Climate reviews

The feebly-led science organization failed to produce viable product for several years while devolving into chaos of ineptitude. The modus operandi of a Monsanto manager and his sycophants are to demoralize, disenfranchise, and criticize so that qualified and creative individuals leave the company, allowing said team to steal and re-package others’ ideas and results as their own.

A few years ago, I would have left this section nearly blank. Now? I don't even know where to begin. It's like working in a Kafka novel or a small Soviet republic. Power and information are concentrated at the top and very little manages to trickle down. A tiny cabal of hilariously inept bureaucrats run the show, meeting in private and then showering their peons and peers alike with buzzword-packed PowerPoints and raving, pointless emails in a desperate attempt to look busy. Team meetings -- once critically important and transparent Q&A sessions on core business decisions -- have devolved into Pravda-style internal marketing BS. Information does not flow upward (or outward, for that matter). Redundant work abounds. Many earnest meetings are held. Laptops are clutched. There is much rushing around. But still, in spite of it all, nothing manages to get done. And because the leadership has managed to convince themselves that they are both absolutely essential to the enterprise -- and yet, bizarrely unaccountable for any failures -- responsibility is totally diffuse. That's not to say that it's a risk-free job, though. Criticism is unwelcome. Independence (or worse, defiance) are swiftly punished. People routinely disappear without warning. And if you're not a sociopath, your chances of a promotion are dim. Some of this is because of recruiting. Once, we were a little startup with a purpose and thin margins. There weren't that many of us and everybody had responsibility. It was exciting, if a bit stressful. Then the hiring began. Our pitch -- that you could work on whatever project your lil heart desires -- was hilariously naive and backfired spectacularly. We attracted a lot of otherwise bright people who just sit around and pontificate all day, dreaming up new solutions to problems nobody has. Some of this is because of the acquisition by Monsanto. Initially loudly opposed by the employees, it was made clear that we had no choice in the matter. Many good people quit immediately after the payout. Most are just waiting around until their retention bonuses or stock options vest. The attrition rate in recent months has gone through the roof. And the Monsanto name is clearly scaring off new applicants. Instead of getting piles of passionate, critical, opinionated applicants, we now get a steady drip of the kind of dead-behind-the-eyes, careerist mercenaries that I thought only existed in Dilbert cartoons. Most of the blame, though, surely rests with management. Their dim view of their underlings is caustic and infectious. Their cronyism and lack of self-awareness is the source of almost all that's wrong at Climate. And their relentless, unwavering commitment to hierarchy has savaged the morale of a company that was once flat, open, and even fun. I could go on, but why bother? It's clear that the company had no strategy beyond the "exit event" and what few principles the company ascribed to were swiftly abandoned when we cashed that billion dollar check. Everything else is just hollow cheerleading. Every attempt to halt our slide into irrelevancy involves either new layers of management ("Promotions all around! Your new job is to hire someone to do your old job.") or new layers of process. We set out to change the world and instead we've become a sweetener in Monsanto's sales pitch.