SPH: Blame previous CEO

It’s fashionable to berate scholars for incompetency especially ex-generals, especially the present Kim Jong-un look-a-like CEO of SPH. After all he did preside over the decline of NOL and its sale juz before the shipping market turned.

But take a step back and look at how SPH was managed before he became CEO.

Low hanging fruit left to rot

Why weren’t these things only done now, not earlier?

— Newsroom consolidation: “The New Paper sports desk will move to ST in November, and ST money desk will move to BT.” (Atas version of Petir)

— And “the AsiaOne team, comprising about 10 members of staff, will be re-deployed to the Straits Times Digital team,” (Yahoo)

These actions should have been done years ago, not last Thursday. After all, revenue from ads and circulation have been declining for years, so why wwere these simple acts of newsoom and tech consolidation not done earlier?

Only scholar can think of these actions isit?

Retrenchment

The original plan by the previous CEO was to cut jobs over two years. The Kim Jong-un look-a-like accelerated the culling, and rightly so.

Here’s something that someone I know wrote on FB

I’ve honestly never seen a retrenchment exercise (and it’s happened to me before) where the retrenched staff are not asked to leave immediately. OK locking out of computers is not the proper way for the staff to find out, but sad as the news is, what’s happened is pretty much the norm. Once a retrenchment exercise is decided on (and one can debate whether it is good or bad), there is no point delaying.

I was at a local bank when they did a major retrenchment. They said they would do it in two months’ time. It was a terrible time waiting and wondering who would be hit. In the end they did it in a week. It was still bad, but there was no point waiting.