I hope all is over and folks that lost jobs have no problems finding employment.
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How many contractors do they use? Seems to me that they contract out pretty much everything and pay a "management fee".
Your brand communication is very poor and not authentic- nourishment of the world is a fake claim for what Cargill is doing to farmers and nature. No one is buying it.
Just like employees do not buy the internal narrative. Start over with all your comms no BS please
Can’t wait to see it all fold as right now the senior leaders are gloating and even shedding fake tears pretending g to feel sorry for those laid off. Absolute lack of integrity at the top
It’s back to Cargill’s commodity roots for now , the failed experiment in pretending to be an innovative company that delivers specialty products is over with serious consequences to 8000 families. Sadly all those senior executives who made this decision got promoted or got fat packages to leave .
+1 for point #3. We should be so much better at executing capital projects yet somehow it seems to be getting worse. Other companies have this figured out. We have spent millions on audits of projects but NOTHING IMPROVES (with a few exceptions). Isn’t anyone in leadership curious why that is??
Kathy needs a new McLaren and real estate in Duluth.
The post below is spot on. Their #5 comment hit the nail on the head. Over the past 3 years, Cargill did a great job hiring some extremely talented individuals and then did a horrendous job of utilizing that talent across the board. Cargill has a culture problem in the fact that it absolutely refuses to change how work is performed. So, any new “change” was met with extreme resistance and now most of them have been let go due to how the layoffs were prioritized.
Already some good posts on this if you do a little digging. I’ll hit some of the highlights
- Unrealistic financial targets which made it look like we underperformed despite it being a top 5 year.
- Poor, yes-man leaders brought in and/or promoted who shouldn’t have been. CFO wasn’t ready (strong talent I think, just not mature enough for this role); Brian’s feelings were hurt that previous CFO walked when she realized what a nightmare it was here so he promoted someone instead of looking external again. CHRO hates people even though she is obsessed with pretending she doesn’t. CIO has surrounded herself with cronies from previous company; they say things but do something different, and are genuinely not remotely good leaders (or people in some cases). Existing leaders (especially the new, not actually new people Brian thinks are all stars) got us into this mess but we’re betting on them getting us out of it too. Makes absolutely no sense. Brian is the common thread, if you know what I mean.
- Poor return on investments because we let people have pet projects and no accountability for how capital is deployed and/or if it’s returned as promised. Instead, we let people bury failures and blame consultants but yet keep hiring them over and over again. Vicious cycle continues. See point above, many of these failed projects have direct executive/senior BP/vp accountability in gate approvals yet none of them are accountable either?
- We’ve become absolutely obsessed with customers who don’t feel the same. Sure, some customers are strategically partnering with Cargill but most of them think about us as a commodity supplier, regardless of what is repeated over and over. We have bloated a “sales” force and our customers are not paying for it.
- We’re having a major identity crisis. We are a supply chain company but we don’t have a single supply chain leader in a consequential role. It is all operations or commercially experienced folks. We even call leaders manufacturing and supply chain leaders but their only experience is operations. Our new chief procurement office has no experience but is a well liked commercial leader. This is what happens when you promote your friends instead of qualified people. We invest hundreds of millions into facilities, but we don’t even have basic modern systems to help us do jobs efficiently. We’ve lost the plot in many cases so we have hired amazing and talented people to do work that isn’t important or isn’t a priority (don’t even get me started on all the stuff we have hired a single person to do but have NO MONEY to actually execute)