Time for Juniper to stop trying to be another Cisco-like mammoth.
Shrink & prosper instead.
Luckily, there is plenty od fat to be trimmed in order to make this company even more profitable. We may be witnessing moves in positive direction these days, after all.
RR is no Jim Harbaugh.
There's no smartsizing at J.
The culture is broken and the serious talent who could get jobs elsewhere have done so already.
What you have now is the Bad News Bears, and what you need is Jim Harbaugh to come in and terraform the place.
Investing in higher cost and higher "value" talent only pencils out when the product or service has growth. When growth stagnates you focus on "value engineering." Take a look at what Apple has done with Macbooks when it was a growth product. They invented new laser technology just to cut microscopic holes in a chassis to status lights can shine through. Now they focus on value engineering like taking out magsafe, lit apple logo, component consolidation, etc. JNPR management is focusing on value engineering as way to increase margins when top line is not growing. Value engineering means you have to cut the high cost talent since the investment doesn't bring returns. It's short sighted but this is the way all US companies work. In fact, value engineering is too long of a loop. Better to just do large stock buybacks and boost the stock price directly.
Smartsizing means resizing the company in a smart way. What happened yesterday was a pure nrs game. Cutting out the higher salaried individuals with no consideration of the value that the affected individual brings on the table. Often times a higher cost investment gives a greater return than a low cost investment. Common sense, but not to our supersmart new leadership apparently. To me smartsizing means cutting out the useless overhead. Unfortunately, the useless overhead survived this round (again). Go Juniper!