> I watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had money in hand ready to pay for when they were inches away from release.
I'm watching friends in two different, reasonably large consulting companies (~700-1000 employees) suffer as their respective companies go through the consulting version of this kind of MBA suicide. In one case the company even decided to change their name and go through a rebranding. Some examples of the idiocy at work
- The rebranded company's schtick is to hire staff with advanced degrees (PhD preferred and multiple Masters) and at least 10 years of industry experience and charge bongo bucks for renting them out to do high-end but not necessarily mind-blowing work. Something like 80% of their contract staff has a PhD. Due to economic reasons they lost a couple medium-sized contracts. Their response was to lay off half of the PhD employees in the company because they were too expensive to keep around while they looked for new work. even ones who were already working on a contract and making money for the company.
This meant that they also had to cancel at least 3 more medium-sized contracts and a handful of smaller ones because they eliminated the staff who were working on them
At one point they also had two CTOs (because if one is good, two look even better) until they came to their senses and laid one of them off.
- At the other consulting firm, a similar pattern, tightening customer budgets meant that they decided to replace staff already on contract with cheaper, less experience, all new staff to pump up the profitability score on the spreadsheet. (they'd already laid off all of the idle staff not on contract, so without winning new business, some MBA thought that this was the best way to increase the numbers and get another bonus)
But now they've let go all of the people in the firm who had experience doing the work, sometimes decades of experience. And now there are no mentors, no experienced hands, nobody. The quality of the consulting work rapidly went down resulting in the loss of 2 contracts and senior positions that they'd normally fill from within required them to go outside of the firm for.
Both of these firms are in death spirals and all of the people that could help them pull out of it were fired.
At one company I used to work for, I also saw my leadership completely lose their minds and fire off all of the development staff, thinking we could coast with a new sales team and the product we had and pull ourselves into profitability. They also turned down trying to fill out profitable professional services contracts we had with staff because the margins were lower than selling new licenses. I also brought them significant new work in a different line of business where it was decided to turn it down because we didn't want to have to deal with low paid temp staff because "temp workers get paid more than their worth to their temp agencies".