What I don’t understand is why they don’t stretch it out over the whole year - less than 1% a month could be relatively easily “hidden” even if people kinda know what is going on. Average churn might be lower than that, even.
Which makes me think it’s performative and they WANT the shareholders to see it.
If your a public company it’s not hidden. Analysts are watching everything. A one time even might hit your stock and then it starts to recover soon after, but an ongoing event would raise suspicions of a deeper problem.
Department B, in February we need you to cancel the lowest-ROI 10% of your projects as part of a strategic realignment to focus on our core goals.
Department C, in March we need you to lower your ongoing costs by 10% by whatever means you think is best, to ensure we're on a stable footing financially.
Department D, in April we need you to chase the last Widget Classic users onto Widget Cloud and wind up the team working on Classic.
Department E....
It's just modern security practices! /s
It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.
As a lowly high income IC, I am prohibited from almost any outside business activity and in some cases forced to divest when joining a new firm. Somehow the guy running the company who has actual ability to make conflicted decisions is allowed to moonlight? Fabulous.
It's actually worked quite well at Oracle over the decades.
Benioff, who is former Oracle, hasn't perfected it like Larry has.
Most Co-head situations I see are either higher-ups setting up a power struggle between 2 newly appointed co-heads, or an existing head pretending to step back by appointing someone as their co-head who they can sabotage in real-time.
Larry is still the largest single stockholder of Oracle (~27%). So everyone knows he still runs the company at the end of the day.
Benioff only owns ~2% of Salesforce. There's institutional investors who own more of Salesforce than even Marc.
Their first non-German leader (Anshu Jain, who didn't speak German) was made Co-CEO with an older German hand Jürgen Fitschen from the board.
They pushed out Jain after 3 years, brought in a Brit John Cryan (who spoke German!) to co-CEO with Fitschen. Fitschen stayed on another year after which they finally let the non-German, Cryan run the place as sole CEO for 2 years before replacing him with another German as sole CEO.
So in total there were 4 years of non-German co-CEOing with a German, 2 years of a non-German actually being sole CEO, and then back to a German again like the rest of their 153 year history.
Don’t VC’s generally prefer that a startup has co-founders? Having such a team mate fosters better decisions, acts as cheerleader when one person is feeling down, etc.
I don’t see a material difference between that and having a co-CEO setup…
What do you think?
You need an executive function to set direction and unblock stupid territory squabbles. Someone whose decisions are final. If you have two actual CEOs, you don’t have that.
The one time I've seen this situation has been as a board member of a small non-profit. This was ages ago but, as I recall, there were two well-qualified candidates for an editor-in-chief position. It seemed a case where if we appointed one, the other would walk. So we made them co-editors and it didn't go well.
But I can imagine circumstances when it can work with the right people and circumstances.
That amount is, I think, only applicable to Elon Musk and it looks like this is going to crash sooner or later anyway - the big Tesla investors are all furious about how much wealth Elon's shitposting has cost them and I would not be surprised if they threaten him with the choice of continuing to tweet or getting ousted. In any case, even he was a paper-only CEO at SpaceX anyway, Gwynne Shotwell has run the ship for years now.
So, I think you can replace "4" with "N where N>1"
...but was still 1,000 to 1,500 people.
Benioff did a whole media tour talking about how Salesforce would do no pandemic layoffs to set some kind of example, and said that they didn't expect other companies to follow their example, but asked them to just pledge no layoffs for 90 days, even though Salesforce was going to do better than that.
Around 91 says later, Salesforce laid off 10% of the company, with no prior warning to the employees who were laid off. The atmosphere internally from the top down was outrage that any of the employees who were laid off would mention that they got laid off to their family/friends/coworkers, and that doing so was somehow a betrayal of "trust".
Brett Taylor, who was then the "co-CEO" (read: Benioff's cleanup crew and babysitter), led an all-hands a month or so later where they took no questions and referred to this as a "one-time reshaping exercise". Benioff slipped up and told MSNBC that this was an annual thing. Brett Taylor pretended not to know Benioff had said that, and acted like it never happened.
This all-hands was a full month after the all-hands that took place the same week as the layoffs. In that one, they took questions, but since all the questions were about the layoffs, they acted like nobody had submitted any questions and the Q&A host came up with some softball "what projects are you excited about"/"what's the biggest challenge with being a market leader" ego questions instead.
I didn't believe that it was "one-time" then, and today I've learned that I was right not to. I left before it became a habit, and have only been relieved to have left.
I wonder when the next annual 10% layoffs will happen at Salesforce? Because it's pretty much the only thing I'd trust them to do reliably at this point.