No long term plan past the end of the day. - Anonymous employee Novus International Employee Review

The CEO has built an empire of bureaucracy, inept management, and a personal Hunger Games scenario among senior management across all product groups. He is disconnected from the business and more concerned about his legacy through needless corporate building enhancements and keeping up the allusion of being a "green" and "sustainable" company. The only way that Novus is achieving this is by losing sales and decreasing their carbon footprint from the production and distribution of products. Novus has stated its vision is to, "To help feed the world affordable, wholesome food and achieve a higher quality of life." This statement was coined by the CEO and perpetuated by senior management in order for the CEO to set himself up for his next position as a Washington D.C. lobbyist. There is a complete breakdown of structure and communication among the dubbed non-elite class of workers. Every couple of months the long term plan is scrapped and updated to better reflect the steady and quick decline of the company. The planned deadline to change from a single revenue generating product portfolio to a multi-product portfolio in order to better diversify market exposure is pushed back approximately once a year due to the poor development of inferior products and hasty acquisitions of declining and insolvent companies with specialty products that achieve consistent quarterly losses on the income statement. Riding a three year wave of artificially inflated commodity prices due to depressed supply from competitors Novus treated their huge profits earned for the first time in company history like Justin Bieber at a strip club. The CEO enjoyed the finer things in life like commissioned artwork from around the world, flat screen televisions everywhere that were never on, water organs designed by daVinci that never once played, monthly corporate parties that are catered with fine meat and cheese platters and 10 different selections of alcohol, and a full library that no one is allowed to work or hold meetings in. At least the library didn't have boring industry reading material one could reference. It was full of classic novels and other non-industry books. I found it a good place to sit. Senior management spent their time trying to prove why there ludicrous long term plan was better than their colleagues equally ludicrous plans, such as shifting key distribution points around the world for an immediate short term savings in capital expenditure, but led to vastly increased order fulfillment lead time and greatly increased supply chain costs over the long term as well as significant decrease in customer sales and customer loyalty. While flying business class around the world "checking up" on how other Novus locations were operating no one predicted the downturn in the market of the single product that does account for approximately 80% of revenue. They did show genuine concern about the long term depression in the commodity market due to key competitors flooding the market after the Japanese owners (Mitsui and Nippon-Soda) brought it to their attention. There was a lot of communication about strategic plans that were going to be put into place to bolster the companies position in the market and ride out the projected market downturn, but all seemed to be abandoned as senior management has gone quiet about any actions that will be taken. Without the ability to admit non-existent sales on disastrous product groups Novus makes the tough choice of promoting the product managers, reorganizing the company, and mass firing to balance out the losses. This last point may need to go under pros as they seem to be getting away with it and senior management is still earning large bonuses. So, pro for senior management and con for everyone else. They have taken other steps to reduce costs such as removing paper cups for employee use and reducing the cleaning of bathrooms from every hour to every two hours. As an example of the senior management naivety and oblivious nature when they set out to implement a new global ERP platform, SAP, they were sold on the idea of a 10 month standard out of the box single global roll out. Just so you understand the scope of that Novus has offices in 30+ countries around the world and generates over $1B/annual revenue. Several months into the project it was realized the standard out of the box solution offered by the consulting firm was not going to work by a long shot. Project management and the steering committee stuck to their guns of a single global roll-out and extended the go-live date multiple times ultimately taking two and a half years to roll-out. No worries though because all that extra time allowed for millions of dollars worth of poorly coded custom enhancements and every world area making a case for why they can not follow the global standard procedure and needed customized solutions which took the plan for standard global procedures for each function to a standard global procedure and various local procedures as local management saw fit with no regard to project management warnings. One may ask how could this happen in a billion dollar company? Well, no fear as it was followed up two years after implementation with a global process improvement and standardization project. This project allocated millions of more dollars to do what was already done several years earlier. When it was determined they could not enforce the theory of a global standard procedure the project was abandoned. This company had a good business model and experienced a stroke of luck that led to very generous profits. The diversity of new product groups that were not part of the companies core competencies, entries into markets with no experience, and the depression in the commodity market that anyone could have seen years ahead of time spelled the decline of Novus. I do not see Novus being able to compete in the global animal feed supplement market with their increasing incompetence and lack of any direction in senior management.