Where to start?
First off, there is just a ridiculous number of mid to upper-level managers at Pearson, many of who did not advance through merit but were seemingly poached from non-publishing businesses or straight out of MBA programs. Most of these managers know NOTHING about publishing and are a significant factor in Pearson's deteriorating brand recognition, releasing sub-par products and marketing materials created with virtually no input from educators or the former educators who work at Pearson.
Second, anemic and delusional leadership. John Fallon is a terrible CEO, who has overseen a reduction in diversification (selling off FT and Economist), time and again has misjudged the market (Common Core, assessment), and has prematurely cut the legs out from paper and gone full in with digital before appreciating the realities of mixed medium learning. He has a technology executive trying to follow the Netflix model, where consumer choice is everything, and apply it to a space where mandates and standards preclude that sort of flexibility. He's headed the outsourcing of thousands of jobs where thousands of combined years of experience in education have been let go and replaced with engineers, MBA's, and project managers with ZERO experience in educational publishing and product development. Pearson's stock has flirted with junk status several times and from all recent accounts there are no signs of improvement. Look for a merger with a consortium to bail out his tenure sometime in the next couple years, seeing as the board simply refuse to see this man off.
Third, the Agile project management culture has taken over all aspects of daily activity at Pearson and is used to mask failures. It's officious, stifles creativity, sets unrealistic and contradictory expectations, pits teams against each other, and results in far more inefficiencies than what I'd seen in my first five years with the company. Don't get me wrong, Agile works well for iteratively developed technology products, but there has to be a consistent vision aligned with customer needs and requirements to drive those efforts and Pearson fails by almost every measure in that regard. Stakeholders are no longer accountable, project managers are, so while the merry-go-round of people doing the actual work sees many go off and fewer get on the ride, the people who are supposed to be driving a cohesive strategy and failing remain in their posts. It's less project management and more CYA management.
Fourth, and it bears repeating, John Fallon and his army of unaccountable officers and VP's.
