Senior management trashing the company - Investment Manager Aberdeen Employee Review

Compensation has been cut, even for high performers, since Stephen Bird joined. The 2023 bonus pool was brutally cut in the investments vector and many people got nothing, regardless of their individual contributions, in an effort to improve the cost to income ratio in the short term. Bird says that "you eat what you kill" - an argument that may carry some weight if he himself did not take a 75% bonus, despite failing badly on his own financial targets. Bird has introduced more layers of complexity and senior management, little of whom have been in the business for long and therefore are not familiar enough with the details, putting distance between himself and the parts of the business that are structurally failing. Instead of using the strong (but shrinking) balance sheet to invest in improvements to the business, he is using the cash to pump up the share price for his own short term rewards. This is clear to all employees across the business but he is so out of touch or his incentives are simply not aligned with the long term prospects of the firm.