That turns into the tweet, “When you say “I think it’s pretty simple”, I hear “I think I understand the parts I can see”. What they say is, “I think it’s pretty simple” and what I think is, “Based on your understanding of the parts you can see… which is incomplete.” I hear something someone randomly says and in my head I translate to what I believe they are actually saying. I’ve had this schtick on Twitter for years. When we handed our biased spreadsheets to the VP, he glanced at them, quickly discerned we hadn’t done our jobs, and said, “You need to cut more. Protecting the team, of course, but not helping the overall business. My co-directors already have the spreadsheet ready, we’ve done the drill, and we do exactly the same thing with our biased spreadsheets. It’s an awful process I wish on none of you.
Yes, the application of these principles meant the lines shifted, often drastically, and that meant one director eventually was letting go of far more of their teams. The humans above stay, the humans below are let go. Yes, you’re drawing a line on this spreadsheet. It’s about as fun of an exercise as it sounds, but they each completed this complicated process by defining a set of principles, explaining them, and then applying them to our spreadsheets. Both the first VP and the acting VP know we’ve done this and understand part of the job is a reconciliation of these disparate data sets. This does not meet the intent of the exercise which is to recommend a strategy that allows the company to survive. Each of the three directors has carefully built their spreadsheets to demonstrate why the humans on their team must remain.
However, the three spreadsheets are biased. We are able to use this spreadsheet to understand who is on the team, their capabilities, what products they build, and what those product will contribute to the bottom line. It’s critical.”įast forward four weeks and there are three spreadsheets of our three teams chockful of information regarding each employee. “Yeah, I need the information in an hour. It started with, “I’m sure we won’t need to do this, but can you take this here spreadsheet of your team and document how much each of them is devoted to this set of in-flight projects? Take your time.”Ģ4 hours passed and they walked into my cube, “Are you done, yet?”
In each case, it started with an unexpected meeting late in the day after the executive team had reviewed the latest books. The existing team of three directors completed the first layoff under the first VP, the second under the interim VP (the head of Business Development… another story for another time). Now this will be the third (and last) layoff. There’s a new VP of Engineering running the show and while he’s been hired with the guidance to “turn the ship around,” the tech economy is a wreck and his first official act is throwing passengers overboard so we don’t sink.
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