Upper management, aka the CEO, Aurel Brudan, is an absolute disaster to work with. The main determinant of whether you will have a good day at work is simply whether he is around and in a good mood, which rarely happens, or away traveling. He is a very “well-decorated” CEO in his own way:
* Forget micromanagement, he has a PhD in nanomanagement,
* A PhD in time mismanagement,
* A Master’s degree in going back on his own decisions, and
* Another Master’s in blaming everyone else for the company not launching, while completely ignoring that he is the biggest bottleneck there is.
He insists on reviewing absolutely everything: outputs, campaigns, plans, and products. In principle, that would be fine, but only if he actually did it on time. Instead, he has delayed the core product review for MORE THAN THREE YEARS. The typical response is always something like “I’ll review it this weekend” or “I’ll spare time to do this in the next two days,” yet it never happens. Follow-ups rarely matter. At one point, middle management even offered to sit down with him and review the product together to speed things up, but he declined. On some “good” days, he laughs when people ask what could justify a review taking this long, making the "same old story" jokes. On most days the response is simply “what I do in my time is none of your business.” Technically, that might be true, except that the entire company depends on his approval in order to launch anything. Again, this review delay has been going on for MORE THAN THREE YEARS.
At the same time, he has an intense obsession with tracking what every employee is doing day to day. Reporting lines mean nothing to him. As CEO, he will directly call interns, ask them what they are doing, tell them they add no value to the company, demand to see their Daily Tasks Tracker, and spend hours yelling at them for not being productive enough. On multiple occasions, he has threatened to fire people simply for not updating the tracker daily or for forgetting to say hi and bye in the team chats. Apparently, those things take higher priority than reviewing the core product that has been delayed for years. In fact, the yelling about productivity happens far more regularly than any update about the progress of the product review.
Another constant issue is his habit of reversing decisions whenever he feels like it, even when production has already progressed significantly. This is especially ironic because he himself decided to continue production even though he fully acknowledged that the prototype had not been approved yet. The changes he later asks for are not small fixes either. They include redesigning elements, restructuring content, adding new features, and making major adjustments. On top of that, these changes are expected to be applied RETROACTIVELY TO ALREADY PRODUCED WORK rather than simply moving forward with new standards. When people remind him that the original decision had already been made, the response often ranges from “I don’t remember ever saying that, where’s your proof?” to, when proof is provided through written records or even meeting recordings, “I don’t care.” Ironically, he was the one who initially suggested documenting all decisions in logs to avoid confusion.
Leadership-wise, no idea is considered a good idea unless it originates from his own head. At the same time, he becomes frustrated that nobody can read his mind or propose exactly the idea he already had internally. This frustration often turns into full outbursts during meetings filled with yelling, insults, and tantrums. Sexist and racist remarks have also been thrown around in discussions. Even when he asks teams to gather data for decisions, he rarely reads the data and instead proceeds with whatever he originally wanted to do. Once he has made up his mind, reasoning becomes impossible. It often feels like major decisions are made without any data or a strategic basis.
This pattern becomes especially visible in how he decided to massively expand the business. The company started adding more product types and expanding localization efforts while also hiring aggressively, even though the core product had not launched yet. One of the earliest major moves was opening localization operations in GCC, Indonesia, Romania, and Vietnam despite the fact that there was still NO PRODUCT LAUNCH, NO PROVEN MARKET DEMAND, AND ZERO REVENUE. Predictably, about a year later, the company started running out of money, and the workforce was cut roughly in half.
Eventually, he realized that constantly expanding multiple entities under this model might not have been the best idea. At that point, he finally began reviewing the product. The process itself came with constant belittling of the team’s work and repeated claims that he was the “savior” who would save the company because nobody else cared enough. Unfortunately, the situation did not improve. During the last week of February, he suddenly demanded that everyone work overtime and weekends to reach a new target that was DOUBLE THE PREVIOUS EXPECTATIONS, despite the TEAM ALREADY BEING HALF IN SIZE it once was. Middle management presented data showing that the timeline was impossible and requested a small extension. He responded that this was completely unacceptable, again with plenty of shouting and hostility, because the project had already been delayed for years, conveniently ignoring that he himself caused the delay.
The final ultimatum became simple: either the target is reached or nobody gets paid. This affects MORE THAN 200 EMPLOYEES. And now here we are. It is March 10, the scheduled salary date, and there is still no payment for last month. The message being circulated is essentially “either make sales or don’t get paid,” conveniently forgetting that the work month has already passed and employees are legally entitled to that salary. There has been almost no transparency about the situation. Some people claim that salaries might arrive within weeks, but that does not change the fact that employees still have bills and responsibilities that cannot be postponed simply because the CEO finally decided to review a product after years of delay.
To make matters worse, he is now blaming marketing, sales, and operations for failing the entire team by not generating sales quickly enough. The proposed solution is to cut the workforce by another big chunk.
At this point, one has to seriously ask: Aurel Brudan of The KPI Institute, what kind of privileged and delusional world are you living in?
