Sun Microsystems – “When Good People go Bad”

Pros

First-line managers are skilled, organized and professional.
Employees are also skilled, organized, professional, knowledgeable and helpful.
Some technologies (Java, Servers, Networks) are professionally interesting to work on.

Cons

Sun employees have endured unplanned layoffs three times a year for the past four years. In that length of time, Sun has retained approximately 45 thousand employees, had perhaps four thousand senior employees quit, and laid off about eleven thousand employees -- often very quietly. This creates serious morale problems among employees who survive those layoffs. Anything positive I could say about Sun must be tempered with this layoff problem, always lurking in the background, always sapping the employee pride and enthusiasm that would normally produce the compeditive edge that made Sun a successful company in the past.

Sun's problem is Management. Second-line managers and above do not understand company problems and opportunities well enough to provide the leadership we need. Internal business processes are simply horrible, and contribute to communication problems and project planning and execution between working groups. This is not simply a version of the communication problems that any large organization faces -- it's a basic competence problem. Many managers were long ago promoted beyond their level of competence and are now apprehensive about trying anything new, for fear they will lose their jobs in the next Layoff.

Advice to Senior Management

You have failed. You have poorly managed your most important new projects; failed to identify who your most important employee contributors are; not acknowledged your most important customers; and you have not recognized your most important business opportunities, for the past decade.

With Sun's latest surprise revenue failures and their resulting RIFs, Sun has fallen too far behind to remain in the first tier of high tech Silicon Valley Corporations. Sun's revenues will drop another 50% over the next 15 months, and become a specialized reseller of technologies they didn't develop, to old customers who are finally moving on from us after about twelve years.