Job Title: Vice President
Location: PA
Submitted on: 23-May-05
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The overarching cultural feeling includes a culture of risk aversity, an
endemic tolerance for poor performance, and an overwhelming feeling of
being in a dying business. This emanates almost entirely from the
hardware business unit, which is where the heritage and legacy of the
company came from. In the newer services units we are still searching for
a "culture".
The mainframe business generates over 100% of the company's cash flow
(meaning that the services businesses that make up the company's future
are perennial money-losers), so the management of the hardware business
is essentially left alone. However, this management group is
astonishingly unequipped for running a billion-dollar business in today's
world. The senior exec staff of the hardware unit is reminiscent of the
management staffs of Amtrak, the US Postal Service, and AT&T. They are
out of touch with today's IT market, poor managers, poor business people,
and have proven to be absolutely inept at running any type of business
other than the proprietary, closed, old-fashioned business of convincing
an installed base of mainframe users not to abandon the Clearpath
platform. (The mainframe/Clearpath business is lavished with R&D
spending, and new enhancements continue to be introduced. This allows
their senior management to succeed in spite of themselves. Enormous cash
flow from locked-in mainframe users covers up an awful lot of weakness
and poor decision-making in the senior management ranks.)
The hardware unit (essentially what is left of Sperry and Burroughs) is
made up of thousands of 20-year to 40-year employees who have survived
the shrinking from 130,000 employees to under 10,000. This is the
risk-averse culture, where no one has any sense of an outside world at
all, having worked in proprietary mainframes all of their lives. There
are also people with 2 to 4 years of service, but this group shows big
turnover because they generally think they can come in and make change
and inject new blood, but are immediately squashed by their own
management ("Please help us change and improve... What kind of crazy
proposal is this? We don't do things that way.") This leaves the
hardware unit looking like 80-90% 55-year-old white males with 25 to 35
years Unisys (Sperry, Burroughs) service (never having worked anywhere
else), desperately hoping the stock will rebound so they can retire and
get the Unisys gold watch. The other 10 to 20% is made up of people with
2 to 5 years service, experience at multiple IT companies, generally
much, much more competitive, driven, and broadly experienced, but leaving
in horrible frustration after the Unisys beast chews them up and they
figure out that they're in a very bizarre place where achievement,
business savvy, market knowledge, and aggressiveness are worthless.
(Note that people with 5 to 15 years tenure are very very rare, because
Unisys simply wasn't hiring during those years, as they dramatically cut
the company.)
The infrastructure service unit is the "low-cost culture", made up of
former break/fix and field engineering people, but now expanding into
networks, managed services, and other new services with some very savvy
people. The outsourcing unit has been a problem for a few quarters.
Demand is great; satisfying that demand is OK; but operationally, the
unit needs a significant makeover. Our culture is actually many
cultures, but with outsourcing and infrastructure having been merged
under a new leader (Hendricks), there is hope that the unit will become a
success and actually have a positive, execution-oriented culture.
The consulting and industry units are the new CEO's focus for the future
of the company, but are not (yet) profitable or growing in the
marketplace. This culture is a tough one to pin down, because the
consulting businesses are made up of almost insane hiring practices over
the past few years. Unisys targeted the former Big Five, lured partners
and associates away with nice pay and challenging work ("We're counting
on you to help us create a new Unisys"). The first generation of former
Andersen/Accenture hires succeeded only at spending a ton of money before
being removed (or leaving on their own in frustration); the second
generation -- seemingly mostly from BearingPoint -- has been built over
the past year or so, and appear to be learning from their predecessors'
mistakes. Biggest problem here is that these businesses are now staffed
with HUGE egos, who are discovering that when your business card says
"Unisys" instead of "Accenture", you no longer get access to the C-level
executives, and you are expected to be a "doer" as well as a "seller"
(contrasted with the Accenture model where partners manage relationships
and win business, while projects are staffed with junior associates and
recent MBA's).
Because the hardware unit contributes all of the cash flow, its culture
continues to cast the largest shadow over all of Unisys. Unfortunately
for Unisys, the culture is one of backward thinking, a complete and utter
resistance to anything new, and weak senior management. The concept of
setting due dates, completing tasks, and delivering anything on time is
literally unknown to the massive engineering organization. The senior
management of marketing stifles new business plans and is so risk averse
that they analyze everything to death to the point where nothing new
outside of the mainframes can ever get introduced into the market, and
the existing products are under-promoted. Sales management is primarily
made up of people who earned their promotions in the days of selling
mainframes and "tech turns" to a captive installed base, so they are
ill-equipped to hire, motivate, and retain the type of sales people
necessary in today's tough IT selling environment. Probably the biggest
problem in this "entitlement" culture is that sales people and sales
directors can fail to make quota quarter after quarter without being
terminated. (It is almost impossible to fire an employee at Unisys for
any reason, with the risk-averse culture extending into Human REsources
and Employee Relations as well.)
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