Pros
I have had some wonderful years at Percussion. I worked with some very bright, talented people on what was possibly the most fun, innovative and successful teams in my career thus far. Given the flexibility of a small company and an excellent manager I was given opportunities to take on challenges and realize potentials far beyond my expectations. I learned a lot and have made some close, lasting friendships. Unfortunately, that slowly started to change about 2 years ago with a change in upper management that was accompanied by a radical shift in business strategy. Things have been going downhill since.
Kontras
We didn’t know it at the time, but the change in upper management 2 years ago was the beginning of the end. Change is good if it is for the better. This was not that kind of change: 1) A new layer of management was brought in and there were no internal promotions to any managerial level positions. Managers were promoted to directors and soon most departments had a manager to worker ratio of 1: 1.5. 2) The business model changed so that a new product that sells for X was brought in to replace a legacy product that sells for roughly 15 times that price with services. Someone forgot to do their math. Instead of waiting for sales to pick up (to at least close to 15 of new prod for every old product license) before phasing out the old product, the switch was abrupt and as expected, catastrophic. Revenues dropped and a fourth of the entire company was laid off in January of 2012. Those not on board with this “new direction” were the first to disappear. 3) All this while as the company bled money, upper management insisted on sending out company wide, grammatically incorrect, spelling-mistake-ridden “make it rain” emails and the rest of management (half the company) would reply-all with “bring out the umbrellas” emails while IT struggled to keep the email server up and clean out inboxes maxed out with all the “yay” mails. 4) Upper management is supposed to inspire and command respect from its employees. This is difficult when half of what upper management says begins with a curse and is punctuated liberally with foul language. New upper management was brought in to increase sales and revenue but thus far has only successfully lost money with their failing strategies to warrant two rounds of lay offs and introduced a culture of crude language and inappropriate, suggestive behavior like hosting customer parties called “bedtime stories” which have scared away at least two customers that I know of. All talent has left the company and the very few who remain are desperately looking to jump ship at the first opportunity.