I can believe they can remove layers of management and deliver good productivity. Many companies have stuffed themselves with more and more useless managers (think of all those "diversity officers" and "equality champions" that seem to be all the rage, nobody will miss them).
If the drive it towards more self-organising teams, then I think that will work well. RR has some awesomely clever and practical front line staff, suddenly freeing them from the tedium of management will allow them to do what they do without interference. Its quite possible this is a "buy as much as you can" moment.
As Warren East said: “We have too complex a management and support organisation and we need to simplify that so that we can remain competitive."
so it seems they have built an org around sales and account management, and not enough around engineering. They are cutting their 5 divisions into 3, dropping marine and nuclear, so there's scope for a heap of redundant positions to go with that 2/5s. It also sounds like, along with overlapping management in those divisions, there was a overly large central management function. So loads of managers in divisions arguing the toss with each other over who's responsibility or credit each gets!
I've worked in big companies like that - one sold my work, that cost the company £300 a day, to customers at £6k a day
and failed to make any profit on that because there were 5 layers of management and support between me and the customer who all had to have a piece of the pie. So I can easily believe that they can reduce the headcount and make the business work much better.
https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/b ... es-1674419