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I am hoping I would learn some if Mr CEO chooses to reply to this post.
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Dear Mr. CEO, I am grateful that you have chosen to address issues on Glassdoor. Finally we have a channel where we can have two way communication without fear of retaliation. Thank you Glassdoor! I would like to take the opportunity to pose a few questions that all of us want to ask but have not been able to ask. Before we start with questions, let us keep some timelines in perspective. 1. Current India management team took over in July 2017 and has been in place for 1 yr 1 month as on date 2. You took over reins in early Oct 2017 and have been at the helm for nearly 11 months as on date 3. Engineering agile transformation is also 10-11 months old. Org wide agile may be 9 months? 4. Your first visit to India was in May'18, over 3 months ago as on date You should feel comfortable with the thought that you and others have been around long enough that you cannot hide behind facade of settling in or being a change or novelty in the organization yourself. This is long enough for a leader to settle in and have an impact. If you cannot be up and performing in a years time frame then you are clearly in the wrong job. I know for a fact you would not give us a month to settle in. You need to hold yourself up to higher standards than that. 1. It would be helpful to understand your strategy. What you have articulated so far is your dream - we want to do X million. What we would love to hear is your strategy. What is the path you are laying out to get us to your dream and why would it work. If you think it is our traditional CSP market then what are we doing “differently” that would increase deal size or account size or increase number of accounts. Talking to more CSPs cannot be the answer - same effort repeated over million times gives same results. Also, I have a hunch our sales team has not been sitting around waiting for you to arrive and tell them to talk to more customers. If you think it is Thales, then again - how? By talking to them for 2 years now? What is the percent of resources we are dedicating to which opportunity? What is our expected RoI and targets for each opportunity and why they make sense? Why we will win at these? What are we not doing in order to do these? 2. What is really the transformation that you keep talking about? Going agile cannot be a goal in itself - what is the end goal? Since we went agile have we been able to: release with higher quality? Reduce development time? Build sustainable culture? Improve team morale? Engage more with customers? Deepen accounts? Unlock latent opportunities? Create new ones? I know first hand that answer to all these questions is NO. Then how are you measuring transformation? Or for that matter YOUR progress and YOUR performance? How did you figure out that this is still the right thing to do given we have lost an year and we are not even at same level as before - that is 25% of the time we had to hit our targets already GONE doing “transformations” that are not done yet and we have no results to show for it yet. If you think it would take another 12 months to complete the transformation then show us what you see - how would we hit our 4 year targets in 2 years when we are standing at the same place where we started with these transformations in place? 3. Speaking of results - by when are you expecting to see them? What are YOUR plans and milestones? 4. In the light of the same can you please help us understand how did you figure out that some of us did not have it in us to undergo a transformation? Do you know how many transformations we have seen before you even came onboard? Did it occur to you that may be we are fine with transformations but we are not fine with what you are doing which makes no sense to us? That we have been voicing concerns to help YOU see that you are pushing harder down the wrong path? You got it wrong with initiatives, you got it wrong with people. How do you figure that you are right and we are wrong? Because word of CEO is word of God? Or Spotify said this model works? Or did it work in your past life? One size fits all? 5. Did you think about the impact of CEO telling his team on a public forum that they cannot transform and hence their being kicked out is implied and necessary? No thank you sir for the pep talk and taking us all along!! Your lack of rationality, sensitivity, and empathy is appalling. Seriously what were you thinking while putting it out on Glassdoor? You think prospective employees would be thrilled to see that and jump right in - yay this is the CEO I want to work for, he really knows how to motivate and lead. The team you addressed is the same well wishing team that is trying to help you see that you are making wrong bets. Would you be surprised if you are left with just yes men leading you down the spiral? It would be fair if you asked me how do I know that you have got it wrong, may be I am wrong!! I would encourage you to look at empirical data - results you have so far, broader team feedback, an honest evaluation of organizational capabilities and culture, and finally your own performance - or you can ignore it and continue being the ostrich and call it my myopia or my loss, suit yourself. 6. Talking about performance and being able to act on the required changes - you were in India in May and got to hear first hand on two critical burning issues - HR team and India management team. You understood it well that these were huge problem areas for us. What have you done so far? 3 months is by no means a short period of time for working on burning problems afflicting more than half of your company. We have seen some difference, things have taken a turn for the worse. a. On HR front, you certainly know enough details. Under your leadership in less than a year, we have 4 different heads of HR. India HR is parasitic. I know that you know this is a huge problem. To the extent that you know you cannot address employees and their concerns through HR and hence are here yourself on Glassdoor instead of exploring HR channel that keeps dirty laundry in-house. Any average HR department would have kept a pulse and have managed to at least get these conversations going for you internally. Even after you know they are useless, why are you letting the problem fester? I do not like posting this on public forum, but where is an internal forum or channel that I can use? Don't go saying we have open culture. If you thought we could communicate internally, you would not be on Glassdoor. b. On India management issues you must have heard it every week in last so many months, again why no action? These were not opinions, these were facts and yet you could not act? Things got worse for us with retaliation that we faced because you failed us. If CEO could not do anything who could touch them now? If you still think you got your leadership team right, call them and let them walk you through a single release process end to end, who does what and who makes what decisions and how information flows - no tech. You know the answer and yet you could not act? Forget act, did you even attempt to build checks and balances? Let’s make it simpler, did you even open a feedback channel to keep abreast of the problem? Do you have single soul in India who trusts you? I do not see any attempt, even an insincere one, on your part to address a problem that should be giving you sleepless nights. c. Given your own performance score card, are you sure you are the right person for leading transformation at Guavus? You cannot act on problems, you shy away from getting deeper into details of strategy and stick to 50,000 feet visions, you have no sense of how to convert strategy into tactics, you have not been able to create new opportunities for Guavus, you have not been able to have a positive impact on people or culture or public image, you have not been able to move the company in the right direction, you have put wrong people in important places - you think you have moral right to judge that we don’t have it in us to transform? To me it seems like you trying to lay your failures at our door. Aren’t you? 7. Before you start typing out replies citing transformation and change - look at the time elapsed and annotate your answer with change management plan and a transformation plan. I hope your plan is not “announce change, tell your team to do it and keep your fingers crossed”. And while you are writing about self organizing team, pray do tell us why do we need you - sales can sell and engineering can build, and we can drink together to come up with 300 Bn USD target - much bigger dreams than what you can — seems like our self organized team is ready to go!! No? Why not? What is your value add? You think 20+ years experienced heads of sales, engineering, product etc are not self organizing enough? Doesn’t same reasoning apply to engineering teams? Think again. I am by no means anti-agile, just that I understand agile better. May be there are things I do not see. May be I will learn something new should you choose to reply. If you convince me, I would not hesitate to revise this post to a 5 star review. For once in my life, I would be happy to eat my words. Make me.
