#leadership

Displacing individuals is too slow and not creating sufficent staff reduction.
Poor work conditions and arbitary illogical management and we-ponized metrics have failed get employees to self attrit. Leadership next phase: Build League, the foundation to start displacing entire teams of employees at once....

Have read this a lot..

The problem with this logic is that it is exactly the strategy used to hire them in the first place (internally from other BUs using Spotify model) what your missing is that this is was designed to fail and there was extreme internal resistance that became louder in late 2019… convenient right?

Have you ever heard anyone at the firm say “fidelity doesn’t like two VPs in one room” before they humbly announce a lateral move to a different adjacent org? Take a look at some of your peers at any pay grade that started to make lateral moves during the fall of ‘25 water cooler talk.

I see your posts, i hear your sentiment. but what you are enraged about isn’t the firms gross incompetence. It’s actually quite worse, because it was strategic and now associates are left pointing the finger at the right people but for the wrong reason.

The existing tenured VPs on teams actively pushed back for years against the re-org and likely didn’t tell you about it. It was near impossible to fight — as PI was proving the model worked in their BU. The main argument of why the success wouldn’t transfer for AM tech is based on the end users and stakeholders. 100% internal technology with a specific set of elitist stock pickers, research analysts and traders as internal customers.

And then expecting those exact investment professionals to engage in this new silly structure was down right embarrassing. Asking someone who has worked as a product manger (industry title) to become a squad lead (not even a title used by Spotify itself anymore) was evidence in itself for some people aware enough that they jumped ship or took a lateral move.

Covid became the catalyst for this shift to formally take place, yes. But dont let your ignorance (and outright bigotry) distract you from the real enemy here. False sense of transparency from upper executives. Tenured VPs shielding delivery teams from all this happening only made them less prepared for the blow.

Fidelity wants to remain known for not following suit in layoff trends throughout changing economies. This is a decade long plan to control costs in a different way that other competing public firms cant take the same approach. If you want someone to blame, this is a “privately owned” cop out.

Thats it. The VPs you keep bringing up that you all seem to want to interrogate hypothetically. They were brought in so that there wouldn’t be outraged when they were phased out. Every single AM tech leader knew this. Patterns were recognized. New roles were presented to people with confusing titles and responsibilities. Delivery teams divided.

Asking chat gpt to come up with reverse interview questions about new VPs merit is sophmoric. This was why they were placed originally — upper execs paid for the Spotify consult and needed to see it through, and covid allowed them to execute this. knowing it would fail and THAT was a valuable point enough to justify future layoffs.

There are MANY cases of well accomplished VPs choosing a demotion, strategically. To stay at the firm, embrace the change for a temporary 5-7 years until the next wave of “leaders” try to make an impact. When Kathy and bill were here, this was well understood but not widely discussed because there was an actionable conversation happening about what long term associates LIKED about why they stayed for so long. There was a long run of success with their combined approach, and unfortunately gave a lot of younger employees a sense of stability that would soon change.

All of the outrage of covid hires and thinking you can reverse engineer something that was intentionally designed to fail in the first place is a waste of your time. Stop being tricked into thinking they actually believed this re-org would work. Or that it was a disguised effort to implement DEI.

Your leaders didn’t tell you the truth, stop whining about DEI when it was intentionally used to distract you and blame your peers, and not the execs.

Great line by NVIDIA CEO.

Truth is, Verizon should have many empty chairs then…

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/entrepreneursanctuary_jensen-huang-co-founded-nvidia-in-1993-and-activity-7453027411870371840-5DK2?

Alright, let's hear it! Comment below on the first week back under the new RTO mandate. People going from 3 to 4 days a week, how bad was it having that extra day and having 3x the amount of people around you all day? HBAs returning to office (myself included), was it as bad as you thought, worse or better? My personal opinion and observations were the following:

• Commutes: These are only 'tolerable' if you get there before 7 and leave before 3. Traffic is and always will su-k in a post covid world where everyone drives like they are either on me-h or sleeping pills.

• Collaboration: We have to sit around people we already work with (I work with cool people thank goodness). Zero difference in teamwork, communication etc other than talking over a cube wall instead of in a teams chat. The idea that being in person will "increase collaboration" is one of the biggest lies told to us. In fact, it seems that people are less likely to do any type of extra "collaborating" because everyone is tired, burnt out, and of patience. Another Fail for ELT. (put this L on the stack with the others)

-"Culture": Day one had lots of chatter and "summit energy" from associates seeing others they had not seen in years. This type of "energy" also can be found at Founders Day. Oh wait, PP ki-led that whole event with no explaination. By day 3 people appeared to be less "bubbly" and were more or less just focused on staying in their cubes, plugging the ears with a headset or ear buds, and counting down the hours until it was time to leave. Everyone looks tired and checked out. If EDJ had any brains, 2 days in office seems to be the sweet spot if you were going to have RTO and not make it fail horribly. But, these people are stupid and will never notice this. Also, for the folks that think HBA peeps are lazy because we are (or were) at home, please sit down and take your L. Lazy people in the office are no different than a lazy HBA. In office are actually worse about getting out of doing work because there is nobody watching them. HBAs always felt like they had to go above and beyond to stay off the radar.

• Productivity: This was the biggest fail of them all. The distractions of having people walking by my cube, the background noise, hearing other calls, and just general in office vibes. This is a horrible, outdated, beyond stupid way to complete non client/branch facing work. It is unbelievable how much less productive I was this week in office VS at home. The time it took to get day to day work done was increased due to having so many distractions. I made more errors this week than I have in years. Stupid errors from simply not being 100% locked in on the work I was doing.

• Leaders: The only leaders that seem to be enjoying this new RTO are the ones at or above DL. The ones who wear the sport coat/blazer every day. They have the talking points down, the fake persona like a politician, and generally walk around thinking they are Gods gift to this company as they figure out new and creative ways to break everything they touch. They don't even seem like real people and make zero effort to interact or have any personal relationship with the people under them, unless of course they need a new 'work around' created for a system tech failure. They stay in their clique` with the other 'jackets'. They seem almost completely detached from reality and have zero ability to "read the room".

Summary: I knew it would be bad, but this is much worse than I imagined now that I'm seeing it in real time. People that love WFH don't care if someone is in office, teams chat is yellow/away, or someone doesnt reply right away. We simply do not care and only focus on the job we are paid to do. Nothing else matters to us if the work is getting done correctly. The in office junkies (the ones who love RTO) seem to be nothing more than micro managing control freaks. They dont have enough to do and have major insecurities. They love being in the office and therefore everyone needs to be in the office to fill whatever mental void they have. These people are borderline psychopaths with the way they obsess over what their coworkers are doing. It's sick and childish when it comes down to it. The obsession with seeing bodies in the cubes and nothing more has to be one of the biggest fumbles and fails EDJ has ever done (next to layoffs and outsourcing). I'm generally curious at this point as to how much extra $ is wasted on these buildings to keep them functional VS when the company was fully remote for almost 4 years. It's going to be a very long summer.

Listen to the Bloomberg Talks interview with Dan. They literally ask him what changes will average customer see that will make an impact and Dan literally couldn’t answer. Totally embarrassing- it’s so CLEAR he has NO PLAN for any real changes. Just AI, AI, AI. Literally no plan at all!!!

Wealth cannot be serious about it.

It's been over a month since the announcement that our manager is being let go, and it's been nothing but radio silence after that

How the he-l do you expect associates to work in peace when you don't know who will be replacing the manager or if we will have a job in next 3 months.

The vague language about "sit back and enjoy the ride for next few months is bullsh-t"

We still continue to see people posting on linked in about their roles eliminated so it's obvious what HR communicated that "it's over" is nothing but a big lie.

Fu-k you Bob, fu-k the entire leadership. You all deserve a special place in he-l and burned for eternity

I genuinely want to understand what's going on with CDO. She regularly brings sales people to speak at her town halls, the CEO directs AI roadmap questions to her instead of the product engineering leader, and right before the new CEO takes over she picks up yet another business unit. She came in as a operations leader, but now it feels like every strategically important BU reports into her.
At what point do we stop viewing this as a series of unrelated decisions and start seeing it as a deliberate concentration of leadership? Is the company effectively positioning her as the executive responsible for product, strategy, operations, and business execution all at once?
It's starting to look less like a traditional functional leader and more like someone accumulating power across the company, leading to a centralized executive structure similar to what existed under Mark's leadership, where significant influence and decision-making authority was concentrated under a single leader.
Time will tell whether this is the right approach. But given the company's experience with one man leadership, it's fair to question whether we're heading down a familiar path.

Execution - The act of doing or performing something planned. It is the process of turning ideas or strategies into action and/or formidable products.

Price on July 1, 2020 $23.40
Price on June 4, 2026 $22.66 (intraday)

Cumulative price return -3.2%
Annualized price return -0.5%

So are we all just going to nod along, or is somebody going to ask the obvious questions like, "What's the strategy again?" and "When exactly are we planning to factor human capital into it?"

“Hi losers I want you to return to the office (I won’t be going in because that’s for wage jockies like you), also work even harder (I won’t be paying you more lol). Let me explain to you what AI is (even though I have no experience in it)”

Make your predictions for the rest of 2026 and early 2027 in this thread. My prediction is that we are done with large cuts, stock is up additional 50% by this time next year. The exec management continues to be as evil and detached as they've always been. Geopolitics continue to be messy.

The culture is trash , no flexibility , no happy employees , no performance ,you run a company like it's 1980 ...this is what u get ..get this loser ceo out now !!!!

Got termed despite 3+ years of good performance, two promotions over the years.  In an effort to "be transparent" I openly shared my concerns with the strategic direction of the company and decision making by senior leadership.  Yes I also shared that i was looking for new employment as many of you are I am sure with Blackbaud's tanking stock price. My termination was how they responded.

If any lesson is learned from this it's "DON'T be transparent" because this is where it gets you. And also, BB has eyes and are actively searching for people expressing any sort of dissatisfaction with Blackbaud. I will hopefully have a new job lined up soon but wanted to share this information as they offered a pitiful "two weeks" severance in lieu of my silence.  
But don't worry AI will fix everything. Company is a sinking ship and would advise folks to get out while they can.

Predict what happens when the most over promoted players face a new reality that requires accountability for its success?

Will being EA for BL be redeeming or excluding? We need to move forward!

For whatever reason, they tried to sneak me into COBRA after my layoff. If I hadn't called to fight it I'd have had to may 800 something dollars. But for some messed up reason, they want to still make sure I pay something so I have a 300 something dollar bill (thank you useless offshore rep) that I have to once again fight.

Oh and the reps were all offshored. Man fu-k this place and its current leaders to he-l.

The Stock Market exploding. high quality/Growth/ visionary CEOs driving success.

Verizon BOD hires more Europeans to run a USA centric business. At some point failed leadership, expense reduction strategies will require change.

One thing for certain... current Vz Executives all waiting to get a buyout offer under guise of " seeking new opportunities " mantra.

Finance SD is openly vying for a SVP job two levels above his. he frequently mentions it in team meetings and its all over LinkedIn. he uses my annual performance meetings to talk about his desire for a promotion. SVP and AVP show favoritism to him. he acts inappropriately around employees and encourages us all to slack off. he constantly pressures people with opposing opinions in an abusive way and lies to protect himself. toxicity at its finest.

Q&A at Global Town Hall, Geoffisms

• We’re closing sites where people don’t want to live or travel to.
• We don’t have a retention issue.

He needs to make a career change to doing comedy.

More rounds of RIFs are coming at FIS, because that’s leadership’s answer to everything. Don’t fix anything at the top, just keep eliminating positions while our stock tanks and employees live in constant fear of losing their jobs. When are the CEO, CFO and other senior leaders going to be held accountable for the absolutely abysmal state of the business?

I hate making this a gender thing - but this feels discriminatory.

I joined Factset in 2022 and witnessed 2 rounds of layoffs. Originally my team had a total of 13 people originally (7 women and 6 men. There were more women in the original team because the team moved from one organization to another organization under the current leader) and now it has come down to 5 people in 2026.

I was impacted this cycle. One interesting thing I observed is that the leader of my group truly hates women. He let go of a total of 6 women and 2 men. At this point the team has 1 woman who is not US based which makes her safe. I don’t know if he’s being discriminatory but I was in really good performance standing due for a promotion for a long time. My manager pushed for it but her manager was not ready to approve. He also let go off my manager who was in really good standing. So I’m very confused… is this discrimination?

I work in the quad, and it seems like everyone is extremely unhappy. Empty eyes as people walk through the skyways. Blank expressions as we struggle to keep our heads above water while doing "more with less."

Everyone is overworked, underappreciated, frustrated to be sitting in a cubicle on Teams meetings because we've offshored so much of our workforce, bitter that raises and promotions are a thing of the past, stressed out because our leaders change direction every few months and want everything immediately but don't give us the time, tools, or people to do it correctly.

I've had friends get laid off who then tell me they're just glad it's finally over, like ripping off a band-aid (or its inferior counterpart, the Nexcare brand adhesive bandage strip).

How long until Bill succeeds in running this place into the ground?

Bravo Waters. Bravo. Impressive.

Bilton&Weiss have just sealed their fate ! They have indeed dismantled an American Insitution. Ratings will drop further. Ad dollars even more. Look what happened when clowns like these came in over the past few years at NBC, CNN, and ABC. Their take a bat to the system failed and now CBS is under the same repeat errors. Good riddence to Weiss&Bilton.

Signed,

Good Night & Good Luck.
The Ghost of ERM.

ByJudith Magyar,Brand Contributor.

“Digital transformation often gets mistaken for an IT upgrade,” said Kurt Aerts, business venture executive at ExxonMobil. He was speaking at the ASUG Best Practices event for Oil, Gas and Energy in Houston, Texas. “Our ongoing transformation is a powerful reminder that true change means transforming the business at scale. It’s not about implementing new systems — it’s about fundamentally changing how an enterprise operates and creates value.”

Not just another systems project
This philosophy underpins the company’s multi-year transformation that integrates people, processes, systems, and data across an organization with $350 billion in annual revenue, about 60,000 employees, and operations spanning upstream, chemicals, fuels, lubricants, and low-carbon solutions.

One of the key steps in ExxonMobil’s journey, which began in 2017, was to reframe the mindset. “We don’t want to optimize, we want to transform,” said Aerts.

Process transformation requires challenging deeply ingrained ways of working and prioritizing adoption of industry standards for each process area and service offering such as Record-to-Report, Source-to-Pay or Order-to-Cash, to drive globally consistent execution. This takes a governance model designed for clarity and speed of decision making — two prerequisites for meaningful transformation and to prevent the common trap of consensus-driven optimization.

Transforming the core
Aerts went on to describe ExxonMobil’s three core pillars of transformation:

Processes are now harmonized to industry standards enterprise-wide versus being executed differently by business or geography.

Systems are modernized from 12 heavily customized ERPs to a unified, cloud-based platform on SAP S/4HANA.

Data is being turned from fragmented, trapped information into harmonized consistently defined enterprise assets.

In the past, answering a simple question such as ‘how much do we sell to Walmart’ required hours of aggregating and reconciling across 12 ERPs. Real-time, enterprise-wide visibility will speed up the process considerably. “Harmonized data is becoming ExxonMobil’s new gold standard — the foundation for predictive analytics, AI, and faster decision-making,” Aerts explained.

Managing scale and risk
Large-scale transformation requires effective risk management. ExxonMobil’s approach balances value capture and risk mitigation.

Deployments are phased by the existing ERP ecosystem, not geography or function, to manage complexity and provide business continuity. A layered governance structure — from a sponsor committee of senior executives to operational design boards — supports accountability, transparency, and alignment at every level.

Aerts shared some lessons from the frontline, stressing the importance of foundational principles. When challenges arise, these principles help keep decisions aligned with strategic intent. Next, he reiterated that data matters most, because clean, consistent data is the real enabler of transformation. And finally, the team learned early on that an out-of-the-box approach really works. Industry-standard configurations deliver agility and prevent the drift toward customization that burdens future upgrades.

“We were able to achieve significant simplification,” he said. “For instance, we reduced about 1,400 company codes to under 1,000, and profit centers from more than 15,000 to fewer than 500. This has eliminated significant complexity while increasing transparency across financial reporting.”

ExxonMobil’s key metrics reflect the disciplined execution of the transformation, and is exceeding its targets on its two principal objectives:

80% target on Fit to Standard: a testament to the commitment to adopt industry standard processes.

90% target on Clean Core: enabling instant upgradeability and system resilience.

Ultimately, ExxonMobil’s enterprise transformation is about creating competitive advantage. By harmonizing data, simplifying systems, and standardizing processes across business lines and geographies, the company is positioning itself for faster innovation and improved experiences for employees, suppliers and customers.

Shaping the future
Transformation is also about visionary leadership in an industry that is adapting to societal needs on how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed. ExxonMobil has a long history of collaboration with SAP to address functionality gaps and ensure the solution is optimized for the oil and gas industry. In essence, ExxonMobil’s journey offers a blueprint for global organizations facing the same challenges, especially lack of agility caused by legacy systems, fragmented data, and decentralized processes.

Aerts concluded: “A successful transformation isn’t about replacing tools; it’s about redesigning processes, data and systems to deliver industry leading performance in efficiency, effectiveness and the experience of our employees and customers, while ensuring agility for adjustments required due to changes in the market.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2025/11/04/exxonmobil-is-rewiring-its-enterprise-for-the-energy-future/

APA needs fresh leadership and outside talent. Too many long-tenured life-long apaches filling the manager positions in critical business units, weak morale, and missed potential despite good people. Lot of talent from supporting fucntions, supply chain, accounting, IT etc. let go. Super talented Permain and Egypt employees quit or laid-off. RC manager in egypt finally let go. Good riddance- absolute dead weight. JC, MM etc have nothing to be proud of.

After the recent Fidelity layoffs, leadership mentioned moving toward larger consolidated teams starting in June. I haven’t seen any changes in my business yet.

Are others seeing team merges already?
Is this just taking longer than expected, or are additional organizational changes still being planned for lower level grades ?

Just saw this on LI, it's it true? What does this mean for GN&T?

The executives at this company are almost cartoonishly evil. I've never seen more people who are deluded into believing they are kind. Yes, I know and I've heard that leadership everywhere are snakes (that's how they end up where they are), but to see it up close is hard to digest.

Stank tried to spin the metric that 79% of the employees that did respond felt committed and engaged and used that number as support for his policies. He did not share the next metric that if only 79% of those who responded felt engaged/committed, then it is a easy assumption to make that really only about 60% of the total work force felt committed and engaged.
Remember, the C-Suite will ignore the responses that do not support their ideology and strategy, and outright lie about what the employees really feel is important.
499/600 and 875/900 are the real survey numbers.

If you’re with a vertical market like touchnet, greater giving, zego, mineral tree, heartland, etc

How are things going at your respective companies? How are earnings? How is morale? Or is the sales pipeline and sales leadership?

They can replace every single person in leadership, but there's no way anyone competent or with an actual vision is ever walking through that door. The culture is too far gone. There's no coming back from this.

I’ve noticed that leaders keep pushing for AI when we actually need more automation. AI is not deterministic and is a struggle to implement. If they want correct answers 100% of the time, why not implement automations instead? Makes no sense…

There are a lot of rumors that upper leadership has stated that SLC will be displacing the QA deptments end of June possibly the end of 3rd quarter in Sept. Its also been said that most of SLC will be gone before 2027. Any truth to this?

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/5g/abdu-mudesir-to-become-verizon-s-top-tech-exec-55594

Link --> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ibm-ceo-commits-to-reaching-quantum-computing-milestone-by-2029/ar-AA24GHxd?ocid=msedgntp&pc=W099&cvid=6a2049f56af74598af51294d8ec381d8&ei=9

If you believe this stuff will be available in 2029, then you'll believe anything and... I have bridge to sell you in London. No mention of Arvind's golden boy, Dario in this article.
BUT...
What happens if the fabled quantum computers fail to materialize in 2029 ? Where will Arvind and Dario be ? Basking in the sun somewhere in the Caribbean or hiding from the Italian Mafia underground ? After all, a billion dollars is a lot of $$$. ($10 billion is even more). LOL.

Would like to hear from any non-ELT GP on here. I assume those remaining support the culture changes. Do you? Is there something we aren’t getting?

Honestly curious.