I have been a little jaded in recent weeks (or even months). My employer’s takeover by an American entity has been somewhat disruptive. While it appears to have brought various benefits to the corporate entity, it has also wreaked havoc with individuals’ lives. A number of my colleagues have been made redundant and the resulting misalignment (or at least a sense of that) has not done any favours to the sense of disruption.
I guess the most disruptive element has been the redundancy of my boss. We all saw it coming, as few corporations can live with two General Counsels. As is the norm, the General Counsel of the acquired entity is the one to leave. So my boss left, nearly 6 weeks now, and from that time on, I have sat in on numerous Teams meetings to deal with the resultant actions that are required. That meant a lot of screen time, with American lawyers (mostly in house), Accountants, HR practitioners, all to do with integration and realignment stuff. There were other Teams meetings for sales/commercial activities of course. I have become tired of it somewhat, particularly the HR side of things where exercises attendant to large(r) corporates often leave me bewildered and amused at the same time.
For the Melbourne office, the American higher up’s have decided to move away from South Melbourne. Yay as far as not being located across the street from brothels is concerned, but very worrying when most of us have so very little visibility of the relocation exercise. What I have been able to see, by virtue of where sit, hasn’t been comforting. Add that to a loss of competitive edge in the tender space as a result of an ex employee (super smart head of products) starting his own shop to “whip our ass”, and the mood turns dark pretty quickly. There are other little/smaller fallouts like the sudden pulling of the old internal portal, loads of badly timed meetings (3am and 7am starts) and one finds oneself in a pretty big pity party.
Thankfully, an option presented itself and yesterday, I received a verbal offer. The written version should come in by tomorrow so hopefully all the plusses I had chalked up in the “pros” column don’t disappear. If that turns out to be the case, I am very likely to then put pen to paper to part ways with my employer.
Ante 