Challenging culture and leadership focus on stock price
Pros
Strong install base. Excellent product teams. Lots of tenured employees.
Cons
No cohesive product strategy. Massive churn across exec leadership. Quarterly commissions, capped at 150%. Awful culture - micromanagement to the extreme (tracking badge swipes and cell phone spend, monitoring your teams chats), heavy bureaucracy. They have instructions inside the bathroom stalls on bathroom etiquette. Very big-brother. This was largely driven by the last CEO, who was a total micro-manager. Wanted to approve every deal, every discount, every travel expense, every hire. The M&A bloat he drove is now resulting in divestitures, and the talent he drove away is the explanation for the massive amount of re-hires we're seeing. It's almost like the board feels guilty because they know they should've fired him sooner, so their atonement is "let's get the band back together" and bring back a bunch of former leaders. But bringing back a 2022 leadership team for a 2026 world is a recipe for disaster. The board is also stuck on the nostalgia of the glory days. And 20-30 years ago Opentext was a market leader, but today we're not known for anything. I have to start most conversations by explaining what our products are, because no one has heard of them except by their former trade names. If you're considering working here, you need to know that, right now, leadership only cares about one thing, the stock price. Not customers, not employees, not R&D, it's all about the stock price. The board calls the shots, not the CEO. The recent return to office mandate is an example. RTO is a cowardly way to do layoffs.
