Wood Mackenzie reviews

PE ownership has hollowed the company out and left it hanging. Strong words, but that’s genuinely how it feels from the inside — uninspiring and deflating. Offshoring of roles and selective promotions in low-cost regions, as others have mentioned, has led to strange structures where experienced people in higher-cost regions are effectively working below less experienced roles elsewhere. It’s not how a global organisation should run, and it plays out pretty much how you’d expect. Data quality and research output have both taken a hit, and you can see the impact with clients becoming more selective on renewals. And all of this has happened even before AI has had any real impact. The stated rationale is being “closer to clients,” but it raises the question of how strong the client base really is in some of these locations. Overall, it feels like short-term decisions are being prioritised over long-term quality and reputation — no surprises there. There’s also a lot of focus on optics while the underlying foundations are eroding. Even engagement on Glassdoor feels like part of that same effort to manage perception. For a reality check, just look at the “helpful” votes on negative reviews — that tells you enough about what’s really going on.

WM struggles with figuring out how to move from a research to a SaaS model. They have a very lucrative core research business but they struggled to figure out how to build new products and grow the top line. Failing to grow, they adopted the standard PE value-creation technique of cutting the bottom line. Tons of layoffs, especially in the US, to support hiring in India. This could still have been *okay* if they didn't botch the layoff process. It was a highly secretive initiative, even among some of the fairly senior folks, which meant that the layoffs were ultimately just names and salaries on a spreadsheet instead of thoughtful decisions around performance and capabilities. Additionally, the hiring in India was a nightmare. Hiring quotas were ludicrous (you could be asked to hire 12 people to "supplement" a 6-person team). Many candidates flunked even basic technical interviews. When there was pushback, leadership "fixed" the problem by forbidding interviews. We were told to just fire anyone who was unacceptable, which was also a challenge (and a waste of time). To be clear: there were plenty of good, talented hires in India, but it takes time to evaluate and find them. During my time there I saw many folks, including myself, who tried very hard to move an ancient ship in a new direction. However, there's tons of old, territorial politics that get in the way of improvement, and an enormous disconnect between the C-level and even middle management. WM was a good, arguably even great, place to work once... but during the end of my time there it was clear it was headed in the wrong direction. I hope the recent leadership changes are improving things but I can't speak to that either way.