The highly successful software company that I was a part of was acquired — and became part of the greater failure that is BNY Mellon. It’s been downhill ever since. It’s as if a clumsy gorilla (BNYM) picked up a Stradivarius violin (our business unit) and could only make screeching noises with it — irreparably damaging it in the process.
Brilliant.
This is a common pattern when the Bank acquires tech firms and even other banks. They try to run it their way and it never really seems to work.
My old director looks like a cross between Wallace from Wallace and Grommit and Mark Zuckerberg. He has Wallace's brains and buck teeth and Zuckerberg's plastic face and soul-void eyes. He chews with his mouth open.
He came for a visit last year and blithely asked us which departments we hate so he could lay them off. A few of the foaming mouth breathers in the group named a department they hate and Dead Eye Wallace jotted down some notes. One can only assume he did this same exercise with all the departments he oversees.
He also said the executives were having trouble figuring out just which employees were supposed to be doing technical work vs administrative or management tasks. So to figure out this incredibly difficult question he had the IT department install screen capture spyware on everyone's computer to see what programs everyone was using and how often they use them. If your computer had development software open most of the time, the executives could figure that you really are a developer and not a manager or executive assistant.
Both of these exercises, I figure, were to just flex on us. It reasserted that the fear of layoffs is the primary motivator at BNY Mellon. But it really does illustrate BNY's core management values in a few different, psychologically interesting ways.
I totally agree with @132EcS3e-jax. Calling whoever is in charge leadership is giving the word leadership a bad name. Whoever is in charge are cowards, s—ups, and care about nothing but their own well being. Forget caring about the staff or company. I just wonder how they can look themselves in the mirror. I wonder if these are the values these so called family people are teaching their children. The real leadership that was at this inept company left awhile ago, because they saw the writing on the wall as the newer sludge came aboard in positions of power. Once they came along, nothing was ever the same. It's become an inept, sorry excuse of a company that probably will just disappear in the years to come (one can only hope).
No surprise. The potential or true leaders are separated first.
We dont have "Leaders". People should be inspired by leaders, we should be wanting to please leaders, trust their decisions, work towards their visions. We have none of that. What we have are charlatans gorging from the trough as fast as they can. Self-proclaimed con artists who make no decision (consultants do that for them), and take no responsibility (workforce do that). They take all the reward, however the risk is on the workforce. Since the 2008 crash and the resulting senior management regimes, our "Leaders" are a bunch of puppeteers playing politics and pleasing investors, whilst dumping the workforce with making decisions, with absorbing risk, with lowering wages, and with no future.
I don’t know about a gorilla but an 800 lb elephant is more like it ...