Qualcomm

It had a scrappy, start-up feel to it until a few years ago, to the point that it was famous as one of the most nimble big companies around. Personally, I had a great career at Qualcomm, starting as a contractor and ending as Sr. Staff/Mgr in 8 years. I consider myself fortunate to have joined while the start-up vibe was still around.

Sadly, in the past two to three years, the company began to rest on its laurels and shun all risks. It was as though the entire senior management collectively went into "rest and vest" mode. Management kept talking about "adjacent markets" to the phone/tablet business without ever tracking it seriously. This was despite the well-known risks of depending on just two major customers for the bulk of its phone business. The results are now painfully obvious to see. Sadly, it is the rank-and-file engineers that are getting laid off, not the execs that blundered in the first place. The topping on the cake was labeling this the "Qualcomm way".

Stop running the company on the whim of shareholders. Learn from Bezos and Elon Musk on how to run a lean, innovative company. Take care of the customer, and the stock will take care of itself.

What is playing out is the classical death of a big company via financial engineering in place of real engineering. The likes of HP and IBM have been down this path before, and it is clear where it leads.