Autonomy – “Acquire and dismantle as a business model”

Pros

The products and technology from Autonomy itself and from it's many acquisitions have a huge amount of potential. Given the right vision and leadership, the products could be fairly compelling.

Cons

There is no vision and leadership, and this permeates the culture. I personally witnessed a thriving vibrant company filled with brilliant extremely hard working people transformed into a group so micromanaged and information starved that most of those who were no laid off left very soon after the corporate office started intervening.

Independent thought and personal responsibility is actively squashed, somewhat weird given the name of the company isn't it?

Advice to Senior Management

While the balance sheets look great, they are misleading. Hand the company over to new leadership that has at least a minimal amount of respect for customers and employees and allows management below the C*O level to actually make decisions. At some point enough customers and potential employees will communicate with their peers that sales and recruiting will suffer.