#accountability

…that you work for a company that wouldn’t p1ss on you if you were on fire.

A company that thinks it’s fine to have an all hands that unambiguously states that RIFs are happening in the next few weeks, even puts it in writing in a recap email, then does NOTHING, then does not even have enough respect for the human that it sends a follow-up email addressing what they themselves chose to put out there in terms of messaging. Accountability, you see, is only for us peons.

So yeah. Don’t sc--w over your team or the customer but “work to rule”. 8 hours. Don’t volunteer extra work. If you have a legitimate press contact share the email and that there’s been no update.

F@ck Enrique, executive bonuses, and this dying brand.

Who’s fault is this new mess and how severe will the fallout be? What did you think of Cara’s email apology?

Management’s obsession with hitting a rigid, daily efficiency percentage has created a completely broken, circular game of finger-pointing. What’s worse is that these impossible metrics are actively creating an unsafe working environment.
Here is the daily reality: local foreman gives the crew a specific job assignment. The crew completes the assignment exactly as directed, but because the work assigned doesn't automatically equal management's "magic number" for the day, the foreman gets chewed out by their boss.
Instead of pushing back up the chain and explaining that the crew did exactly what they were told to do, middle management tries to point the blame directly on the craft to save their own skin.
The absurdity is off the charts. We are talking about the exact same foremen who assigned the work in the first place, and the exact same foremen who are sitting behind multiple high-def cameras running ops tests and watching our every single move. They see exactly what we are doing every minute of the shift, yet they still look us in the eye and ask why the numbers are low.
What the system completely ignores is reality. Nowhere in these calculations are we allowed to add to our time for things that are completely out of our control.
Our guess? Higher management is trying to figure out how to navigate away from traditional, publicized layoffs. By making up completely unrealistic performance metrics, they can stress people out or manufacture failures.
When the only logical answer we can give a foreman is, "You gave us the job, you tell us," it shows just how detached the metric system is from actual field operations. If you're going to manage by a spreadsheet to squeeze the craft, at least look out the window to see the unsafe environment you are building on the ground.

If you’re considering a role on the Markets side, know what you’re walking into. The culture there isn’t just competitive, it’s dog-eat-dog, and it’s shaped by leadership that’s more interested in protecting itself than developing people. Too many of the “managers” running these teams are underqualified for the seats they hold, and they’ve built environments that reward toxicity because toxicity is what got them there.

Loyalty and tenure mean nothing. Years of contribution mean nothing. If you value a workplace with real accountability from the top down, look elsewhere.

Instead, I got no training, no mentoring, and assignments outside my skill set. So much for my expectations.

Compared to this same time last year, everything is trending in the wrong direction:

• Customer Success output is way down — fewer courses built, slower turnaround, more backlog.
• IA/EA adoptions are noticeably lower across multiple disciplines.
• Salesforce closed business is so far behind that leadership is blaming “CRM hygiene” instead of acknowledging the real problem.
• Faculty frustration is rising — some are openly threatening to switch materials.
• Customer Success and reps are already exhausted, and it’s not even September.

We’re running back‑to‑school with a skeleton crew and a roll of duct tape. Org chart vacancies everywhere. New hires who don’t understand their roles or the workflows they’re supposed to support. Experienced colleagues continuing to exit, and many who remain are actively looking for new careers.

And here’s the part leadership won’t say out loud:

This is NOT what Apollo wanted heading into an IPO.
Apollo expected a clean, stable, predictable back‑to‑school season — something they could point to when selling the story to Wall Street. Instead, they’re getting:

collapsing workflows
missed in‑stock dates
angry faculty
exhausted teams
shrinking adoption pipelines
declining IA/EA momentum
internal confusion about roles, ownership, and accountability

This is the opposite of “IPO‑ready.”

And it all ties back to the May 1st reorg.
The May 1st reorg removed the last wave of people who actually understood Higher Ed The people who stabilized operations, built courses correctly, managed timelines, and kept faculty relationships intact.

In their place, leadership installed a structure full of:

• inexperienced managers
• unclear roles
• pods stretched across institutions
• Customer Success teams drowning in work
• reps covering territories that make no sense
• workflows patched together with duct tape

The May 1st reorg wasn’t a “reset.”
It was a detonation, and we’re living in the blast radius.

Apollo wanted a clean runway to an IPO. Instead, they got a back‑to‑school season that looks like a controlled crash.

Employees can see it.
Faculty can feel it.
Customers are talking about it.
And the numbers reflect it.

This isn’t “a tough year.”
It’s a disaster, one created by leadership decisions that gutted the last of the real industry talent right before the busiest stretch of the year.

If Apollo thought the May 1st reorg would make Cengage look stronger heading into an IPO, they’re now seeing the truth:

You can’t cut your way to stability.
You can’t reorganize your way to expertise.
And you can’t IPO your way out of operational collapse.

We were at 245 summer st. The room was vp’s on up. Lots of mba, egghead types. We were talking about updates to a platform, to include new offerings. I had spent 8 years on the phones and got a new gig. I felt like I could adequately describe and represent the associates who are on the front lines.

The conversation was about logical progression and workflow of a call. I insisted that not all calls flow a logical progression but many times clients get emotional. I cited several examples and case studies to make my points. The discussion became difficult, especially for this one svp bonehead who’s claim to fame was he was smarter than everyone. By the end of the meeting, because of time, the decisions made were to not change a single thing because the logic was good and the back office would just need to get more efficient.

These eggheads do not know what they’re talking about and think they’re superior to the associates.

Let’s be clear: this is not a criticism of women broadly and certainly not of the many women of color at Nike who consistently kick a-s, deliver exceptional work, challenge broken systems, and make the company better.

This is about a specific corporate archetype: privileged, entitled "leaders" who we-ponize victimhood whenever their competence or conduct is questioned. They demand accountability from everyone beneath them while treating accountability for themselves as persecution.

They turned personal insecurity into “leadership,” favoritism into “talent strategy,” and organizational politics into a substitute for results. They promoted one another, protected mediocrity, punished candid dissent, and surrounded themselves with people unlikely to challenge them. Competence became threatening. PowerPoint replaced product.

Meanwhile, the people who genuinely understood athletes, footwear, design, engineering, and innovation were sidelined while professional meeting-attenders accumulated titles and congratulated themselves for “transforming” the company.

Now, after helping dismantle a culture built by generations of talented people, they will undoubtedly insist that none of it was their fault.

That may be their most enduring Nike innovation: failing upward while presenting themselves as the victims.

The leadership that has been running the company to the ground for several years has decided the failures aren’t due to their own choices — not the years spent pulling engineers away from innovation to chase a commodity PC chip, not the fixation on edge AI while the entire industry moved toward datacenter AI, and not the pattern of entering mature markets long after everyone else.

They never prioritize, never take responsibility, and always look for someone beneath them to blame.

Now they’ve concluded that the real problem is the workforce. Their “solution” is to push out hardworking people and replace them with new hires from the industry, buying themselves another 3–4 years of insulation while nothing fundamentally changes. Because the core issue is them.

And this is the only company where one individual simultaneously controls the financial decisions, the operational direction, the business strategy, and the sales pipeline — all concentrated in a single seat, right next to the CEO. There is no separation of responsibility, no checks and balances, no accountability. When one person holds every lever, failure has nowhere to go but downward.

By 2029, when shareholders start asking why the promises remain unfulfilled, they’ll either quietly exit or invent another cycle of excuses.

Meanwhile, countless careers and families will be disrupted — while the same leadership circle continues to thrive, untouched by the consequences they created.

They can't take any constructive criticism without getting defensive, making excuses, and refusing accountability. In today's corporate world, errors get you fired so fast, but they seem to think mistakes are just part of the process. Good luck to them. They're going to need it.

Verizon sales and support representatives often keep customers on expensive plans against their requests because company commission structures and performance metrics heavily incentivize high-tier plan retention and upsells.

Why is the TAO leader (P. M.) threatening an employee about his job security in front of hundreds of employees during her talk in Bengaluru? Why has the Board of Directors and CEO not taken any serious action? Are leaders at that level not accountable for their words and actions? What happened to Nokia being an Ethical Company? How do you think the employee who was being threatened felt after being embarrassed in front of hundreds of employees? Does she think this is a joking matter? What type of damage does this do to Nokia (brand, investors, customers, future contracts (gov't and commercial), employees, etc)? Should leadership be just as ACCOUNTABLE as any other employee?

I know every team has that one person who somehow helped ruin WPE for everybody.

So instead of actually dealing with that person, we changed the rules for everyone and just collectively took it up the a-s.

And the funniest part? That person is still gonna find a way around the new rules.

They’ll come in at 11, walk around talking for 30 minutes, complain about being there, make sure enough people saw them, then disappear and somehow still count it as compliance.

Why didn’t we just create a way to report the actual problem employee and handle it directly?

Because now everybody gets punished, productivity gets disrupted, morale gets worse…

…and Captain Loophole is still doing exactly what Captain Loophole does. 😂

The recent documentary about Boeing is an interesting watch.
How those at the top exercised rampant cost cutting, destroyed trust in a company and lined their own pockets at the expense of everyone else

"In 2009, Boeing opened a facility in North Charleston, South Carolina—a non-union state—to produce the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” plane as cheaply and quickly as possible. The majority of the plane structure was outsourced from cheaper suppliers rather than being assembled in-house. The facility was soon full of shoddy engineering—ill-fitting pipes were sledgehammered into place, holes were found in aft body fuselage sections, and tiny metal slivers that were liable to cause massive electrical problems were found in the planes.

How do executives think the AT&T guarantee is a good thing?

If anything, it’s a complete middle finger to the customer when their internet is out for a day, and they get $2.32 refunded 30 days later.

Are they just THIS out of touch with normal people?

Sorry peeps, but this is therapeutic… doing the work for the reporters so they don’t have to. 🤷‍♂️

Centene expects to spend $315 million to $365 million on employee separation costs while reportedly committing $500 million to as much as $1 billion to Cognizant for technology services involving TriZetto, claims, billing and customer service. Source: https://www.beckerspayer.com/workforce/centenes-buyouts-could-have-a-315m-price-tag-for-the-rest-of-the-year/

Here’s the important part… *Investors, CMS, and the state agencies sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Centene** should ask whether the work is actually disappearing or whether Centene is trading internal capability, institutional knowledge, and direct accountability for vendor dependency.

A point of comparison: Citi is moving in the opposite direction, reducing its reliance on technology contractors from approximately 50% to 20% to strengthen data governance, risk management, and operational control. Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/citigroup-plans-slash-it-contractors-hire-staff-improve-controls-2025-03-13/

Why is Centene increasing vendor dependency at exactly the moment its execution risk is increasing? Why did Citi decide to do the opposite? Both are highly regulated industries. United Healthcare is also investing heavily internally and is quarters or years ahead of Centene in that regard.

What is the purpose of their job? Track token usage and scold us if we use too much or not enough?

https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/medtronic-ceo-pay-2026-executive-comp/

This is a 10% raise from 2025 Meanwhile stock down 27% last 5 years. Congratulations. Great job GM

Imagine the amount of RIFS that could’ve been saved if these people like GM take a pay cut for the incompetence. Sadly accountability doesn’t exist in this company. And instead they get raises.

What are the benefits of having him represent AT&T?

There’s a point where “culture” stops being what a company says on LinkedIn and becomes what people actually experience when they work there.
You can post all the polished messages you want about people-first leadership, growth, transparency, and culture—but saying those things doesn’t make them true. Culture is reflected in who gets listened to, who gets protected, who gets developed, who gets held accountable, and ultimately, who chooses to stay.
If leadership continues asking the same small circle of people whether everything is okay—and those people are the ones benefiting from the current system—of course the answer is going to be yes. But that is an incredibly narrow way to measure the health of an organization, especially one that desperately needs to right the ship.
At some point, leadership has to get uncomfortable enough to actually listen. Not just to the loudest voices, the favorites, the “yes” people, or the people sitting closest to power. Talk to the people who left. Talk to the people who stopped speaking up. Look at retention. Look at engagement. Look at production beyond the surface-level numbers. Look at what happened to the travelers and relationships that were handed off to people celebrated as “top performers.” Did those relationships grow? Did those travelers stay? Were those desks actually nurtured—or were they simply inherited?
And if the same people have been sitting in leadership seats for three years while the same problems continue to surface, it is fair to ask whether the problem is no longer the circumstances—it’s the people in the seats.
Leadership should not be a talking head. It should not be gossip, cliques, politics, favoritism, or protecting the people you personally like. Leadership means fighting for your people, advocating when it is uncomfortable, holding everyone to the same standard, and having the courage to admit when something isn’t working.
Stop fluffing certain desks while demanding everyone else prove themselves over and over again. Stop celebrating numbers without examining how they were achieved or what happens after the handoff. Stop confusing loyalty to a leadership circle with loyalty to the company.
Three years is enough time to make meaningful change.
At some point, continuing to do the same things, empowering the same people, protecting the same behaviors, and expecting a different outcome becomes exactly what we all know it is: insanity.
What makes this particularly sad is that this company once talked so passionately about being different. About putting people first. About creating something better than the corporate environments so many people had experienced elsewhere.
Somewhere along the way, it started becoming the very thing it said it would never become.
Profits matter. Performance matters. Growth matters. But people have to matter too.
And when good people continue walking out the door, leadership shouldn’t be asking how to improve the messaging around culture.
They should be asking what happened to it.

Why does HCSC still maintain project manager roles? Beyond following up with people, what value do they actually add and why don’t they seem to be held accountable when projects fail? Shouldn’t these positions be considered redundant with us being agile ?

This rests at your feet.
Kept hiring from the Boyz club for CEO and here you are.
Pathetic.
Not surprising.

Some workplaces say they want honesty.

They don’t. They want compliance.

The moment you question dysfunction, challenge bad leadership, or point out what everyone else is quietly seeing, you become “difficult.”

That is how toxic cultures protect themselves.

They make integrity look like insubordination.

If you are trying to stay honest in that kind of environment, you need more than good intentions.

You need strategy.

A few things I’ve learned during my career:

1/ Document patterns, not feelings.
One bad meeting can be dismissed. A pattern is harder to ignore.

2/ Ask questions before making statements.
“What outcome are we solving for?” lands better than “This makes no sense.”

3/ Keep your tone boring.
If they can make the conversation about your reaction, they will avoid the issue.

4/ Talk about the work, not the person.
Focus on process, deadlines, expectations, and decisions. Keep ego out of it.

5/ Know who is safe.
Not everyone who agrees with you privately will stand with you publicly.

6/ Know when the culture is the answer.
Some places are not broken. They are operating exactly how leadership allows them to operate.

Integrity still matters. But in the wrong room, it needs strategy.

Have you ever worked somewhere where telling the truth made you the problem?

The LeBron James Innovation Center was built to represent the future. Instead, it increasingly feels like an extraordinarily expensive monument to executive vanity, an architectural masterpiece filled with empty desks, empty language, and far too many empty suits.

Walk through the building on an average day and the most impressive innovation may be how successfully leadership has made actual leadership disappear. There is hardly anyone there, accountability is even harder to find, and yet the people in charge continue performing their roles as though everything is working perfectly.

From facilities leadership to the executives supposedly responsible for product design, development, and engineering, the operating model appears remarkably consistent: protect the narrative, protect the hierarchy, and never acknowledge the widening gap between what is presented in meetings and what is actually happening.

The building is world-class. The leadership seems better suited to a corporate costume department.

These leaders speak endlessly about innovation, collaboration, courage, transparency, and psychological safety. Nike has apparently perfected all five, as presentation slides. In practice, when someone raises a legitimate concern, challenges a failing process, or points to a red flag, leadership rarely addresses the issue. It simply begins treating the person who identified it as the issue.

Nothing says “innovative culture” quite like punishing the people who notice what leadership would prefer not to see.

Real leaders confront uncomfortable information. Empty suits manage the optics. Real leaders create clarity, accept responsibility, and protect their teams. Empty suits schedule another meeting, repeat the approved vocabulary, and wait for someone more disposable to absorb the consequences.

At the LeBron James Innovation Center, there is no shortage of impressive titles, carefully staged presentations, executive theater, or self-congratulation. What appears to be in critically short supply is ownership.

The irony could not be sharper: a building dedicated to innovation operating within a culture that can discourage honesty, punish dissent, and reward people for maintaining the fiction that everything is fine.

Innovation does not come from dramatic architecture, expensive equipment, slogans painted on walls, or executives pointing at presentations about “the future.” It comes from capable people being trusted to challenge assumptions, expose weaknesses, and solve difficult problems without fearing professional retaliation.

When leadership treats critical thinkers as disposable while protecting those who preserve the status quo, the organization is not engineering the future. It is engineering its own decline, apparently with executive approval.

Nike still has extraordinary talent. What the LeBron James Innovation Center appears to lack is leadership worthy of that talent.

But perhaps that is the building’s greatest innovation: proving that you can spend a fortune creating a monument to the future, fill it with empty suits, and still expect everyone else to pretend the emperor is fully dressed.

https://www.tradingview.com/news/prnewswire:3f8bc5859ebaa:0-did-humana-inc-insiders-breach-their-fiduciary-duties-to-shareholders/

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Nike Innovation Leadership: World-Class Excellence in Strategic Seat-Warming

Please join me in recognizing the extraordinary contributions of certain Nike Innovation directors—the courageous executives who collect enormous salaries while bravely enduring back-to-back meetings about meetings.

Their impact is difficult to measure, primarily because there isn’t any.

These visionary leaders have perfected a revolutionary management model:

• Protect your title.
• Protect your salary.
• Protect your friends.
• Protect the appearance of importance.
• Under no circumstances protect, develop, or advocate for the employees doing the actual work.

When talented people ask for support, mentorship, career development, or basic accountability, leadership suddenly becomes powerless. But when someone posts an uncomfortable truth online? Incredible. Immediate alignment. Urgent conversations. Executive escalation. A flawless demonstration of speed, collaboration, and decisive action.

Apparently, deleting criticism is the only deliverable this leadership team can complete on schedule.

Imagine if they invested that same energy in developing employees, removing barriers, making decisions, or producing something more valuable than corporate theater and expensive calendar invitations.

But let’s be fair: warming a premium office chair all day while protecting a six-figure salary is demanding work. Sometimes you barely have enough energy left to say “people first” before doing absolutely nothing for those people.

Innovation isn’t dead. It’s just trapped in a meeting, waiting for approval from someone whose primary contribution is occupying a director-level seat.

Just delete it.™

The best employees get blamed and cut while the lazy, gossipy, rude ones get protected. Why does it work this way?

Name me another company where folks like this could thrive?

We should never want to, nor stand for, living in a society where corporations such as Humana can simply do WHATEVER they want to do.

There are written laws for which they mist adhere to AND there are unwritten laws, which we often call morals, ethics, and goodwill, which these corporations should adhere to.

Humana is failing on both fronts of written and unwritten laws.

Time they either cease to exist as a corporation or please leave Louisville as your home base so that your stench of corruption will not rub off on other local corporations, communities, and our citizens.

I’m not sure why analysts continue treating each new Centene C-suite promise as if the last one was delivered.

In 2021, Centene told investors it was targeting a 3.3% adjusted net income margin, with the benefits of its margin-expansion plan expected to materialize in 2023 and 2024.

Drew Asher was specifically named as one of the executives driving it.

Here is what Centene actually delivered, using its own adjusted earnings and premium-and-service revenue:

• 2021: 2.58%
• 2022: 2.48%
• 2023: 2.60%
• 2024: 2.58%
• 2025: 0.59%

Four straight years of approximately 2.5%, followed by a collapse to 0.6%.

They didn’t briefly reach 3.3% and fail to sustain it. They never reached it at all.

Employees were reorganized, outsourced, offshored and RIF’d in the name of “margin.” Meanwhile, the executive specifically charged with delivering margin expansion missed Centene’s own target every single year.

Apparently, “accountability” is another expense Centene decided to eliminate.

Question to the Board: when does Drew get RIF’d???

Target:
https://filecache.investorroom.com/mr5ir_centene/114/CNC%20MS%20Conference_Final.pdf

Results:

https://investors.centene.com/2022-02-08-CENTENE-CORPORATION-REPORTS-2021-RESULTS

https://investors.centene.com/2023-02-07-CENTENE-CORPORATION-REPORTS-2022-RESULTS

https://investors.centene.com/2024-02-06-CENTENE-CORPORATION-REPORTS-2023-RESULTS

https://investors.centene.com/2025-02-04-CENTENE-CORPORATION-REPORTS-2024-RESULTS

https://investors.centene.com/2026-02-06-CENTENE-CORPORATION-REPORTS-2025-RESULTS-AND-ANNOUNCES-2026-GUIDANCE

In the name of ai, he brought his stooges and now ki-ling actual working groups in verizon. He is super biased toward enterprise ai group led by hi* no respect for other groups who have shown millions of actual saving on ground. 0 fair chance for others to even present their work.

To ensure fair and objective decisions, review system/login data for attendance, leave, WFH, and actual work activity. Use verified records and job impact rather than assumptions or personal relationships.

​In corporate settings, toxic behavior rarely stems from ignorance. Adults in leadership positions know when they are micro-managing, publicly correcting, dismissing input, or shifting goalposts.

​Organizations often grant "grace" downward, expecting employees to absorb poor managerial behavior under the guise of "leadership style" or "stress," while treating an employee's emotional reaction or boundary as a performance issue. This asymmetric tolerance erodes psychological safety and corrupts institutional security.

​When bad behavior is ignored at the leadership level, it signals professional accountability and workforce engagement practices are optional for the powerful.

If the new SA position only covers MOW’s PTO. Who will cover open territories with no RTM? I’m not sure many DMs have the ability to do actual real work. Will they pile it on other RTMs? Good lord this is a mess. lol

The Commercial Central Area did not show up in FY26. New Area and Operation Leaders are needed. The other areas have their act together based on all the accolades they received.

They’ve hired another PayPal leader, and I’m honestly very happy about it. At this point, anyone would be an improvement over Tanya J. and Nancy C.

I just hope the new leader recognizes how much of the old leadership culture is still holding us back—and how slowly some teams in the digital space move.

I also hope they take a hard look at the ridiculous structure we have today, where it takes 5–6 stakeholders just to get a single button added to a digital page.

I’m really hoping this brings a meaningful cultural shift, with more accountability, faster decision-making, and a lot less bureaucracy.

New York's labor movement is grappling with the rapid integration of artificial intelligence across various sectors. While some unions see AI as a potential tool to assist workers, others are actively fighting to prevent job displacement and protect professional expertise. A common thread among workers, union leaders, and elected officials is the demand for transparency, accountability, and worker-centric AI governance. Different unions are adopting varied strategies, from proactive partnerships with AI developers to preemptive negotiations and legislative advocacy. The overarching concern is ensuring that AI implementation prioritizes human workers and their rights.

New York

https://thechiefleader.com/stories/ai-and-labor-in-new-york,57362

Poor decisions, no talent, no accountability, pretty much every day is a disaster. Layoffs are just the end result.

Any progress rooting out employees with fake degrees, and moving them out.

How is this STILL happening? This should be one of the easiest things imaginable to get right... you’ve only had YEARS to figure it out…. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the incompetence.

We’re being told five-day RTO is important enough to monitor and enforce, while the system they’re using to monitor it can’t even produce an accurate report.

And we’re supposed to trust this data enough for it to impact employees? What a fu-k!ng joke.