Where do I start....
Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians. As a lower level employee you were simply there to execute what you were told and not have any ideas of your own. It was very rare, to have any ideas by the junior staff brought to fruition, however, if you did not contribute ideas, it reflected badly against you. Countless hours were wasted "brainstorming" ideas or trying to be proactive only to be told, "No, that's not how we do things here". Plus, if a junior staff did come up with a great idea, it was then turned over to executive management to "revise or refine" which basically meant that the idea was completely changed. So eventual the junior staff would leave. There was a high turnover rate and anyone continuing to work there felt they were in a dismal environment.
There seemed to be little recognition that overall, the company provides a powerful consumer product via the sale of MUSIC at a jukebox. They constantly focused on their customer base, who sold the jukeboxes, but little was done to market to the end user, who ultimately has to buy the music in order to make the company profitable.
The marketing team was bogged down by TWO old school executives, with no clear definition on each of their roles and the constant disagreements on how to market. Along with needing to have COMPLETE authority on all marketing projects, there was always a bottleneck to get things finalized. It was ridiculously disturbing that they defined EVERY minute detail of anything that had to be done, right down to arguments about a shade of purple in a advertisement, or a font type, or a comma in a sentence, or a hyphen for a word.
Ad sales suffered because management believed in trying to catch only the big fish, which was virtually impossible with barely any brand recognition for the TouchTunes product and executive management was doing nothing to pay attention.
The creative team, which was brilliant with their innovative ideas and great designs was often forced to change things at the demand of executives, who believed they had a better "eye" for good design.
There was little trust between executive management and junior staff members, most of which had great forward thinking ideas and could bring the company into a new era of music entertainment, if the old school style of thinking was put to rest and the fresher generation was allowed to actually give their ideas a chance.
Also, there were virtually no processes in place, no controls when it came to signing off on projects and a great deal of wasteful spending.
