#accountability

I've been at the bank long enough, and in enough different roles, to finally understand how the place actually rewards performance.

The reward for hard work isn't recognition. It isn't career growth. It isn't additional compensation. It's more work.

Not just any work, either. You get handed the complex, politically sensitive, high-risk initiatives that everyone else has quietly managed to avoid. The kind of work where failure has consequences, success is expected, and if you somehow pull it off, leadership thanks you by immediately assigning you the next impossible project.

Competence isn't rewarded here, it's exploited.

The irony is that the less capable you appear to be, the less you're expected to do. People who consistently fail to deliver, miss deadlines, or spend more time trying to hand off work than actually completing it somehow develop an impressive track record of failing upward. They become experts at managing perception instead of outcomes, while the people actually producing results are too busy carrying the organization to spend time marketing themselves.

Then there are the teams that seem to have won the organizational lottery. Small teams. Clearly defined responsibilities. Minimal scope creep. Leadership that actually protects their capacity instead of treating it like a public utility. Flexible delivery timelines. Dedicated administrative support. They get measured on exactly what they signed up to do.

The rest of us? Apparently our job description is simply "everything else." Need another critical program? Give it to the team that's already drowning. Another governance function? They'll figure it out. Production support? Add it. Executive requests? Sure. Regulatory deadlines? Why not? Twenty-four-hour operational oversight? Of course. After all, they've always found a way before.

Then leadership has the audacity to act surprised when capacity becomes an issue. The best part is pretending this is all accidental. It isn't.

Leadership has the reporting. They have the staffing numbers. They have the capacity plans. They sit through prioritization meetings. They review resource models. They approve organizational structures. They know exactly which teams have half the support and two or three times the responsibility. They know which groups are expected to supervise critical operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year while simultaneously delivering strategic initiatives.

They're not uninformed. They're informed enough to know exactly what's happening and comfortable enough to let it continue. When you escalate the issue, you get the standard corporate script.

"Prioritize better."

"Focus on the highest-value work."

"Be more strategic."

"Challenge your assumptions."

As if no one has ever considered making a priority list.

You can spend weeks documenting workload, mapping every deliverable, demonstrating capacity with actual data, and proving mathematically that there aren't enough hours or people to accomplish everything being demanded. The response?

"We understand."

Translation: We have no intention of changing anything, but we'd appreciate it if you'd continue accomplishing the impossible so we don't have to explain the problem to someone above us.

The most frustrating part is that leadership often mistakes resilience for excess capacity. Every time a team sacrifices nights, weekends, vacations, morale, or retention to somehow meet another impossible deadline, leadership congratulates themselves on successful planning instead of recognizing they've just normalized another unsustainable expectation.

And so the cycle continues.

The competent become the organizational pack mules, carrying increasingly impossible loads because they've demonstrated they can survive them. The underperformers continue to enjoy manageable expectations because no one expects much from them anyway. Meanwhile, leadership points to another successful delivery as proof that the current operating model works, blissfully ignoring that it only works because a handful of people refuse to let the wheels come off.

At some point, you realize the system isn't broken.

It's functioning exactly as leadership designed it.
The people doing the work absorb the cost.
Leadership gets the credit.

And every year, everyone wonders why the people capable of carrying the organization eventually stop volunteering to do it.

This feels like a textbook example of people believing their own narrative. Instead of meaningful transparency or honest discussion, it’s filled with self-congratulation and carefully crafted talking points.

There’s very little substantive information here. It’s just selective framing, unsupported claims, and messaging that doesn’t align with what many people are actually experiencing. Rather than acknowledging legitimate concerns or difficult realities, the focus seems to be on celebrating themselves and controlling the narrative.

Real leadership is measured by results and accountability, not by how enthusiastically you praise your own performance. At some point, the applause for yourselves has to give way to honest conversations backed by facts.

Me to Claude: should all these people lose their jobs?

Claude: “Thanks for the question. It would appear so.”

Arvind, read your own headline back. “Company culture was too slow to change.” Not “I set a strategy that leaned on debt-funded acquisitions for five years.” Not “I ki-led a working deployment focus six months ago and had to rebuild it under pressure.” Not “I chased a stock price number instead of asking whether the growth underneath it was real.” Culture. As if the culture is some ambient weather system that happens to a company, instead of the direct, measurable output of what leadership rewards, funds, and tolerates.
Here’s what “culture” actually means when a CEO says it out loud: it means employees. It means the people three, four, five levels below you, absorbing blame for decisions they didn’t make and couldn’t have stopped. You don’t get to spend years building a strategy on acquisitions and mainframe timing, watch the props come due at the same time, and then, when the market notices, hand the bill to “culture.” Culture doesn’t sign off on M&A. Culture doesn’t set the incentive plan. Culture doesn’t decide which function gets ki-led in January and rebuilt in July. You do.
And the board’s own language makes this worse, not better: confident in the strategy, but will “hold leadership accountable for execution.” Read that twice. The strategy stays untouchable. Execution is the only thing on the table, and execution is exactly the layer where the people with the least power to change the strategy live. That’s not accountability. That’s a firewall, built to make sure the decisions at the top never have to answer for the results at the top.
So here’s the honest question, asked directly, not through a euphemism about culture: why is it always easier to say “we faltered” as a company than to say “I got this wrong” as the person who ran it? Why is the sentence “culture was too slow” acceptable in a headline, while the sentence “I ki-led a function I should have left alone” never makes it into one? If you were confident enough to reshuffle the entire org on a six-month clock, be confident enough to put your own name on the outcome instead of a word that conveniently has no face and no bonus attached to it.
Own it, you said. So own it. Not the culture. You

We’re now having to work on accessibility standards and compliance, and it’s clear this should have been addressed years ago. The reality is that someone dropped the ball in starting this project, and now we’re operating under a deferral that forces us to catch up under time pressure.
What makes this especially frustrating is that accessibility should have been built into the work from the beginning, not treated as an afterthought. The cost, delay, and rework required to fix this now are significant, and the project is far less efficient than it should have been. Someone failed to start this work when they should have, and now the company is stuck doing expensive retrofits under pressure. And they’re laying off the most important ppl needed to go forward.

Furthermore, accessibility matters, but government should not impose one-size-fits-all solutions on every business or building. The real issue is whether a mandate is proportionate to the cost, because a badly timed retrofit can become a huge and unnecessary expense if the work was never planned from the start. Private organizations should have flexibility to solve access problems in ways that fit their size, budget, and actual use, and accessibility should be built in early rather than forced in later through an expensive scramble. You can support equal access and still criticize wasteful, retroactive implementation.

internal sentiment at this company is too negative. hard to work with some people/teams with sh-t attitude and outlook as a motivated new hire and outsider, trying to make it work. cant even explain how much worse my last gig was and it was rated one of the best global employers, for years, as fortune 100. opentext is no different than other companies: team, manager, business group dictates all. if you’re developing a 30+ year old product to match what industry solution peers already have……please. like get real about who you are, what you do, the market, the future, and show up with some humility and accountability. /rant

In John’s Q2 results email he said, “We’ll need to embrace a market-based culture and continue executing against our 2026 priorities.”

That got me thinking… what exactly does “market-based” mean?

A market-based system generally means rewards and consequences are tied to performance. High performers create more value and are rewarded accordingly. Poor decisions and poor performance have consequences. Resources flow to what works, and what doesn’t work gets changed or terminated… That’s not how this place feels.

For employees, compensation isn’t meaningfully tied to individual performance. Top performers and average performers often receive very similar outcomes, while broad policies apply to everyone regardless of results.

And if we’re truly going to talk about a market-based culture, shouldn’t that standard apply at every level of the organization, including leadership?

A market-based culture shouldn’t just measure employees. It should measure strategies, capital allocation, recruiting, retention, culture, innovation, and long-term shareholder value.

The phrase “market-based” only has meaning if accountability flows both ways. Otherwise, it’s just another slogan.

Robin Vince announcing his appointment to the OpenAI board reads like peak corporate satire: the CEO of a bank whose employees publicly describe leadership as opaque, dismissive, and allergic to accountability is now helping steer the future of “responsible AI.”

Sadly, it’s almost poetic. At BNY, Vince champions AI as a “capacity creator,” which is a polite way of saying it helps leadership know more, move faster, and replace people more efficiently — a theme not lost on the thousands of workers and former workers posting their experiences on this forum.

His statement about deploying AI “responsibly, securely, and with strong governance” lands awkwardly when employees can’t even get responsible communication about layoffs, offshoring, or the never‑ending transformation cycle. And the part about AI benefiting “all of humanity”? BNY staff might settle for it benefiting even just a fraction of its workforce.

The real comedy is the humility act — Vince describing himself as “humbled and grateful” while employees describe him as absent, evasive, and increasingly disconnected from the reality inside his own institution.

If OpenAI truly wants to understand how AI impacts people, they’ve now got a board member whose own employees already feel like failed test cases.

How can someone who is so out of touch possibly guide humanity’s future while BNY employees can’t get straight answers during his entire tenure with the firm?

Eliza? . . . Eliza? . . . Can we get a little help here?!?!

Are we submitting questions or assuming that even with the format pivot we aren’t going to get real, honest answers to questions.

Personally, I hope people submit their toughest questions and demand accountability from MKW. It’s been a sh*t couple of years and that’s largely on him and the rest of leadership.

“An apologist is someone who writes or speaks to defend and justify a specific belief, cause, or institution, especially one that faces criticism.”

Managers need to STOP being apologists for U.S. Bank and defending bad behavior. While you’re not expected to speak ill of the company publicly , you will gain more respect of direct reports if you’re in line with reality. We can spot fakeness. Those that see U.S. Bank with rose tinted glasses are looked at with disdain. Whatever corporate carrot 🥕 you’re chasing here isn’t worth it if no one respects you at the end of the day.

When a corporation keeps missing the mark, the groups responsible for independent challenge should not escape scrutiny. Their job is not to protect relationships, preserve invitations, or stay in the good graces of senior executives. Their job is to raise uncomfortable truths.

If an oversight organization has become known more for executive access and polished diplomacy than for confronting weak results, it may no longer be serving a useful purpose. At that point, reducing or rebuilding the function is a legitimate business decision.

Responsibility starts with the person leading it and continues through the executives who report directly to them. They set the tone, chose what to challenge, and decided how forcefully to communicate the company’s failures. If that leadership structure prioritized proximity to power over accountability, it should be replaced—not rewarded with continued headcount and influence.

I was recently laid off and started digging into the WARN data. Something doesn't add up.

The national WARN boards show these layoffs concentrated in Iowa, yet I know for a fact there were layoffs this year in Chandler, Irving, and Charlotte—not even counting non-core sites.

Is the company required to report WARN notices accurately by location? If so, why does it look like the layoffs are being funneled into one market? That raises some serious questions about transparency and accountability.

“You saw our preliminary results… The first step is just to own it.” We already do. Every single one of us on the ground owns our number, every quarter, no matter how the goalposts moved that quarter. So let’s talk about ownership both ways: what exactly do you own here? Not the words “own it” in a Monday message : the actual outcome. What’s the consequence for you when the results miss? Who’s putting you on a PIP?
Nobody around you says this out loud, so I will: we had real leaders who could have told you this a year ago, and they didn’t leave for a better offer .... they got pushed out because they tried to correct you. You don’t get to say “no deflection, no excuses” while the people most likely to challenge the plan are the ones no longer in the building, because they challenged it.
Maybe IBM’s software problem isn’t the market, isn’t the customers, isn’t even the products. Maybe it’s you. Look at the CROs and software leaders actually winning out there right now. do you really think they run their orgs the way you run this one? Reshuffling structure every six months, pushing out anyone who isn’t aligned, surrounding yourself with people too scared to push back? That’s not how growth companies behave. That’s how companies behave right before they lose the people who could have saved them.
And look at how these decisions actually get made: under panic, not conviction. Every reorg lands like an emergency reaction to a bad quarter, not a plan anyone thought through. And somehow, in that panic, we’re the ones treated like zero, like we can’t understand a reorg, like we’re not agile enough, like we’re the ones resisting transformation. We are exactly those things. We adapt every single time you ask us to, on a shorter timeline than any of you have to answer for. What we’re fed up with is taking transformation advice from the worst-performing leadership in the room, delivered in a panic, and then being blamed when the panic doesn’t produce results.
And on that note: when you write “we are putting more attention on software consumption,” who exactly is “we”? You and McKinsey in a slide deck, or you and the people actually sitting in front of customers who could tell you months ago that this was coming? Because from where I sit, “we” hasn’t included us in a long time : it’s included consultants who get paid regardless of whether the plan works, and employees who inherit the plan with no say in it.
“Every Second Counts” is a good line for a kitchen sign. It’s a bad operating model for enterprise software. Nobody sells real value in one or two quarters. Value takes time to build because it’s built on trust, and trust takes longer to earn back than it takes to lose. Nobody deploys software in one or two quarters either, because deployment runs on the customer’s timeline and their business needs, not ours. If every second really counts, the first thing that should buy us is more discipline before changing structures, incentives, and coverage models mid-year : not less.
Here’s my Monday growth message back to you: a leader is accountable to the people below him, not just to the market above him. That means listening to employees and customers before restructuring around them, not after. It means being able to say “I was wrong” and “this is going to take longer than I promised,” out loud, without spinning it into a hype line for the next town hall. We show up accountable every day, on our numbers, on our customers, on our word. I’m asking you to show the same thing back .... not another recap of initiatives, but an honest account of what you got wrong and what you’re doing to fix it, including how it affects the people asked to execute it with less time and fewer resources than the plan pretends.
We’re not asking for perfection. We’re asking for the truth, and for someone to actually be willing to hear it.

A layoff is when good epmployees are let go due to bad business decisions. The employees were forced to support and try to make those decisions work, and are then fired. The executives who made those decisions stick around, say they hated to do it, and then do it again. Oh, but they also thank you for your efforts in supporting their cr-p ideas. No apologies, no accountability, just business. And repeat.

We have reorgs constantly, with new structures, new reporting lines, new everything and always many, many layoffs. You'd think with all that effort and all those changes, we'd be perfect by now. But nothing ever truly changes. Why isn't anyone holding leadership accountable?

Last week's layoffs carried over US employees itself or VZ India as well? Why all american workers and their positions get eliminated but not India employees? Is it because of cheap rates? Though their work is at sub-par in quality and no accountability what so ever?

When a company’s performance deteriorates year after year, every oversight function should be forced to answer a basic question: did its leaders challenge executives, or did they become too comfortable maintaining access and relationships?

A function that appears more focused on executive schmoozing, polished presentations, and avoiding difficult conclusions than on confronting persistent underperformance is not providing meaningful oversight. It is providing institutional cover.

Accountability should begin with the head of the function and extend directly to their leadership team. If they repeatedly failed to identify, escalate, or communicate the seriousness of the company’s decline, leadership changes and a fundamental restructuring are warranted. At some point, shareholders should stop funding oversight teams that seem unwilling to challenge the people they are supposed to hold accountable.

Heard some senior folks talk about our high performing teams in terms of sports teams. It made me think about genuinely high performing sports teams - the ones who are given time to develop and train, given the best equipment, given support, given trust and empowered to perform and then I thought about XOM, the team on the field is despised by their managers, trying to perform with worse equipment each year, no support and a performance system that pits teammates against each other. I realised the sports team analogy is a pile of bullsh-t.

As a 40 year Vz employee who was fortunate to enjoy a friendship making career at Verizon I can't help but think HBS is writing a business case for MBA students to examine.

I believe the foundational thesis will be "When meitocracy and execution failure"

To think Ivan achieved CEO status as a formet IBEW Tech and grew up in the most competitive New York Telcom Market in the World, the standard was set.. results are rewarded and winners get rewarded based on results.

Then we transition to a different CEO.. Lowell.. Ivy education, obviously bright in academics but history shows could never build a cohesive strategy and Executive Team and badly mismanaged aquistions, integration (gotta have AOL, Gotta have VODAPhone 40% at extraordinary price), stop funding fiber expansion at significantly lower CapEx that now Vz is playing catch up. You get the point.

Tben tbe huge miss... recommends Hans to become CEO... this is 49% on Lowell and 51% on Board. To hire a Foreign CEO who was removed at Erickson as a failed CFO with zero experience on execution and zero USA market experience is a signicant reason for Vz free fail in stock and market performance. As a resukt Hans biught in an all European C level team to create Marketing programs, Finance, Operational metrics and a huge fail.

Verizon then transitions to a new CEO Dan who is on a running clock with sole focus to eliminate costs vs Customer value in marketplace. Employees are eliminated without regards to performance and skills. Rather on Salary in 90 day increments. Culture is crushed.

What remains is tbe keast experiences C Suite Team in the history of Ma Bell.

Finally, while quarterly results can fluctuate, the one tbing that Verizon has lost and accerated under Hans and Dan is the strategic advantage Verizon had over 100 years... Customer And Employee Integrated culture.

This entire Summary will be the HBS business case for future generations to learn from.

GB - took over Nov 2017. Over her tenure, shareholder value has increased by an anemic 2.8%/year, membership by just 1.4%/year, and operating margins have cratered by 52%. Meanwhile, her annual compensation has steadily increased by 7%/year. Sounds like a “2” rating performance but a 4 or 5 compensation. Shareholders should ba----g on the BoD doors demanding her ouster. Wil never happen, since BoD is stacked with her pals.

Can we talk about this? Because I'm struggling to see how this is fair.

INC USUI team, has money for lavish dinners, unlimited upscale travel, "collecting points," cruise dinners, events... you name it. But somehow when it comes to their own TIS USUI counterparts? Layoffs.

Some people got told their roles "weren't sustainable." Weren't sustainable, but the boat outings were?
Make it make sense...........
If there's money for unlimited daily fine dining and over spend, there is money to keep people employed. Let's stop pretending this is about resources. It's about priorities. And right now, the people actually doing the work are not the priority.
You don't get to blow money left and right and then turn around and lay people off like it's a budget issue. That's not leadership. That's a failure of judgment, plain and simple. Shame on your leadership.
To everyone who got impacted, this is not on you. This says nothing about your worth or your work. You deserved so much better than this.
#Layoffs #Accountability #WorkplaceCulture #Leadership

I don’t want Dan and Alfonso to get on stage next time and complain about the terrible customer experience on the app or mobile site.

They chose to retain the underperforming team while laying off smart people. How did they decide to keep Adam C over other Senior Directors? And Chris P’s underperforming team remains completely intact.

The buck stops with them going forward. They can’t blame the former leadership team anymore.

Talk about some spin. If AK and his cronies in the C-Suite forgo their bonuses for the rest of their undoubtedly extremely short tenures and take a significant pay cut, then that'll show accountability.
And doesn't AK attend the WEF in Davos every year? What advice did he receive from all those geniuses?
Somewhere out there one can hear the echoes of Ginni's hysterical laughter.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-facing-leadership-test-accountability-2026-7

By: Sarah E. Needleman | Jul 15, 2026, 4:56 AM CT

When IBM delivered bad news on Tuesday, CEO Arvind Krishna didn't look for someone else to blame. He owned it.

Krishna, who is widely credited with turning IBM around since becoming CEO in 2020, said in a letter to investors that clients had redirected quarterly capital spending toward scarce infrastructure. Management underestimated the scale of that shift, contributing to the company's second-quarter shortfall.

"These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered," Krishna wrote. "We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected."

Though IBM's shares tanked in response, current and former tech executives told Business Insider that other leaders ought to emulate Krishna's candor. Owning a setback can strengthen a CEO's credibility longterm, they said, by showing that management understands the problem and is prepared to address it.

"He will develop more trust among his shareholders and employees and customers by being transparent," said former Cisco CEO John Chambers.

Leaders can gain more credibility from how they handle setbacks than from their successes, he added, though they need to move quickly. They should explain what happened, acknowledge what did not go as planned, and outline how they intend to get the business back on track.

"Rule 101 on setbacks: speed and be very visible," Chambers said.

Openness carries risks, though. Leaders facing a setback may not yet have complete answers, and acknowledging uncertainty can leave them vulnerable.

"You have to have the courage to say, 'Here's what I know. Here's what I don't know,' " Chambers said. "And that sometimes exposes you to critics."

Accepting responsibility

Gilad Bechar, CEO of Moburst, a digital marketing agency, described Krishna's remarks as "refreshing." He said CEOs often attribute disappointing results to outside forces such as tariffs or other macroeconomic headwinds.

"Usually you don't see Fortune 100 companies that are owning their situation like that," said Bechar. "They are very afraid of being this candid."

Krishna may have helped contain the damage by characterizing the shortfall as a forecasting error rather than as evidence that demand for the company's products and services had deteriorated, added Bechar. Showing that management understood what went wrong gives investors reason to believe the problem can be corrected, he said.

"If you're in control of the situation, you fully understand everything, and you just misjudge one specific element, it sounds like you're in a much better place," Bechar said.

Public-company leaders may be obligated to disclose material setbacks promptly, but accepting responsibility is a choice, said Jeffrey Puritt, the retired CEO of Telus International, a technology services provider now known as Telus Digital.

Krishna could have satisfied investors' need for information without explicitly owning up to management's mistake. By doing both, Puritt said, he demonstrated the accountability expected of someone in the top job.

"If you're the CEO, you get paid to take responsibility for the business's performance, win, lose, or draw," he said. Blaming others, Puritt added, would have been "a bit of a cop out."

'What you need to hear'

Krishna has spent more than three decades at IBM. He helped orchestrate the company's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed in 2019, and became CEO the following year. Since then, he's led an overhaul centered on hybrid cloud, software, and artificial intelligence.

Rod Adkins, a former IBM executive who also spent more than three decades at the company, said transparency is consistent with Krishna's leadership style.

"He has always been what I would call an above-the-board executive," Adkins said. "He will deliver what you need to hear versus what you want to hear."

That approach is especially important at a company like IBM, whose technology supports mission-critical operations, such as banking transactions and systems used by healthcare providers, airlines, retailers, and government agencies.

"Part of the trusted brand is being authentic with your communications," Adkins said. "Transparency, especially today, is a very important leadership attribute."

What exactly does this role entail, and what product are we working with? It looks like a glorified Scrum Master position, and most of the people in it are G8s. I'm not sure how sustainable this setup is long-term. What began as a pragmatic shift to stop engineering teams from building things nobody wanted has devolved into a massive, heavily certificated industry of performative bureaucracy.
More than 95% of product managers are not required .We have projects ,We dont have products .In tech there are no products.There are product managers even in data teams .Thats level of insanity this so called "product mindset" BS has reached

MST home dispatch tech use and abuse company assets. They drive 100K-200K bucket trucks to their home and back to their home garage everyday. Big V8 6.3 L engines use a lot of gas and insurance on top. Also, with MST high pay and only have .5 job per tech a day per tech how is that saving company money and liability.
There are rules to follow when joining home dispatch program. Following the rules helps save gas and time and wear and tear on a vehicle used to drive to work and to home. But MSTs abuse this program from driving to the garage every day and dispatching at the garage. Making a stop at the grocery store to grocery shop in the company vehicle before driving home. Not closing your last job at the job site and instead, drive home and being still dispatched on your work ticket and then closing the job when you arrive home. I follow the rules, and I do not want the home dispatch program to go away because of MSTs taking advantage of the abuse. Also, MST managers are favoring many MSTs and letting the home dispatch MSTs do what ever they want. STOP ABUSING THE HOME DISPATCH PROGRAM YOU MSTs. You know who you are...

I’m stupid and I still live in my parent's basement. How about you?

If you have left the company and you're in here moaning, then you haven't stepped away at all.

Xerox has to change. Decades of poor leadership, management and poor execution, coupled with quite incredible world events- remember COVID, have led it, and others in its sector to where it is today.

Many hark back to the days when Xerox dominated; sadly, Xerox didn't invest and didn't diversify then and, like others in the sector, is paying the price now as they attempt to do this against a ticking clock, which ultimately will and does impact employees.

You appear to have decided to move on; good for you. Others have made the choice to stay and support this change, and others will have found themselves stuck.

Many need Xerox to not only survive but beat the competition; they need the income.

Far too many posts on here don't contain facts. In fact, I would go so far as to say they deliberately carry disinformation intended to sow doubt, not healthy debate or even offer useful help, support and advice. That isn't healthy.

Far too many posts carry voices from the past, who are now on the sidelines shooting into the barrel. Let me point back to my earlier statement: it took decades for this to happen; if you were here in the past, you were a part of that decline; be accountable, stop saying 'I told you so' and su-k it up, you helped make this mess.

I don't drink the Kool-Aid, but I need to work; the best chance of me staying in work is to deliver, so that's what I'll do.

A couple of final words: If you're unsure, ask your manager, not some random on here. If they don't know, ask HR; you'll have to wait for a reply for sure, but it'll be correct(ish)(mostly). Don't get caught up in mindless survival assessments with folk on here. Let's be frank: if they knew what the markets did and how they worked, as they claim, they wouldn't be on here moaning and groaning; they would be spending the $ they were making. The last and most important thing. Focus on you, be healthy, don't come in here and worry about a financial assessment made by someone that literally doesn't know what they are talking about and who no longer works for Xerox. If you're struggling, reach out to someone who can help.

Giving the post a negative? You're part of the problem, not the solution.

Why does bill get to leave when he sc--wed everything up? He should have to sit with his poor decisions until death. What a clown.

The most productive thing you can do today? Embrace JOMO. We’ve all been raised on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but in the corporate world, FOMO is just a polite term for a bottleneck.

If you feel the need to be in every 30-person meeting to "stay aligned," you aren't leading; you’re hovering. If you need to be CC'd on every email thread to "feel informed," you aren't empowering; you’re slowing the engine.

At Verizon, we are architecting an AI-enabled ecosystem to eliminate "the mundane". But tech alone won't give us speed. We need a cultural pivot from "Agreeable to Accountable".

JOMO - The Joy of Missing Out —is the ultimate leadership flex. * It’s the joy of trusting your team to take "Total Ownership" of the talent lifecycle without you in the room.

When we stop trying to be everywhere, we finally give our leaders the space to be innovative and quick. Speed doesn't come from more eyes on a project; it comes from fewer, more decisive ones.

Let’s stop rewarding "presence" and start rewarding "impact."
Who’s brave enough to decline that 4:00 PM "update" meeting and trust the team to handle it? That’s the BOLD standard.

#Leadership #JOMO

I have had many great years working for Target but I think that Target is well past being able to return to what it was during its "glory" years. The culture has shifted in a negative way, well-respected leaders have moved on and there is more work than people. Target culture was always a bit of a double-edged sword. It could be difficult to infiltrate, especially if you weren't from the midwest, or weren't a Type A extrovert. That being said, the pride and positivity that people felt in working for Target consistently drove the team to go above and beyond to exceed requirements.

Yes, workload continues to be a problem but it is a symptom of a bigger problem. The biggest issue continues to be Target leadership. You have leaders within Target that (A) Don't understand the work that is associated with the roles on their team or (B) Do not know how to inspire/support their team to address workload or (C) Give the appearance of not caring.

Leaders have been hired from outside Target who did not have either the business skills or people skills to manage and inspire a team. For example, the VP of my area was an outside hire who previously managed a $25M business with 1-2 direct reports for a small, but aspirational retailer. Target put her in charge of a $6B+ business and she is ill-suited to lead people or strategy. She has been a failure and until recently, there was no accountability for bad team surveys or poor sales. The team was blamed and the ex-SVP allowed this to happen. There was finally HR intervention this year but guess what? She the VP is still here and sales are still declining!

My whole point in relating this story is that why should anyone work extra hard, beyond required hours and responsibilities, for a company where you aren't respected? I would have worked around the clock for a few of my past leaders who are no longer with Target because I respected them and they respected me. Hiring a "leader" who belittles her team in meetings, doesn't appreciate all the work being done and has driven team members to seek mental health treatment does not drive productivity or sales.

Bumped from @zy+1kx1vvht4.

I'm guessing that ML has continued his practice of short work days and long weekends - no work ethic.

Q2 sales will lack both plan and the latest exec forecasts. Substantially. SVP of sales and several Director / Sr. Directors in sales will finally be fired in August. Not for missing the target, but for missing their own forecasts now several quarters in a row.

ARR in the current quarter will shrink vs end of previous quarter (for the first time). That will be the catalyst for the bigger changes:

KKR will continute to re-shuffle the board to drive more accountability.

CEO still believes that "product is fine, everything else is the problem". He'll be fired, too. Timing just depends on interim and long-term succession plan. Nobody will miss him as he's been over-promising on outside investment / recapitalization / acquisition and under-delivering.

Once that happens, the power center of gravity will shift away from product groups. Don't need as many PMs and engineers if the goal is no longer just growth (which has been embarassingly lacking). PE firms are happy with high profitability / low growth or lower profitability with higher growth (rule of 40). Any combination works for them long term and the company will be reconfigured to set and maintain the direction.

All of this will be disruptive, causing more internal power fights. Good people will leave for better opportunities (which exist for them) why others will be RIF'ed in certain areas. That will leave the company with lower cost, but also understaffed in important areas. That imbalance will prolong recovery time.

In short - long term (18 months+), Omnissa will be fine.
Short term (12-18 months), it's going to get ugly. Opportunities for smart people to navigate the disruption.

You read it here first.

PPDM was the biggest steaming pile of horse shiiiiit from day #1. Everyone who worked on it should be fired on the spot!

My customers are ripping it out of their test environments, which they could never get to fully work, in droves. What a complete joke of an Enterprise software product. Pathetic.

One of the biggest mistakes this “leadership” made was creating a 5x RTO policy for everyone because of the actions of a few.

The understanding has always been that the push toward 5x RTO was driven, at least in part, by concerns about a small number of people who weren’t meeting expectations under the 3x8 policy. Whether that’s true or not, those people are largely gone. The ones paying the price today are everyone who complied and remained.

Instead of holding poor performers accountable, leadership rolled out a blanket policy that treats everyone like they need to be monitored. High performers, average performers, and low performers all get the same treatment. That’s completely a$$ backwards.

Good people managers manage performance. They don’t replace performance management with one size fits all policies that punish the majority because of the minority.

So, the unintended consequence is the new 8 & skate culture.

People who used to go above and beyond now focus on just checking the box. Badge in, sit for eight hours, badge out. Time that once went into extra work is now spent commuting. Discretionary effort has simply been replaced by compliance.

The irony is that the policy intended to improve accountability has actually reduced it. When you stop rewarding results and start emphasizing attendance, don’t be surprised when people optimize for attendance instead of outcomes.

If someone isn’t doing their job, you deal with that person. You don’t build a policy that discourages the very people you should be trying hardest to keep.

I am seeing First Line Supervisor lying about their move to Edmonton. They have already told their friends that they will not move. But, when talking to me, a subordinate, I am told how committed they are to move to Edmonton, and all the benefits of moving there. Looks like FLSs are allowed to lie without any consequence.

With the former Head of Cloud Migration no longer with the organization, many employees are questioning why the same leadership structure and operating model continue unchanged. This includes leaders such as Hewitt, Orella, Kaul, Lucero, and other program management leaders. These are highly compensated leadership roles, and employees naturally expect clear technical strategy, strong execution, measurable outcomes, and accountability. If these roles are not delivering the expected value, there is an opportunity to redirect those investments toward higher-impact engineering initiatives.

In the US, we cannot see where we stand on SCORE so we have no idea how we are progressing towards our quota. We cannot see all of our backlog. Is this the same globally?

Some of these leaders only have 4–5 direct reports, yet they carry themselves as if they're God's gift to the program. Instead of leading, it feels like their job consists of asking Gemini to write emails and forwarding them.
What's even more concerning is that some Assistant Directors seem to lack fundamental leadership skills. It appears they earned these positions through politics and bootlicking rather than proven performance, yet they're still trusted to make important decisions.
Even worse, several have never consistently come close to hitting quota, but instead of taking accountability, they blame the frontline teams. Leadership is about owning results, developing people, and setting the example—not shifting responsibility.
If someone can't effectively lead a team of five, it raises serious questions about the standards for leadership.

I lost count how many times ISG engineering would openly brag about overinflating estimates for work and intentionally leaving features partially finished as an "insurance policy" for future job security. How's that working out for ya'all?

BNSF utilizing drones to track worker performance and efficiency, while operations testing as a secondary measure…. “In the event a violation of company policy or safety violation is viewed” during the process of rail and equipment inspections in yard and mechanical facilities.

There seems to be a large amount of spin from the company executives about these outages, but nothing mentioned about the real cause.

CFO Ackland speaks about "good mobile signal strength" being available at certain locations during the outage. However, that radio signal is completely useless if the core / IMS network elements have failed.

The CEO and CFO both said that mobiles camped onto other provider's networks during the outage and that emergency calls would have still been possible.
However, if the customer's own radio (RAN) signal is still active (and core network has failed), mobiles WILL NOT move to other carrier's networks for the purpose of initiating emergency calls.

The company needs to come clean about what really happened to cause the outage.

Moreover, in the current political climate, all risks to network integrity need to be removed. Allowing offshore operation & maintenance access to Australian networks is an unacceptable security risk.

While offshoring may be cheaper, telecommunication companies should re-consider this horrible risk to Australia's critical infrastructure.