#leadership

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.

Rumors are buzzing all around the company. Unfortunately since leadership hasn’t communicated much people are making things up. I suggest you don’t spread rumors until we have facts in official communications.

This is just a general question for retail workers, especially Sams Club workers. As a long time associate, I have never entertained the idea of leaving until the last few years. However being there for as long as I have, with established vacations, and PTO, and of course insurance, it feels as if my hands are tied and I should just su-k it up. I am not happy as to the way the direction of this company has gone, or the leadership within the walls of my store. I don't want to sound like a je-k, but I feel as if I so much better then where I am currently stuck at. That I am wasting possible untapped potential. I know that many of you probably know the feeling or may be struggling with the same internal fight. To take a leap into the unknown feels a bit scary, since I am unsure of what to go into next? But I also know that I am suffocating where I am at. And don't want my life to pass me by, knowing I could have been more. Has anyone here successfully navigated away from Sams Club? To put into context, I am a 22 year associate.

So called analytics “leaders” at Nike who took us down the gutters are congregating at Amgen. Glossy footwear is trivial but meds O-o

I was let go after more than 20 years. I have to ask, why are you still at FIS? It is a tough market and the longer you are there without spending adequate time searching for a new job will hurt you. You already know it is a POS company. C Suite is filled with liars, and broken monetary promises. Are you too scared to try and consider something else or are you hoping to be let go for severance? Either way, neither will make you happy. You are losing out on potential other jobs that will be flooded with more candidates after more and more people are let go.

For those let go like myself, it haunts me every day and I feel your pain. I moved on but it took time. The pain, helplessness and uncertainty was real. My advice, network, network, network. Also, keep reviewing and looking into AI. It will be asked of you when you interview regardless of position or title. Don’t let your position on a spreadsheet define your worth.

Sc--w you SF and your overpaid minions who have watched the stock fall apart and a board that let the company go to cr-p with no changes the past few years.

How much do you agree with this statement: “My feedback directly contributes to leadership bonuses, even if it contributes to nothing else.”

Dan promised Wall Street ai-cs tech stack by November. That means more layoffs are coming to reach the $5b .. I expect more leadership departures to be announced soon since last week’s cuts don’t add up to the $500m Verizon wrote off in the sec filing for severances and real estate. Brace for impact.

This would make Verizon truly an AI-first company

All new leadership coming from the outside.. And all from the same group who is moving from Company to Company

Don’t know where we’re going, so we won’t know when we get there

I was listening to a podcast and the discussion was with a management consultant. I think they summed up the issue with Phillips 66 and this management team:

“…the macro implications of a society that is maximizing profit is that it's going to be minimizing other goods that aren't easy to quantify.”

Under Greg, there was a balance to things—a purpose. He cared about people and the legacy of the company. Yes, he was not perfect, but you knew he cared about the company, the industry, and the people.

I believe that is gone. We are just focused singularly on making more money, trying to beat the competition, and just catering g to shareholder interests. It is interesting that, despite that focus, we are falling further behind, while also giving up the soul of the company and are experiencing an erosion of culture.

In our search for profit, Phillips has abandoned its commitment to people, developing people and taking chances on people with promise. Instead, we give people a job description and tell them it is on them to prove they have the skills for the next role. We talk only in terms of shareholder interests, returns on equity/investment, and tell people we must always be focused on beating MPC, VLO and a group of companies that the management team and board are focused on.

Am I wrong? Would like other perspectives. Is Phillips still committed to people and the interests of the communities and customers we serve?

Come to think of it, I have been with the company for 10 years and almost never hear about customers. Why is that?

“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.

Senior management protects their turf, you do something to better the company like win a technology challenge and are told that you should have saved it for your own group and not shared it company wide. For that specific reason I have been canceled. No longer an e performer even though no one knows nearly how to do their job and comes running to me. I was told that I should be honored that many take my slides for their own presentations and not giving me credit.

I went to a competitor who now loves my work and also understands their competitive edge over fidelity

Look at Nike’s stock price over the past 50 years. There have been ups and downs, but nothing compares to the decline since 2020. The five-year downward trend is crazy.

It’s hard not to see this as the point where Nike went off the rails. Leadership, business strategy, and company culture all changed for the worse. I wonder how business analysts will explain what happened years from now.

Everyone should tune into 2Q earnings on Wednesday and witness “leadership’s” spin on their reality vs ours and our customers. What’s the anticipated playbook? If like other earnings or townhalls it will go something like this:
1) Credit Hoarding and Blame Deflection: Stankey will take personal credit for all successes, but scapegoat realities or market factors for any poor metrics, failures, or missed targets.
2) Spinning Data: He’ll present metrics selectively to inflate achievements while minimizing or altogether hiding negative data/results.
3) Focusing on Optics Over Substance: He’ll prioritize vanity metrics like PR splashes or superficial growth instead of addressing structural issues or the long-term sustainability of the corporation.
4) Gaslighting Employees: He’ll publicly contradict internal realities; he will claim the company is thriving while employees experience understaffing, canceled projects, and record level layoffs and burnout.
5) Silencing Dissent: He’ll negligently ignore bad news, punish employees (no matter their level) who report operational failures or low morale, and exclude critical voices from high-level conversations.
6) Lack of Empathy for Stakeholders: He’ll dismiss the toll that poor organizational performance (e.g., RTO and targeted layoffs, restructuring) takes on the workforce and quarterly results.

When are we going to be rid of this terrible regime? Any light at all at the end of the tunnel?

“You can’t shrink your way to greatness”

• Seth Godin

Dan, you have highly competent employees, functionally adequate systems / processes / tools, a strong band, and multiple engagement points with most customers. Try reimagining the customer experience and lifting walletshare capture through the assets you have. Reducing your human capital now is just the junkie’s next fix but cannot, logically, achieve increased shareholder value. you know it, we know it.

Rumor has it that Kamal & Mange are out early August

Given the headcount of AEG, we are heavily investing in AI. Our strength in AI chip design lies in the vast internal data within our tools, which can be directly leveraged by AI models, a luxury that customers and other AI chip companies simply do not have. That said, it is striking that neither my team nor neighboring teams appear to be working directly with AEG to integrate this AI into our tool workflows. It seems to me that AEG is another den of scammers. Meanwhile, we are laying off many contributing employees while expanding a group that lacks profitability, clear direction, and a viable strategy.

Has anyone else noticed or heard about ongoing ethics and leadership culture issues in Nike’s Sports Marketing group?
There’s been significant turnover at the senior levels over the past couple of years. Some current and former employees are saying the ethical standards and decision-making in the group still need real improvement, even with new leadership in place.
Wondering if others have seen similar issues or if things are actually getting better.
Appreciate any honest takes.

We have lost market share for years so now LFG has been rolled out moving many specialists to the portfolio teams. Are they replacing the failed portfolio sales and engineering leadership at all levels that are responsible for this.

So many people are quitting from burnout. Leadership doesn't care because they don't have to pay severance. They think they're winning.

The people running this place don't know what they're doing. They just play games and waste time. It's obvious and it's hurting everything.

Treating people well isn't complicated. When you respect employees, they stay and contribute. Mistreat people and it brings everyone and everything down, including productivity. Why can't leadership figure this out?

I heard that most of the experienced people we laid off recently were immediately snapped up by a competitor at a much higher salary. If that doesn't show how clueless our leadership is, nothing will.

It's awful seeing coworkers lose their jobs, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. At the same time, this place has had serious issues for years that leadership never bothered to fix. Looking back, almost everyone who's left has ended up happier somewhere else. I'm starting to think the people who walked out last week may have gotten the better deal.

They keep promoting young, inexperienced people into management positions while the people with years of experience and real qualifications get passed over. So we end up losing our best talent, and replacing them with people who don't know what they're doing most of the time. Solid business strategy. /s

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?

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.

Morale is in the gutter due to cuts and leadership couldn't care less. They don't seem to realize that stressed employees aren't productive employees. Or they don't care.

This has been one of the most volatile Org changes period i have experienced in my 17 years at USAA. At the core we have amazing & inspiring mission. However behind curtains this has been messed up in last 12 - 14 months. Constant layoffs, rapid changes, mindless promotion of people, New leader Introductions means wiping out complete existing leaders, Zero interest for people development, Completely demoralized workforce. I know people in HR & Communication read this site. PLEASE SINCERE REQUEST. Do all layoffs, changes what ever once & give us some psychological safety & focus so we all work to deliver best for members.

Who will be the next CEO? If the board lets Khalaf stay until 65 or if they cut him, they need a successor, stat.

What happened in Claims a few weeks ago? Heard there may have been some senior officers departing? Performance, or is this an exercise in flattening the leadership structure and cutting costs?

IBM has a major gap in its product portfolio. We don’t make and sell devices that have GPUs. This is what enterprises are clamoring for AI training and inferencing at scale, which is way more powerful than the accelerators we have on IBMZ and Power. And IBM Cloud can’t compete against the hyperscalers, which are expensive, however ideal for running AI use cases at scale. We have a strong AI product portfolio, although so do a lot of companies. We’ve acquired a lot of companies that complement our core products and have a massive ecosystem. But most days, I wonder -
What does IBM even stand for? Where do we even belong in this rapidly evolving world?

I don’t believe IBM will fail. However we all, especially our Senior Leaders, need to really think about what we actually stand for. Not this BS hybrid cloud leader statement. It’s about crafting a real vision that inspires the world. It’s about culture change to invigorate low morale at the ranks. It’s about picking up this company and giving it a really good shake. If we don’t do something drastic, then the free fall will continue.

I wrote my resignation letter in 15 minutes.

The real version took 2 years
to write inside my head:

The one I submitted said "pursuing a new opportunity."

Professional. Clean. Polite.

The one I actually meant said something very different.

It said I brought you solutions for two years and you treated every one of them like an inconvenience.

It said I worked weekends you never knew about on projects you never acknowledged.

It said I walked into your office looking for a leader and walked out feeling like I was bothering you.

But resignation letters do not say those things.

They never do.

And that is the problem.

Companies never hear the real reason. So they never fix it.

And the next good person walks out the same door for the same reasons six months later.

79% of employees who quit say the reason was a lack of appreciation.

Not money.
Not a better title somewhere else.

They just wanted someone to notice.

30% of workers say they have felt invisible at their own job.

Nearly a third of the workforce is showing up every day wondering if anyone would notice if they stopped trying.

I was one of those people.

And I can tell you the moment I stopped being one.

It was not when I found a better boss.

It was when I stopped looking for one.

I started building something where my effort was the product.

Where every hour I put in went directly into something I owned.

Where I did not need anyone's permission to matter.

And here is the part nobody talks about.

The same traits that made me a great employee, the initiative, the problem-solving, the willingness to go above and beyond, those are the exact traits that make someone a great builder.

You were never the problem.

You were just giving your best skills to someone who did not know what to do with them.

If you have been writing your own resignation letter in your head for months, that is not burnout.

That is clarity.

Something in you knows that your energy deserves a place that actually values it.

And if you are ready to start building that place yourself, I put together a free toolkit to help you take the first step.

It walks you through how to take what you already know and turn it into something that actually belongs to you.

I’m reading managers and directors. Is there any more info on which managers and which directors? What channel

Others seeing this already... Managers running scared schmuck. There time has finally come to learn technology or retire.

Drain the swamp and focus on revenue. Hans had no plan!