21–30 of 338 posts
I don't have knowledge about managing a company, but is it at all possible to efficiently lead 127000+ employees? Has MSFT become a non-manageable behemoth?
And now, every day for a year, everyone gets to wake up and wonder if this is the day that they will get laid off. Why can't they wait and make the announcement once they know who they will eliminate and do it in one swift action? Why put people in limbo for a year?
It's actually an attempt to try to be smart about letting people go. Sure, yes, they could come up with a master list and just pull the trigger today. But the odds of sweeping up a huge number of "false positives" grow considerably. The idea behind waiting is that along with these layoffs are a lot of restructuring work - teams get moved around, some people actually get promoted, newly manager-less teams are absorbed…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually an attempt to try to be smart about letting people go. Sure, yes, they could come up with a master list and just pull the trigger today. But the odds of sweeping up a huge number of "false positives" grow considerably. The idea behind waiting is that along with these layoffs are a lot of restructuring work - teams get moved around, some people actually get promoted, newly manager-less teams are absorbed…
That's plausible, but also plausible is that the drawn-out process causes the better performers to leave while they can. It's easy to say from the outside that the layoffs will hit underperformers and people who are just coasting, but the fact is that layoffs of this scale inevitably involve politics. We're talking about an organization that had so much trouble getting the Office people on the same page as the Mobile…
No -- most people who work at a big company know _exactly_ whether they're in danger or not. We're speaking about 5% of the original (pre-Nokia acquisition) workforce. You must know whether you're in the bottom 5%, or if your product is in the least critical 5%. Of course there are surprises and some good/productive guys will be laid off because of politics (as the process is not completely effective), but in general that's not the case.
I've seen similar things happening inside the financial industry around 2008. Many people left (sometimes much more than 5%), but we could usually guess who's going to be affected (with really high accuracy).
Too many words. He needs to drop the self absorbed thought leader babble and communicate in a straight forward manner.
>focusing our innovation investments
>our work toward synergies and strategic alignment
>Nokia Devices and Services integration synergies and strategic alignment
>simplify the way we work to drive greater accountability, become more agile and move faster
>Thank you for your support as we start to take steps forward in evolving our organization and culture
You can't make this shit up. It's straight out of Dilbert.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's plausible, but also plausible is that the drawn-out process causes the better performers to leave while they can. It's easy to say from the outside that the layoffs will hit underperformers and people who are just coasting, but the fact is that layoffs of this scale inevitably involve politics. We're talking about an organization that had so much trouble getting the Office people on the same page as the Mobile…
> That's plausible, but if I were at Microsoft I'd be sending out my resume right now. No -- most people who work at a big company know _exactly_ whether they're in danger or not. We're speaking about 5% of the original (pre-Nokia acquisition) workforce. You must know whether you're in the bottom 5%, or if your product is in the least critical 5%. Of course there are surprises and some good/productive guys will be la…
In the brave new world of "mobile first, cloud first" what's the least critical 5%? In a "mobile first, cloud first" world, somehow the newly-acquired mobile division is getting the brunt of the cuts.
This is a company with a net profit margin of 27.74% in Q1 2014.
Layoffs aren't always about profit though. In this case, it is more about streamlining and making MS more agile
I'm not very impressed with the choice of Nadella so far, he seems too deep into MS culture to be able to see clearly. But only time will tell, it's still to early to give a verdict.