CEO is only concerned with people thinking he’s edgy and with being in control, regardless of what’s best for the company. He wants to be the Elon Musk of mediocre tech startups. What used to be clever about CBI is now smug. The company’s goal changes about once a quarter and it’s vague every time. When asked about a recent strategy for vetting new ideas, he explained, “If it’s not dope, I don’t want to hear about it.” He also decided that a company-wide meeting about the round of layoffs was the appropriate time to announce that the official company values were being changed. The goal? To avoid being “nice.” Instead, it seems, the goal is to be juvenile. The revamped company values are frat house fodder. At the top of the list: “build dope isht.” Seriously. CEO’s whole thing is supposedly “Data > Opinion.” It’s the company slogan. But that isn’t true when it comes to his opinion. For example, content focused on tech that addresses climate change gets killed all the time because “CEO doesn’t like it.” It doesn’t matter that clients ask for this content all the time — never mind that it makes the company look ignorant and behind the times. But that isn’t where his micromanaging ends. Despite being CEO, he still finds it necessary and appropriate to dig into individual pieces of content and insert himself in the process. Perhaps if he spent more time fleshing out the plan for the company instead of trawling Twitter and nitpicking about titles, the place would be in better shape. Morale, at least, might be higher. There’s no point in hiring people if you don’t trust them to do their jobs. Meanwhile, leadership has basically zero experience working in content — and it shows. The focus is purely on quantity, not quality. It’s about publishing as much as possible as fast as possible simply so that we can say we published X-many reports. It doesn’t matter if they actually say anything. Even that could be forgivable if newer members of leadership (there’s pretty high turnover) would bother to consult with senior members of the team and learn what they do, what the processes are, etc. Instead, they set team goals that are in direct opposition to each other, making it impossible to be successful. CEO hires direct reports who won’t push back, and this is a prime example. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how good you are at your job; all that matters is if you kowtow to CEO. Leadership always says they want people to pitch new ideas — this is a waste of time. The only new ideas that matter are CEO’s. Meanwhile, the misogyny is so blatant it borders on satire. Men in leadership positions (though not all of them) don’t even bother trying to hide their disregard for the work that women on the team produce. Men get promoted faster and earn higher salaries than women at the same levels. They get credit for work done by their female colleagues. Projects — and even entire pods — are taken from women and given to less experienced men. If you’re a woman on the team, don’t waste your breath trying to share your knowledge or offer up new ideas. The worst part of all this is that there will be no actions taken to correct it. Any honest criticism will be shrugged off as people being dramatic or not being team players. CBI has lost several excellent, long-time employees just in the last few months. Though that should be a huge alarm going off, it will be dismissed as people wanting a change of scenery, or being disgruntled, or being unable to hang with the new team culture.
