You're right that the CEO's goals may not be the idealistic goals I'm thinking of. The goals I had in mind were: be honest with your employees about something terrible and show them, don't tell them, that you valued their service to the company.

Judging by the contents of this email: the goal might be to confound or confuse counter-arguments to the decision, limit the damage PR-wise (and stock wise), and above all, insulate the new executive staff from a groundswell of anger/hatred from the bottom.

My instincts as a writer, and maybe a bit as a human being, is that you shouldn't try to fool the people who support you. If the author of the email (probably not Dorsey) was a stronger writer, and perhaps free of some pressures, I'd like to think he or she could have both been fair to those under him or her, and also protected from their wrath.

I too would be very interested in seeing historical examples of leaders forced to write messages explaining tough decisions. Would you happen to have any?

Let's be practical, and I don't mean this in a cynical way: The goal isn't to actually BE honest.

The goal is for the employees to feel as if you ARE being honest, and that they have something positive to focus on that is not just plain disappointment and insecurity.

Plenty of corporate drones take this too far and focus too much on the sugar-coating to the point that only other top corporate drones think the email is a good one.

But I think Dorsey's passes the b.s. test (Most people's reactions, even those being fired isn't going to be "what a load of b.s.")

Could he be more direct? Yes. But it would come at a risk of coming off as callous and incosiderate.

I had read a couple of books both of which said the sandwich technique is an out-of-date way of delivering bad news and it's significantly better to do it immediately to help not continue to build up to the bad news that the person on the other side knows it coming (because, let's face it, the sandwich is obvious from 100ft away).

Unfortunately I can't figure out what books I read and I'm having a hard time finding studies (just keep finding damn buzzfeed like article about using the sandwich). If someone else finds these sources or debunks them I would be greatly appreciated :)

While not scientific, the example I can think of is in How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (published: 1936). In the section dealing with how people read your messages, he lists an actual letter from a company apologizing about a delay [which reads just like any corporate e-mail].

Then he rewrites it focusing on what the person reading it is concerned about: themselves. The key was to focus on the questions a reader will ask, "How will this effect me?" and "What should I do?"

That's exactly one of the examples I was thinking of! Thanks!

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz specifically mentions it being terrible.