u/TheHumanLayer

They just appointed their third CEO in 18 months, and if you've been following the financial news this week, it’s a roller coaster. CEO resigned so the stock dropped drastically, then they appointed the new guy and the markets recovered a little. And thats the news we are seeing: money is coming back up so YAY all is well, transition success!

Well, I spent my morning reading through Glassdoor reviews to see if that's really the vibe (which, honestly, says a lot about me, but lets ignore that shall we?)

Frank Bisignano ran the company for five years, he then abruptly left for a position in the current administration in May 2025, and his replacement Mike Lyons came in and immediately described the earnings targets as "objectively difficult to achieve." Undermining everything the workers had been told to work towards.

Obviously the stock collapsed nearly 50% after the CEO said "Bro, no way we can do that." As CEO, Mike Lyons spent a year cleaning it up, and from the reviews he did a decent job building a new foundation. Then he stood up on stage at investor day last month, smiled and told the room they had made "meaningful change across leadership and culture" and then resigned 30 days later with no severance, just poof, over to a bank. Now Takis Georgakopoulos, who joined the company in late 2024, is suddenly CEO.

The Glassdoor reviews going back to 2019 describe a workplace where compensation plans get rewritten mid-year, leaders change every six months, and announcements of culture change are followed by more of the same. The only consistent positives across thousands of reviews were "you get paid on time" and "the employees are great."

Here's the part I find genuinely fascinating from a human dynamics standpoint.

There's a concept called learned helplessness. When people experience repeated cycles of disruption where their actions produce no reliable outcome, the brain eventually stops trying to influence outcomes at all. Layer on top of that change saturation, which is the point where enough reorganizations and leadership announcements have happened that the brain stops processing new ones as meaningful and starts filing them as noise. "Meaningful change in culture" from a CEO who leaves 30 days later ends up sounding like the teacher from Charlie Brown.

What Georgakopoulos is actually walking into is a strategy that is probably solid, but also a workforce that has spent three years learning not to believe it.

That is going to show up six months from now when everything stalls and nobody can explain why.

What you actually need in that moment is an outside perspective, someone not embedded in the org chart or invested in the narrative, who can tell you whether people are genuinely moving with the change or have just gotten very good at looking like they are.

"These types of restructurings may also lead to shortages of sufficiently skilled employees in certain roles, loss of valuable institutional knowledge and damage to employee morale and retention."

Oracle wrote that… in a legal document…. and filed it publicly.....

The employees who were let go got a vague email citing organizational change, signed by “Oracle leadership."

The employees who kept their jobs posted on Glassdoor that they learned more from CNBC than they did from their own VP.

What does it mean when a company's legal obligation to disclose risk to investors is more honest about the human cost than anything they said to their own employees?

It means that they've become so big that their priorities are very clearly the people who own their stock. Because of their current place in the market and the size of their workforce, they can get away with ignoring the human layer.

And maybe they can. Maybe a company the size of Oracle won't even feel the financial repercussions from ignoring the human layer six months down the line. Maybe they'll be able to survive without that valuable institutional knowledge or those skilled employees, and maybe the morale won't impact their bottom line enough for them to actually give a shit.

So good for Oracle c-suite leadership, I guess, but for the mid-level and mid-to-senior-level managers who are still interacting with those employees on a day-to-day basis, they're going to feel it.

Their budgets will feel it.

Their team morale will feel it.

Their emotional mental capacity will feel it when they get the questions and complaints that the c-suite doesn't.

I hope that Oracle is at least helping them and providing them with the resources to preserve as much of that human layer as possible. I hope they realize that they are only able to be as big as they are because of those teams doing the work and those people leading the teams doing the work.

If you are a middle-level or mid-to-senior-level manager at Oracle and you want help keeping your team from fracturing completely, call me.

And im sorry you're experiencing this.