LexisNexis – “Not what it used to be”

Pros

The people I work with every day in my office are wonderful - humble, intelligent and with beautiful souls. The company has a wonderful commitment to community work - doing things from Pro Bono legal clinics to helping local schools. My comp package is fair - good healthcare and 401k. And every so often I meet people from one of our other locations (we have a lot of different offices - maybe 50 or more) who is really exceptionally gifted. It's hard to think of much else

Cons

I've been here for quite a while - I joined after an acquisition in the late 1980s. The company used to be a dynamic, exciting place to work during the 80s and 90s. We put great things into the market - we were a great publisher and our products were market leaders. People loved working here and the company attracted talented people, particularly in the content and engineering fields. Management was strong but empathetic and inspired loyalty.

Over the past 10 years, though, and particularly the past 3, much has changed. The company is now bureacratic and run by senior executives who don't understand our customers and don't understand content or technological progres. Sadly, they believe that they do and lead in a very directive manner. Leadership is entirely command and control - there is no trust placed in the people. Responsibility and accountability are not delegated - people are told what to do and those who speak out and express different opinions are quickly sidelined. The only way to really get on at LexisNexis is to be a sycophant. The company has lost touch with customers, made poor strategic decisions, invested poorly, made a string of acquisitions that have rarely delivered on their promise, outsourced jobs that really needed to stay in-house and lost focus on the core of the business. The company has undergone 3 or 4 reorganizations in the past 3 years that has left it with an extremely complex and highly dysfunctional structure - the Operations (IT, Content etc) are in one place, Sales and Marketing in another and Product owners in a third place. These three legs of the stool act as separate companies, which don't really like each other, led by executive teams with different agendas

And now LexisNexis is starting to suffer. The company has realized that it has to make big investments in content and technology, but has left it too late. Our major competitor West is eating our lunch and new entrants are attacking us as our customers' behaviors change quickly, with the pervasiveness of Google. It's sad to see it happen. Even sadder is the fact that my younger colleagues, with future careers to consider are leaving - either by choice or through aggressive cost-cutting (I think it's called right-sizing now, by the people with MBAs in New York). This once great company is gradually sinking.

Advice to Senior Management

Gain some humility and admit your mistakes. Listen to your people more and trust them to make decisions for a change. Simplify the organization. Frankly though it's probably time to make way for a new generation of leaders to try to save the company.