Wood Mackenzie reviews

Toxic corporate culture seems like an understatement. It’s flat out depressing to watch highly motivated, smart, and loyal Wood Mac’ers have their spirit broken by management and realize the only option left for them to feel happy and advance their career is to leave. Strategic decisions about products, major internal processes, and people are all made from the top and executed without question. Senior Leaders have seen so many of their former colleagues mysteriously “move on for other opportunities”… for constructively disagreeing with decisions. The company has developed a culture of silence and a system of reward for those willing to put office politics ahead of the right thing to do. An old Glassdoor review makes reference to a “Game of Thrones” leadership circle and it’s hilariously accurate - kudos to that anonymous contributor. Short-sighted strategic decision making and the preservation of EBITDA margin above all else has set the company up for a very difficult path to growth. People are afraid to challenge convention or make decisions that could actually propel the next phase of growth. Spin-offs and competitors are quickly dismissed by leadership but they’ve grown tremendously and are well placed to build off Wood Mac’s eroding market perception. My last comment on the “cons” is the overall drop in the standard of excellence. As an employee-owned business, and even in the early days of corporate ownership, Wood Mac was well run. A huge contributor to that was the fact that senior and mid-level leadership demonstrated good corporate behaviors which trickled down to their teams. Unfortunately, most of those people have left. The erosion of professionalism is staggering and it will make you feel like you’re taking crazy pills. Leaders, particularly in the sales org., inundate subordinates calendars with meetings with no clear agenda or objective. They don’t understand how to use business systems or take the time to understand the outputs for fear of looking bad. Decisions are made before a problem is fully understood, cross-functional collaboration isn’t encouraged, and ironically for an analytics company, the use of data for decision-making seems to be a relic of the past. What makes surviving employment at Wood Mac even more difficult is watching management openly lie and pretend nothing is wrong on Quarterly Town Halls. The lack of awareness or emotional IQ is dizzying. With respect to the client interactions, they’ve become transactional. Clients used to look to Wood Mac as a thought partner and now simply see them as a data provider. Wood Mac still has a foothold in certain markets that’s going to be tough for competitors to displace but any new service is quickly dismissed by prospective clients after they’ve all experienced years of failed product launches. This market perception certainly does not bode well for a company looking to make the biggest product pivot in their history.

* Leadership suffers from 'Peter Principle' - virtually all executives have been promoted to their level of incompetence * Leadership has no path forward and afraid to show weakness by asking Verisk corporate centre for help * There is no career development plan; new hires need to come in with a mercenary plan of learning about the industry and then moving on to company with real career paths * Advancement (especially in Research) is all about politics both in the office and actual politics. Once you are on the wrong side of a political issue, hit the eject button and get out * New Research organisation is populated at the top with people in global roles having (a) no global experience, (b) no subject matter expertise, (c) horrible team management skills * I have never seen a less professional way of treating people. The public humiliation of people you have personal grievances with needs to stop. The public treatment of several high profile people pushed-out of the company was outrageous (and might have HR liability implications)