Xerox To Cut 15% of Workers in Strategy It Calls a 'Reinvention' (cbsnews.com) 49
Xerox will lay off 15% of its workforce as the struggling digital printing company moves to cut costs and jump-start growth. From a report: In announcing the cuts, Xerox said Wednesday it is adopting a new operating model and organizational structure aimed at boosting its core print business, while also forming a new business services unit. CEO Steven Bandrowczak said in a statement that the shift will enhance the company's ability to efficiently bring products and services to market, labeling the strategic pivot at Xerox a "reinvention." As of October 2023, Xerox had roughly 20,000 employees, according to the company's website.
No details = BS (Score:5, Informative)
In announcing the cuts, Xerox said Wednesday it is adopting a new operating model and organizational structure aimed at boosting its core print business, while also forming a new business services unit.
New operating model HOW? New organization structured HOW? New business services unit to do WHAT? What a trash article... had to google for a few details: https://www.news.xerox.com/new... [xerox.com] Looks like a bunch of the same to me though.
If I had to guess (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the 80s IBM made a lot of noise about reinventing the company with mass firings and a bunch of folks thought it was super keen because they were firing managers.
Turns out it was just the older managers they were firing, who were mostly doing actual work instead of managing. Years later there were lawsuits, I think a few were actually won. But it's not like anyone got their jobs back.
Re: (Score:2)
it's just age discrimination. e.g. they're gonna fire all their older workers.
Back in the 80s IBM made a lot of noise about reinventing the company with mass firings and a bunch of folks thought it was super keen because they were firing managers.
Turns out it was just the older managers they were firing, who were mostly doing actual work instead of managing. Years later there were lawsuits, I think a few were actually won. But it's not like anyone got their jobs back.
It's a lot harder to do that now, since there are plenty of lawyers willing to take up class action lawsuits, where the companies will have to provide a list of people let go along with demographic information. Age, gender, race, etc. discrimination is easy to show. That's why all companies now include several "usual suspects" to include with the group that they really want to get rid of.
Re: (Score:1)
There's also too many right to work states. "Right to work" isn't just about Unions, it's long since been a code word employers use to a whole host of laws and practices that chipped away at hard won worker protections and rights.
For example, thanks to the Supreme Court upholding business' rights to use binding arbitration (and Congress passing the
Re: (Score:3)
The model is paying fewer low level employees so the suits can get bonuses for lowering costs.
Chiefs for Transformation, Disruption, Strategy? (Score:3, Informative)
The new Xerox Executive Leadership Team includes:
John Bruno – President & Chief Operating Officer
Xavier Heiss – Chief Financial Officer
Louie Pastor – Chief Transformation & Administrative Officer
Deena Piquion – Chief Growth & Disruption Officer
Jacques-Edouard Gueden – Chief Channel & Partner Officer
Fred Beljaars – Chief Delivery & Supply Chain Officer
Suzan Morno-Wade – Chief Human Resources Officer
Flor Colon – Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary
Chris Fisher – Chief Strategy Officer
Re:Chiefs for Transformation, Disruption, Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
9 more people they could cut, and this time they wouldn't even lose any quality.
Re: (Score:2)
Better double their bonuses, that will fix things
Re: (Score:2)
I would double something I'd use on them just to be sure. But I wouldn't exactly call it a bonus.
Re: (Score:2)
don't be silly. If you put both boots up, you'll fall! :)
Re: (Score:3)
Think smaller. Think higher velocity.
So... (Score:2)
Reinvention? Mass layoffs? There's a difference? (Score:2)
Reinvention? Why? (Score:2)
Flagship of hired-gun CEO idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)
After a company grows and goes public, getting a board of directors composed of investors, and then the original CEO dies or cashes out, the odds begin to skyrocket that morons will be in control. Boards love to hire friends, rather than competent people, and give them overly-generous compensation even as they kill the company with their incompetence.
Xerox was one of the most glaring examples of this when its stupid idiot CEO at the time ordered his employees at Xerox PARC to show Steve Jobs everything they were working on (the GUI and mouse etc). The CEO wanted to impress a visitor, and had zero understanding of the value of what his employees had developed with the shareholders' money. In doing so, he cost Xerox investors BILLIONS of dollars and control of the personal computer industry. Had there been any hope of saving Xerox, it would have happened THEN with a clean-out of the entire management team, EVERY single management person from top to bottom. That did not happen, and the entity formerly seen as an American tech icon has been dying a slow death ever since.
It's an unfortunate thing that these stuffed suit CEOs with zero intelligence, zero wisdom, and zero actual practical skill, tend to have one real talent: playing golf with board members and gradually getting the board to join them in stupidville. They try to cover their failures with plans to "right-size", "re-scope", "re-invent", "focus on the core business", or "expand to new markets" etc as they convince their equally-idiotic clapping seals boards to keep supporting them. Tis all a scam that aids wave after wave of new execs, each a little cheaper and lower on the reputation scale, to come in and get a golden parachute and repeat the failing exercise. This would happen a lot less if individual investors payed more attention to their portfolios and pulled-out of such companies and also if fewer people invested in managed funds (which too-often stay invested in such companies). Usually, the workers actually doing the work know exactly what's going wrong in the company, but boards tend to advertise their stupidity by only ever talking to their friends in the executive suites and never having a chat with the workers.
Xerox is hardly alone in this, see: Disney
Re:Flagship of hired-gun CEO idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Hindsight is always 20/20 (Score:2)
Seems like for large companies that have developed a technology that could put themselves out of business they should assume someone else can also independently come up with the same idea/technology
The problem is identifying which ideas like this are winners and will become the next "must have" technology vs. ones that turn out to be useless. To make things harder it is not just the technology you need to get right but the marketing: the iPhone had no real technical innovations over existing phones at the time but was packaged and marketed far better.
Technology choices that seem obvious now are not always obvious at the time...although even I struggle to see how Kodak could not tell that digital p
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they did, but decided spending a bunch of money in a losing war was a bad investment.
We tend to assume companies that declined to cannibalize their cash cows were just being foolish. But maybe they looked at the situation clear-eyed and decided it was smarter to get while the getting was good.
Re: (Score:3)
I was a co-op with Kodak 1982-1984. My father worked there from the 1960s until a decade or two after I moved on. It was well understood that 6 megapixel sensors in digital cameras would cut the demand for photographic film in half. Electronics moved a bit faster than Kodak executives thought. Having invented the digital camera, they had no idea how to turn that into a profitable line of business. They tried, though, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS. Japanese camera companies did it a lot b
Re: (Score:2)
And Kodak thought the same with digital photography. Seems like for large companies that have developed a technology that could put themselves out of business they should assume someone else can also independently come up with the same idea/technology and then they really have nothing. Risky if you don't do it yourself, risky if you do...
Except Kodak DID see the future, and tried to get ahead of it. Lots of companies fail because they can't, or refuse to see the future. Kodak's management knew very well that digital imaging would kill off a bunch of their existing business, and they took a rather good attitude about it: "We can't stop it, so why not try to be a part of it?". The problem was the public simply wasn't buying it. Kodak made good digital cameras (hell, they helped pioneer the field), but the American middle class' tastes had got
Yes (Score:2)
Kodak is another example of this sort of executive suite idiocy.
Kodak DEFINED photography in the USA. Workers inside Kodak knew exactly what was happening and people inside Kodak did excellent work on digital image sensors and digital photography. It's likely that a small team of Kodak employees, aided by an entirely new set of executives and and infusion of some investor money could have made Kodak the dominant player in the field (at least for America), while the rest of Kodak continued to ride-out the en
ah, that seems to make sense, but... (Score:3)
The same corner-suite morons also got themselves out of the "big iron" part of their business. They stopped innovating in copier land, eventually dropping production and simply buying (and re-branding as "Xerox") machines made by their competitors (who of course were happy to become "strategic partners" before eating their lunch).
If you were an employee, a long term investor in Xerox, or a loyal customer, this was not a good thing at all. It's not even good for a marketplace when this sort of stuff goes on.
Re: (Score:2)
To what?
Re: (Score:2)
By the time Jobs came around, Xerox had been sitting on a lot of tech it never commercialized, things that Jobs 'stole' such as the mouse, GUI but also things like Ethernet were invented decades prior and just collecting dust.
It just didn't jive with their core business of commercial printing and copiers, meaning they had no insight or creativity to see how to make a computerized/networked copier/printer for the small/home office. Jobs' biggest thing in comparison to IBM and Xerox is that he wanted to make
um (Score:2)
you missed *part* of the point...
Those same execs who gave away the store (allowed Jobs to visit, see everything, and well, we all know the rest...) were such incompetent schmucks that they were SITTING on it with no plans to capitalize on it,
They PAID teams at PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) to do all the research and a mountain of excellent work on it, they themselves SAW it, knew about it, played with it, yet they lacked the competence to know what they had, and to have ANY vision of what to do wit
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think it was complete incompetence, I think it was fear that they would destroy their own market. Fear is a bigger motivator than incompetence, incompetence would be to put it on the market (since you invested in it anyway, might as well make a quick buck out of it) and not iterate on it any further, which is what 3Com and Novell did for example, they got the tech from Xerox and then just thought the market would continue to revolve around them.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Xerox got compensation from Apple for that visit and Apple's use of what they saw, options on 100,000 shares of Apple stock at $10 per share. I believe Apple stock has split 28-to-1 since then; had Xerox held onto their stake, it would be worth $506,800,000 today. Pretty good return.
Xerox continues downsizing (Score:2)
In 2012 2500 layoffs amount to less than 2% of Xerox's worldwide workforce of 146,000 people.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
That was big news in 2012. What wasn't big news in the meantime was the 143500-20000=121,500 jobs that went elsewhere. (Even if that elsewhere was from the 2016 company split.)
Maybe none of this is news. Maybe they should just declare themselves "Former Behemoth a Shadow of a Decade Ago"
LMFAO! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and no. I went through a company which was "reinvented" as well, which also included at the end of it 10000 fewer staff. However I'll buy in that it's not a lay-off. Layoffs just get rid of people. Can't speak for Xerox but when I was "reinvented" the resulting company was nothing even remotely like it was before. We completely changed operating models, organisational structure, responsibilities, etc. I was actually very close to quitting beforehand but ended up staying on as work got significantly more
Reinventing a unit they split off? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
They need to start in a new market, or do something like R&D. Even if ideas wind up going somewhere else like the idea for a GUI, something like PARC would give a lot of products that would keep the company going for the long haul.
What ever happened to R&D for R&D's sake? This is how companies stay relevant for the long haul, and not just the next few quarters.
Elon Musk turnaround plan (Score:2)
Fire 50% of staff and reduce revenue by 90%? Why does Wall Street reward layoffs that don’t include mass executive layoffs as well? If a company has layoffs the entire executive management should be fired first. Have to praise Elon for at least doing that. A good leader finds a way to utilize all resources available to him and also wouldn’t overallocate in the first place. It isn’t right for only the staff to suffer for executive miscalculations.
Re: (Score:3)
Fire 50% of staff and reduce revenue by 90%? Why does Wall Street reward layoffs that don’t include mass executive layoffs as well? If a company has layoffs the entire executive management should be fired first. Have to praise Elon for at least doing that. A good leader finds a way to utilize all resources available to him and also wouldn’t overallocate in the first place. It isn’t right for only the staff to suffer for executive miscalculations.
Elon aside, the reason most companies don't fire from the top is because the top tend to run in the same circles as the people making bank via Wall Street, if they aren't outright in that crowd themselves. It's a big circle jerk of hedonistic capitalism run amok, born on the toll to the common worker class which not a single one of them gives a shit about as long as they keep making bank and getting their golden parachutes.
You don't fire from the top until you get the full-fledged vulture capitalists that a
Market cap (Score:2)
This brought it's market cap down below $2 billion today. Wow. Just goes to show how a company can be such a huge deal, and then come down. Interesting to note that it's actually over 100 years old, having started as a photographic paper company. Their decision to commercially exploit the xerographic process was brilliant, after that they're case study in a huge corporation that fails to realize what they've got or how to develop it, leading to the rise of Apple among others.
It's a huge rags to riches t
more consistent products (Score:2)
I at least want to like Xerox products. My experience with Xerox products in the last few years is really hit and miss, I've had some really great products and some pretty crappy ones (not everyone needs the same size or throughput or features but some uniformity is nice).
Just make consistently decent products across your full line. Limit the number of dogs in your lineup and business will be just fine. Until then Brother is kicking you ass.
Alto (Score:3)
I'll buy any remaining Alto machines they might have if it will help.
Re: (Score:3)
So rinse and repeat for the 7th, or is that 12th? (Score:1)
Reinvent (Score:2)
Re: Reinvent (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's some awesome buzzword bingo PR. I have an idea, they could change their mission statement to:
Xerox, the global leader in AI, and VR, and AR, and cloud services, and blockchain. Have we missed any? If so, we're that too!
Re: Reinvent (Score:2)
Xerox is junk (Score:1)
Reinvention? (Score:2)