Circus of Third-rate Accomplishments – COTA
Pros
There are only two classes of people at COTA - unproductive and overpaid and productive, overworked and underpaid. It is the best place to work if you belong to the first category.
Cons
Cota has a not so unique semi-decent but potentially useful idea, whose implementation has been unsuccessful in the past five years and is likely to remain so (if they continue to exist) due to the founder’s insistence on an implementation strategy that is unscalable and meaningless. In Q4 of 2018, Cota appointed a new CEO and a CTO. This was a welcome change. Cota went from near certain death under the former CEO to critical life support under this new leadership. On paper, these are two accomplished individuals who are very much capable of turning things around, but they have a monumental task of addressing three years of lost work. While some of the leadership that oversaw the failure including the CEO have been let go, it has had a very heavy toll on the company. A lot of good people with domain knowledge have exited COTA in the past year – the very folks who might have helped in a quicker recovery. This new leadership might be the new ringleaders for this circus, but can they put on a better show with same old clowns? Given the latest round of promotions, there is very less to look forward to. There are two main challenges for this new leadership – The first is technical. Cota has multiple products but none that function, at least not by the standards of your average healthcare expert. After 2 years and millions of dollars of investment, COTA’s data collection platform is the very definition of a Garbage in – Garbage out software. Management paid no attention to the data quality issues raised. New leadership might be able to change things in stages but to have a decent functioning product is likely to take at least 2 years and a plethora of good decisions. But the second and a far greater challenge for this new leadership is – COTA’s culture. In his two-year tenure, the previous CEO managed to create an extremely toxic culture. The key to success at COTA was being loud, brash, and incompetent. If you met these basic requirements, your chances of success were further boosted if you happen to be white and a male. Teams were judged not by their output and efficiency but by their size. Unfortunately, some very talented and smart team leads started taking advantage of this and made unnecessary hires to make their departments bigger and worse - oversee functions that they were not qualified to. Technically unqualified delivery leads overseeing engineering and analytical functions is a prime example. This continues be the case under the new leadership and people and teams with such behavior continue to be rewarded. Making changes that will make the data and products useful and beneficial is going to take a lot of effort and time. But management’s goal seems to be to regain some credibility and look for some (unsuspecting) buyer or investor. If the economy remains good, this is very much a possibility and might lead to decent pay day for a few. These are uncertain times and it remains to be seen if COTA can turn around and be a winner. What is certain is, under the current state of COTA’s products, is that the patients lose.
