The company was run like a cult with lots of corporate jargon thrown around that means little in practice. Jerre Stead was an uber-Christian type and sold himself as a man of the people, but the exec's interest in what was going on at the lower levels of the company was minimal and limited to Jerre's special inspirational "quotes" that would appear on the intranet and were a source of general mirth in the office. Hopefully the Markit merger will bring a fresh, more innovative culture to IHS but it would be a big leap.
The company suffered from extreme silo-isation, new acquisitions were never properly integrated and were generally done to boost the share price. There is huge potential among all the variety of expertise and products to create something new and valuable but in practice any collaboration was discouraged by people defending their own territories. Cross-selling of products across business lines was barely attempted, and to make matters worse sales people often had minimal knowledge of complex technical products they were meant to sell. Subscription renewals were being lost for entirely preventable reasons.
In short, very little logical structure internally, the best they could do was tell you the company had a 'matrix' structure (code for 'it's up to you to make sense of it and reach out to colleagues around the world'); very little incentive to go above and beyond existing job description and attempt to innovate.
Atmosphere was for the most part quiet and not exactly negative, but not overwhelmingly positive either. It didn't help that as soon as there was any dip in the share price or perceived under-performance, everyone knew that travel budgets would be frozen indefinitely and people would be fired (or encouraged to leave, or not replaced if they left, increasing the workload on everyone else). It was a very, very short-sighted strategy that saw cost-cutting as the only way to boost financial results/share price, whereas in fact this only aggravated existing problems and closed off avenues that could have brought in revenue in the longer term.
