Toxic work culture with lower and middle level being squeezed dry - Senior Consultant Plural Strategy Employee Review

The overall business performance has been poor last couple of cycles and it shows with all "non-essential"/ team building activities being cancelled during my time there. The fiscal discipline has also translated into creating a toxic workplace environment with periodic lay offs in the name of poor performance. Second, Plural tends to foster some 'golden children' in every cohort, who can do no wrong and they are retained at all costs. More often than not, such golden children are considered as such for the sake of the long tenure (e.g., growing from analyst to associate director/ director levels over 10 years never working a day elsewhere) or for their less than healthy overcommitment to the job (e.g., willing to work 18 hours a day and fall sick after a 3 week stint of 80 hour weeks). As a result for all the lesser folks, life is all about measuring up or pleasing the golden apples. Third, while everyone is nice, do not expect anyone to bat for you - everyone is batting for themselves as is natural in a competitive environment where no one knows where the axe will fall next. The senior management and ET are genuinely nice for most part, with JD and Louis being absolute delights, it is often the Director and AD levels that is more clued in on what is happening and in their desperation to grow within a shrinking top level playing field, is eager to create impact at the cost of the lower level employees. Expect that any DD will have 70-80 hour works weeks because someone on the top over committed to doing a 4 week job in 2 weeks! Fourth, Plural simply does not have the ability to coach and train lateral hires at mid levels and has a very entrenched and rigid way of working where they expect you not only to perform at your best level from day but become a mind clone to their "Plural way of solving a problem". Finally, Plural realistically is a due diligence firm and irrespective of what they sell in their marketing outlooks, will remain so for the foreseeable future. There is only so much you can learn doing DDs repeatably so best to find another place if DDs is not what you want to do forever.