Monkey wrenches.

A company I work for was recently purchased by some firm you and I never heard of. While being tangentially in the same business arena, one is a publisher and the other one is an investment firm. 

Knowing the track record of the money mooks at places like Boeing in recent years, I am not optimistic. My main contact says that so far there's been a little departmental shuffling, but no major changes. 

I will be the first to admit that publishing is a mug's game these days, the overeducated spooling the unnecessary to the uninterested. It had reached a grand height in the 1990s, when Condé Nast built its new tower on Times Square, and has been in precipitous decline since. (Condé had its own tower by 2015.) Still, some ends of the business are attached to lucrative industries like finance and healthcare, so they have reason to continue to expect profitability. The company I work for is like that, so there's no reason to think it was bought to be sold off in parts, or to have the stock price run up and then dumped for profit by buccaneers of finance. 

However, there is every reason to fear that, once the dust clears, the new owners will move in the monkey wrench crew to improve things. 

These improvements are very much like artificial intelligence. They are forced onto the unwilling to perform functions that are unnecessary and wind up costing jobs for people who have performed well for years. The work is then outsourced or given to cheap hires that perform poorly. The bottom line is temporarily improved, the stock price rises, then clients flee as everything gets weird and shoddy. Then it's sold off for parts.

Improve Back Better

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of capitalism. The profit motive in a high-trust society like America has been until recently is the best means of raising people in large groups out of poverty ever devised.

I'm against stupid capitalism, however, where companies are run by people who neither know nor care about the actual business and everything goes to hell. I'm sure you can list a dozen examples of companies that died that way, usually the death of a thousand cuts rather than a staggering collapse. Often companies are just caught by surprise by technological advances. But in the end, it mostly comes down to a lack of the intelligence and devotion that made the companies great in the first place. 

If your company is bought out, as has happened to me in the past, I wish you very good luck. Keep an eye open for the monkey wrench crew, come to fix things. It's usually a sign to get the résumé together, if you haven't already.