GoDaddy

My rating went from a 5 to a 2 in the last 3 years.

While Bob ran the show, you truly felt valued as an employee. You felt like you were an important part of delivering value to the highly valued customer.

You were also encouraged to come up with new product concepts based on your experience in the marketplace and suggest ways to improve existing products.

Team pride in delivering value to customers and having fun were the highest priorities.

Every year the company flew in all who were directly involved with software development for an annual TechFest in Arizona. This was an awesome opportunity to meet people in person whom you only had electronic interactions with. It was also a wonderful learning and collaboration opportunity.

Peers presented exciting new technology and provided resources for future use. There were so many valuable presentations that you could not attend them all. Eventually the presentations were captured via digital video so you could access them from the company intranet site.

Once KKR started to drive the company more and Bob Parsons faded away to the Board of Directors, uncertainty drove a dog-eat-dog culture. Directors in different geographic locations became more concerned about building their corner of the company and less concerned about delivering value to the customer. Re-orgs occurred more frequently, and some new managers did some pretty shady things to end the careers of great people. Some employees were even reprimanded for using their free time to take part in company-sponsored new product idea submission opportunities.

Reinstate Bob's 16 rules, get rid of managers who operate unethically, and stop managing by fear.