Wiley reviews

- Wiley is made up of silos packed into silos divided by silos. Each of the three main businesses runs essentially independently, each local office does things its own way, and each publisher or product line has very definite idiosyncrasies. The concept of applying a single best practice across the entire organization, or even having a clear functional structure across the organization, is anathema. To succeed at Wiley, you must be adept at understanding the Byzantine structure and using it to achieve your goals. - Upper management claims to have a clear strategy, but their communication to the staff has been vague and contradictory for several years now. Perhaps they have a strategy at any given moment, but consistency and long-range planning do not seem to be available. The CEO's health issues probably feed into this, unfortunately. - They seem to have entered a period of managing to quarterly results, which is never a good sign. Layoffs in particular are triggered by an upcoming unfavorable quarter-end. Similarly, reorganizations are beginning to blur together into a continuous panic of change and fear. - A successful career can greatly depend on who you know and who your allies are: you need to be immediately useful to the people who are immediately useful to the senior managers who will be kept on and rewarded with the next pending reorg, and navigating that path is not clear.

Sad to see what's happened to the trade business book group. Massive layoffs. Most books, believe it or not, receive zero marketing support. Wiley now puts the books on Amazon and gets a few copies into physical distribution outlets. That's it. Of course, they don't tell authors in the recruitment phase. I was told recently about a CEO of a huge company who published a book with Wiley. The book was a lead book in their catalog, so it merited actual marketing. However, the marketer was a new hire, just out of college with zero background in marketing. The CEO was astonished at the lack of professionalism. Of course, he was lucky. The vast majority of books don't even receive that minimum level of support. Senior managers are self-serving, disingenuous, bureaucrats with absolute no vision. They lie constantly and are a bit paranoid. They say they are "driving change and innovation," but in reality, they are simply protecting their own jobs.