#strategy

Curious if anyone has any actual intel on the remote workforce strategy? I’m not looking for passive aggressive comments on speculation. I’m trying to get ahead of my own planning. If there’s anyone on here who has some intel, please do tell! I’d prefer what’s next not to be a surprise also.

The decision-makers at Mattel are stuck thinking one quarter at a time. There is no long-range vision, just constant reaction. It’s like they’re having trouble realizing that popular trends can last anywhere from a month to years and you can’t base a whole business strategy on just that. That lack of foresight is painful to watch.

Has corporate told us which strategies are driving outflows the most? Remembering the blue chip flip during 2020. 8 billion is a lot.

Starbucks hired Laxman Narasimhan, a former McKinsey & Company senior partner, as CEO in 2023, but his tenure was marked by declining market value (around $30 billion lost) due to a perceived disconnect between strategic advising and operational execution, leading to his replacement by an "operator" from Chipotle, Brian Niccol, which immediately boosted the stock, highlighting a shift from pure strategy to hands-on management at the company.

Key Details:
The Hire: Narasimhan, with deep consulting and PepsiCo experience, was seen as bringing strategic discipline to Starbucks.

The Problem: His focus on efficiency and process, influenced by McKinsey frameworks, alienated customers and staff, leading to poor store experiences and falling sales, despite strategic logic.

The Pivot: In late 2024/early 2025, Starbucks replaced him with Brian Niccol (ex-Chipotle CEO), known for actual operational scaling.

The Result: Niccol's appointment reversed the stock decline, showing the market's preference for real-world operators over strategic advisors for hands-on retail challenges.

The Lesson: The situation became a case study on the difference between consulting/advising (strategy) and building/running (operations), with Starbucks learning that its brand needed experience, not just frameworks, according to various business commentators.

Starbucks didn’t fail in its execution.. it just forgot what it is selling.. is chevron heading down the same path?

Everything that Ford announce yesterday is basically they will copy China automotive companies products. Farley's team been in China and they finally realized what they need to do to survive. Seeing what China already produced and successful, Ford will bench mark China.

With her lack of clear leadership and strategy as well as her focus on outsourcing any and all jobs she can to those who "defer to others" when making decisions it was only a matter of time. I for one congratulate Athena for failing upwards once again!

we can be creating a company in the consulting industry, about strategy, process, whatever, to bring our intelligence to the market

we know Vz weaknesses and we know the market, we need one leader to start it

anyone ?

we could also crush the wholesale market ....

Dell’s recent brand unification—and the apparent reversal back to older brands next year—stands as a textbook example of how not to manage brand strategy.

Brand changes are expensive by design. They consume money, time, internal focus, and customer attention. When done right, that investment buys clarity, momentum, and long-term equity. When done poorly, it delivers the opposite: confusion, fatigue, and erosion of trust. Unfortunately, Dell’s approach seems to fall squarely into the latter category.

Unifying brands only to roll them back shortly after signals a lack of conviction and strategic coherence. Customers are left wondering what Dell actually stands for. Partners struggle to align messaging. Employees are forced to relearn narratives that may soon be discarded again. None of this creates value—it destroys it.

The most troubling part isn’t the wasted marketing spend or the operational churn. It’s what this reveals about leadership. Strong leadership makes hard decisions, commits to them, and sees them through with discipline. Weak leadership oscillates, reacts, and reverses course without fully absorbing the consequences.

Brand strategy isn’t a logo exercise. It’s a long-term promise to the market. Changing that promise repeatedly tells customers one thing very clearly: we’re not sure who we are.

In an era where trust, clarity, and consistency matter more than ever, this kind of back-and-forth is not just inefficient—it’s damaging. And the cost will be paid not in rebranding budgets, but in lost credibility

“Win Now” assumes a stable foundation. Many here question whether the organization is repairable, and others note it has yet to stabilize. Since the comeback strategy began, repeated executive turnover and workforce reductions make the end state hard to understand.

When integrity feels absent, professionals have to anchor to personal values—knowing when to stay, help, or move on without bitterness. The harder question is why so many remain while clearly unhappy.

If anyone has firsthand layoff experience or concrete insight that could help others make informed career decisions, it would be valuable. Merry Christmas.

Tech has the knowledge, no need for Consulting

If laying off HR is part of the senior leadership strategy, how are the human resources at FIS supposed to respond. Need help with a leave of absence request, problem with your pay, being harrassed by a colleague or supervisor? Yeah, no. Evidently, leadership is also, not interested in the protection from liability that is a core function of a sound HR department. FIS is reckless and their shareholders should know.

Closing out the year with a bunch of resignations that look like GoGo house cleanning. Heads of IR, Strategy and Comms -Gov Affairs are all gone. It’s not whose tellin the story. It’s the story!!! Even chuckles can’t spin this

Hate the game, not the player...

If you’ve ever tried to keep all the flavours of SAS ticking over at scale, you’d have a bit more empathy for the hiding to nothing that team is on.

The model is properly broken, no doubt. But it isn't the staff... it’s the lack of joined-up thinking from the top—pushing offers that shouldn't even exist. The top brass will nod along and say there are issues, but point out that Cloud makes us $x00m a year. And they aren't wrong, unless they finish the sentence... it makes SAS hundres of millions but it should be making us billions.

SAS has been flat for 15 years. Let me state that again, SAS has been flat for 15 years... because the mentality you have is shared by the ELT... who don't get any steer or love from Dad. The cloud offer here is a shambles of execution... across the whole company, not just the division. Let me state that again, SAS has been flat for 15 years...

With that in mind, no need to stick the boot in. We should at least be decent to one another as we shift the deck chairs around... makes the time on a sinking ship a bit more bearable.

This deserves its own thread. OP:@12j+1kbnvhbm6

Under murky rationale the head of Oracle Design left the company. Oracle has made great strides in UX (redwood.oracle.com) but the future is not clear. Everything is “AI” but with no real strategy.

Verizon's Competitive Pricing Strategy
Aggressive Holiday Promotions
Verizon has recently implemented aggressive holiday promotions that significantly undercut T-Mobile's pricing. This strategy aims to attract customers by offering larger discounts across various price tiers. Analysts suggest that Verizon is now positioned as the discount provider in the market, a role that T-Mobile previously held.
Financial Implications
Despite the attractive deals, Verizon is reportedly incurring losses with these promotions, estimated at $640 per account. The company believes that retaining customers through these discounts will lead to long-term profitability as subscribers typically upgrade their plans and purchase additional services over time.
Market Positioning
Verizon's new pricing strategy includes a "Bring Your Bill" promotion, which allows customers to bring their current bills from T-Mobile or AT&T to receive a customized offer that often matches or slightly undercuts their existing costs. This initiative is part of Verizon's effort to reverse recent customer losses and enhance its competitive stance in the wireless market.
Conclusion
Overall, Verizon's current pricing strategy is designed to attract customers from T-Mobile by offering better deals, even at the cost of short-term losses. This shift in strategy marks a significant change in the competitive landscape of the telecommunications industry.

The result of this is T-Mobile has already followed Verizon’s lead and has started laying off employees in order to cut costs. Dan is a genius, the race to the bottom has begun!

They say his highest spot ever. I am wondering how much advertising we need to buy to get him to the top 5. Maybe we can pay a consulting company millions of dollars, so they can give us a strategy to get there. We can do it!

The Wealth business unit is rapidly declining in appeal. What is Bob's strategy to address this? Given the circumstances, is his expertise more aligned with business leadership or technical operations?

With Sean and Nina gone, Skiip has Aortic on the chopping blocks to support his other M&A plans. All the dots are connecting... Skiip (whose only expertise throughout his career is divestures and acquisitions) is brought to CV OU. Sean, and then Nina depart. No significant investments in Aortic for past several years. Market share and net profit from Aortic are declining. It's not if, it's when... or rather how soon!

In my 15 years at PEP they've been beating into my head that "we've got to beat KO". Well, look at PEP vs KO stock performance over the last 5 years. PEP has no strategy and schmucks like Elliott can boss it around and tell it what to do. What a humiliation for clueless Ramon. If he has any dignity left at all he would resign. All he can do now is what Elliott tells him. Fire people, consolidate, cut brands. A schmo from the street have come up with that plan. Running a huge CPG company takes real smarts as Warren Buffett found out through his huge loss in Kraft Heinz. At PEP the entire ELT needs to go. They have proven they have no clue how to run a company like PEP. And Athina, my G*d, she has zero experience running strategy for a company like PEP, just like these Brazilian clowns that ran Kraft Heinz into the ground. They never learn. A clown show,

because honestly, he wouldn’t have risen to that level if he was.

It’s just that he is inept, and is horrible at strategic decision making. Which is probably the most important attribute a CEO needs.

You couple that ineptitude with a narcissistic personality disorder, and a complete lack of empathy, and you get what we have here.

How do you get to be an executive and not understand the golden rule of always tell the truth. People respect you when you are truthful and explain why painful things have to be done.
Guess who has z e r o respect? The coward who cannot even answer a question that many employees want to know. What products are considered core?

Someone posted: It had better be a damn good plan that gets unveiled soon.

Based on what he has shown = nothing - is just a CONCEPT of a plan

I look forward to receiving via email all of the discount coupons I get from CVS. I love my CVS discount coupons; I also like going to my local CVS store. I think CVS should focus on its core business and sell the non-core businesses it has acquired over the past decade.

AT&T (T) chief executive John Stankey will speak at Tuesday’s UBS Global Media & Communications Conference where he will discuss the company’s network and financial outlook.

Besides the mid-band spectrum the company agreed to acquire from EchoStar (SATS), AT&T (T) expects to continue to accelerate the pace of its fiber reach through an agreement to acquire substantially all of Lumen’s (LUMN) Mass Markets fiber internet connectivity business.

This transaction is expected to close in early 2026 and will enable the company to reach more than 60 million total fiber locations by the end of 2030.

The company said it is also on track to achieve its 2025 financial goals and return $4 billion to shareholders through share repurchases in 2025 and $20 billion of share repurchase capacity during 2025 and 2027.

This includes consolidated service revenue growth in the low single-digit range, adjusted EPS in the higher end of $1.97 to $2.07 range, and adjusted EBITDA growth of 3% or better.

Subscriber net additions to its mobility business will be higher during the second half of 2025 than it reported during the first half, including an expectation for seasonal trends in net adds during Q4.

Additionally, AT&T (T) expects its net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA ratio will return to its 2.5x target within roughly three years of closing the EchoStar transaction and achieve “strong free cash flow” from the Lumen and EchoStar acquisitions.

NetDocuments acquired eDocs from Opentext. Does anyone know of any other noncore solution being sold off?

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/opentext-sells-non-core-business-120629553.html

Guys, do a little research the same main investors are on both sides Vanguard, black rock etc I’m pretty sure they where told to move asset meaning field to a better performing asset Mastec because it’s been said several times over and over there NPS has been 85% for ten years.

You gotta hand it to The Stankmeiser. He really knows the landscape and how to be a wheeler dealer.

I've been "out" for awhile now and while I do believe there's value in the brands...and there's a host of great, talented people there...it is, as it stands, a sinking ship and one not worth staying on. It will for sure get worse before it gets better...and "better" might mean just a little bit better not thriving. You have a leadership team at this point that is swamped by arrogance, short-term incentives and a lack of understanding of people, team, engagement and leadership...the things that actually will grow the company long-term.
Too much debt. Sacrificing too much to protect dividend. Macro pressures. Bad leaders. A strategy that probably would work but requires a focus that isn't there. Cutting the wrong people and teams at the wrong time.

This post deserves its own thread. Found at @q4+1kbdjtt9e.

If anything, the better you are at your job, the higher the odds you get cut. The only guiding principle has been the short-term bottom line. Not long-term stability, and definitely not some bold strategic vision. That would require effort. So brace for yet another round of shedding talent and competence.

With the plan of divesture and consolidation and rationalisation etc, will the new CEO just continue along this path ?

Could the CEO change course again ?

YL repeatedly promotes the ‘This is Shell’ moto, yet his messaging focuses almost entirely on LNG, Trading, and short-term shareholder value. If this is truly Shell’s identity now, what does that mean for the rest of the company? What should the logo or tagline really be?

https://www.phonearena.com/news/verizon-layoffs-not-enough-to-turn-things-around_id176364

Verizon’s version of the Big Short. Layoffs for short term stock gains.

https://youtu.be/Ihs2r2O-b5s?si=cCIxaxPOkfkSIOOr

Hearing chatter that Dell’s new cost-cutting strategy is quietly targeting s-xagenarians.

For the board monitors - A s-xagenarian is just someone in their 60s. That’s the whole mystery.

Upstream: Cold Lake, Kearl, Syncrude
Downstream: Strathcona, Sarnia, Nanticoke, Terminals, Pipelines
Chemical: Sarnia

Or does it make more sense DW finally recommends to the EM board to buy the minority interest of IOL (30%)?

There are rumors spreading over MN SoC organization that due new strategy of CEO custom silicon is dead end and HW designers will be laid off, nvidia will be sole silicon provider.
Anyone knows something ? All of this seems unreal…

IBM will continue layoffs until it finds a business model that works and works reliably for many years. For the last two decades, Software, Hardware, and Services have taken turns playing the IBM not-me game. I won’t make profit, but I will amplify that other team which will directly own your profit. Without my synergy, you will surely fail, so you must keep me. Every couple years, a new profit maker is anointed and a new round of the game begins.

Even if they find a model, it needs to work reliably for many years. Not so long ago at the beginning of Watson (AI), a Watson kick-off meeting was held in Austin for the entire Watson management team. The business plan presented would rapidly accelerate to stratospheric heights in 3 or better yet 2 years and remain there for 20-30 years before starting a gradual and still profitable decline. Commoditization utterly destroyed this plan and business in 18 months. Models fail even faster in 2025.

In a world of cheap vanilla-grade CPUs, RAM, networking, and storage and completely free software, it’s hard to find a higher grade product that people will pay for outside of regulated businesses. And those who do unquestionably need the value add point to the cheap stuff and demand lower pricing. And the cowards in sales fear losing 100% of their commission and decide that a steep discount benefits both them and their client.

This is nothing new; it’s just come to IBM’s corner of tech now. In the 80’s there was a battle between two consumer video storage systems: Betamax and VHS. The cheaper — in both senses — won out. There were superior alternatives to Compact Discs for audiophiles, but the CD wiped them off the market. MP3 audio compression is terrible, but it dominated the music streaming and download business for a long time.

All 3 of IBM’s pillars (Hardware, Services, and Software) have experienced their own versions of this. That’s why they play not-me. IBM has 3 future strategies. Hybrid Cloud, which can’t sustain an IBM-sized business. AI which is already deep into the commoditization spiral and has as an industry accumulated over a trillion dollars in debt. IBM has already stepped off the AI stage, preferring to serve as high-end salesmen for partners’ actual products packaged up with an IBM bow. Quantum Computing: how many non-governmental clients will actually need this capability badly enough to shoulder some risk, finance the development costs, and pay ongoing support. Quantum computing could be the opening for IBM to become the CocaCola Bottling company of tech — providing a low-profit product that makes others fabulously wealthy.

Until these things change, IBM will have to undergo periodic amputations. When it ends in one or more passes through Bankruptcy Court, then we will discover how bad things can get.

A once failing tech company called Apple righted itself for a while by leaving the tech industry and joining the fickle fashion industry. Is there another industry where centenarian IBM might fit well?

Buckle up folks … and prepare for turbulence for the duration of the flight.

Perfectly said, @tq+1kb1metdd.

a year that's going to the executive board and put it back into the network and customer service.

Wow! I read through customer comments on Reddit. Dan claims he’s going to focus on customer experience and customer value. Given that Hans has blasted thousands of holes into the side of the SS Verizon and we are taking on water by the ton, how long will it take to repair the damage he caused? Simply making better offers for customers is not going to cut it. Customer Service (outsourced) needs to migrate back to the US and the network needs massive attention based on the comments of people complaining about how it used to be good and now it’s awful.

I’m not buying into Dan’s comments as they are the same words Hans used, so either it’s another distraction or an actual plan. If it’s real, there is no way to quickly fix the issue so customers are going to continue to flee quarter after quarter.

How long would it take to fix Han’s legacy?