But you notice I said "until around 2020"; the brain drain is staggering to say the least in the past two years. And many of them were engineered by management and involved senior, experienced staff. The managers placed to head the various parts of the business know very little of the industries they cover, and most if not all cannot be bothered to learn. Pleasing the (now "retired") CEO was the main concern, and many new ways of working simply do not address the issue properly, or worse are just plain unsuitable for coverage of some markets. It is also clear that management obviously view these senior staff as too expensive, and in their efforts to cut costs amid the recession past two years, these experienced staff have been made to go, or asked to opt for early retirement. I suspect the CEO himself was actually one of these, ironic as it may sound.
Another major problem is the lack of respect for customers, and bordering on lack of integrity. Publishing late, or not publishing reports is considered an acceptable practice, even if the contract with customers is that you need to deliver X number of reports over a specific time frame. And in some cases, it's known that management has asked research staff to fudge data and cut back on analyses significantly, in order to fit in pages which can contain only XX number of words in the text. While brevity is a virtue, the problem is the flawed assumption of management that covering one product in one page should be thus, and covering 10 products in a value chain in one page should also be the same. Not true, and one shoe doesn't fit all, please. The end result is a huge sacrifice to quality and even quantity you're contracted to deliver, and this is not honest.
Several of the senior staff who left, confided in colleagues after their departure that the company now is very, very different from the WM they knew many years ago. The research is no longer rigorous, especially against the backdrop of cost-cutting where travels and meeting clients have become non-existent, and the hitherto high standard of analysis and integrity is no longer there. It's affecting their own individual reputation in the industry, something they've painstakingly built up over many years. They also predict that while the short-term impact may not be visible, as the years progress, WM would lose its reputation and standing in the industry. After all, customers are not stupid, and many of them have already noticed the drop in quality (yet they're asked to pay higher subscription fees at renewal every year).
