When CR justified the layoffs this week he used the same words he used 6 years ago when he said we had to pivot to become a SW company. Will we adopt any lessons learned from that effort? The way I see it, there was no real plan how to get there, new people were hired, existing employees were fired. Existing employees told they either didn’t know anything or were resistant to change, Job overlaps created and remain unresolved, disinvestment in TAC happened, everyone without a clue was promoted to VP, the culture began to turn toxic as dissent was silenced, the services portfolio diluted and an army created to develop use cases to drive adoption by non technical folks and then pretended adoption was happening when they subjectively mapped progress to a made up engagement race track. Where were the successes given the amount of investment? The expectation was significant and recurring revenue growth.
Hopefully the next steps in the planning will be significantly detailed and innovative. If laying people off and moving the jobs to India is it, seems like history is repeating itself,
Many of the existing talented architects and engineers have been studying AI and have been working with customers, INVEST in these folks. Invest in the current talent, many were told they couldn’t understand customer success which is why so many new people were hired. That turned out to be a myth.
Change out some of the leadership, and bring in new blood that will cultivate their teams and bring new ideas to the table and welcome opposing thoughts and view points. Bring in leaders experienced with AI transformation, invest in recruiting. Invest in your people, believe in them for once and stop traumatizing your workforce with a constant threat of losing their jobs.
Do the heavy lifting and the payoff will come.