Wood Mackenzie reviews

Increasingly dysfunctional and political corporate culture. Serious shortages of resource in key areas. Staff cuts have decimated key departments, even those with strong revenue growth. It has now hit a point where after a long term problem of under investing in staff there are serious questions as to whether the company can carry on delivering content to clients. At the same time the company is hiring significant numbers of staff who are frankly pointless. Key senior staff are increasingly backing away from key departments as the situation spirals out of control. The commodities industries are become much more cautious about dealing with research companies like wm and others after recent oil prices falls. Combining that with serious cuts to staffing is proving to be problematic for renewals. Good staff are not rewarded and are increasingly treated badly,Good staff members are often burnt out. Staff turnover has now gotten out of control. Where the company traditionally had a turnover rate of less than 10% in key departments that number has now gone past 20% and is still rising. What's worse is those staff who leave are now often not replaced.

-Management is a mess. Managers seem to be promoted based mainly on time served and having similar beliefs as existing managers, with qualifications taking a backseat. -Top management is totally focused on a near term IPO so they and other senior employees can cash out, at the expense of current work product. They are trying to do too much and do it too quickly in order to drive growth. -The company operates on an unspoken code of secrecy and things are often on a “need to know” basis and are passed to analysts only once decisions have already been made. -No analyst development programme. Also, goals in performance reviews are rather meaningless as ratings seem to be based on managerial preference and speed of progression between bands is inconsistent between a few chosen analysts and everybody else. -Research turnover has increased significantly in the past couple years which strains already overextended analysts. -Private equity ownership for the past few years has led to severe underinvestment in business processes, which results in inefficiency and an incredible amount of wasted time. The beyond awful IT systems fit in here. I feel bad for the guys responsible for supporting the unstable Jenga tower that is our IT system.