Just as someone wrote, this company has an identity crisis. The only question is whether this identity crisis will be resolved before it is too late, and I am also interested in how this company got to that stage in the first place.
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Part of the dysfunction can be directly attributed to David T and the family. You don’t get to do anything major without the family. DT hates Eagan so Eagan has become less important despite Vance Opperman being on the TR board. DT likes shiny objects so SH has come in to try and get TR to be that Silicon Valley type company. They have hired all these people with that background who have no idea who the customers are, what they do and how they use our products and most importantly they have no idea how we make money.
IMO the company has an identity crisis because year over year new strategies were launched and replaced before knowing whether the strategy was working. Layered on top of that were employee "empowerment" programs like cr_p about a mood elevator and assuming positive intent. Remember "time to lead" (no budget to lead, no advancement from leading, no recognition for leading...just get out there and lead). The product purchases, the technology decisions, everything operational flowed downward from the revolving door strategies. Now the strategy is cut, and do more with less.
The company tried to reinvent itself as a technology company rather than a company that provides essential services to its customers. Technology became an end in and of itself rather as something to make the workers jobs easier and that would deliver customer needs.
The Reuters acquisition never made any sense, and that company culture never gelled. TR went wild acquiring as much data as they could but had no strategy to monetize it. So that led to a wild goose chase for creating new products. They have seen some success with those and even more doing police and defense contracting, which also has nothing to do with the core business. Imagine if the AP and Lexis were owned by Deloitte. Confused? Me too. There are many much worse companies than TR but TR leads the market for being schizophrenic.
TR acquired too many other companies with no strategy on what to do with them. Then, engaged in mass layoffs and hiring freezes. It's total chaos and disorganization.
It was a holding company with individual entities. Then they wanted it to be an enterprise company that sold content, no technology, no content, no technology. Then they sold off 45%. New management came in. They wanted to become an operating company that sells content technology. Now they want SaaS / digital. The only entity they had and have now is schizophrenia.
Long story. I think this was pretty much always a dysfunctional company. The Reuters acq made the psychotic disorder worse. The massive layoffs in 2018 further exacerbated their issues by laying off a lot of institutional knowledge and the hiring of more empty suits in the c suite. TR will one day will be a case study in the fall of a potentially great company.
It started when SH became big boss and brought his creepy cronies to help turn us into an operating company.
As far as I can tell the company wants to be a SAAS company. They want to be shiny new se-y SAAS. Like the other new money companies in Silicon Valley.
I just don’t see us that way and I bet most of the employees don’t either.