#accountability

Extracts from an article originally published in Australian newspaper "The Age" on 13/08/2026:

Link to the original article:
https://www.theage.com.au/technology/telstra-boss-lands-11pc-pay-rise-in-year-of-1200-job-cuts-20260813-p60nvy.html

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady says “ultimate accountability” for July’s national Triple Zero outage rests with her, after the company’s board stripped $607,000 from her short-term bonus.

Brady was speaking as the company delivered its annual results on Thursday, with Telstra’s net profit rising 2.7 per cent to $2.4 billion. Brady’s total pay rose 11 per cent, to $6.8 million, and the telco says the failure that cut off Triple Zero calls has cost it almost no customers.

“There were things within our control that triggered the outage,” Brady said on Thursday, describing the board’s reasoning.

“As CEO, ultimate accountability rests with me for the outage.”

Telstra directors cut her individual performance multiplier by 20 percentage points, leaving her a short-term bonus of $2.762 million. Then-group executive of global networks and technology Shailin Sehgal took the same reduction, and the rest of the senior executive team, including chief financial officer Michael Ackland, lost 10 points each, taking a further $1.29 million out of the bonus pool.

Brady said the external investigation was still running and the board could impose further consequences through FY27 pay once it reports

This masthead (The Age + other publications), first revealed the outage was caused by a server that had reached the end of its supported life almost a decade ago and was never replaced, despite newer devices costing less than $30,000.

In its full-year results on Thursday, Telstra revealed its direct workforce is now 4 per cent smaller, at 29,334, and the telco has signalled it will keep cutting as it simplifies the business. The job losses lifted its redundancy bill by $92 million to $206 million.

That cost-cutting helped drive a full-year result that has delivered shareholders a bigger dividend and a fresh $1 billion share buyback.

Who knew that accountability really meant managing things HORRIBLY for a couple of years and then applying reactive management and tossing human beings out of the back of the plane they could never fly or land? Their plan going forward? Buy AI pre-built tools and outsource everything to automation. These guys are totally clueless how to run a company.

Why are people investing in the stock at all? They’re easily the worst band of do-nothings I’ve EVER seen in my 20+ years of working in enterprise companies. If the analysts and investors could peek behind the curtain they would be horrified!

Nike Innovation has perfected a remarkable process: take an exciting idea, overcomplicate it, poorly position it, leave it half-finished, and then ceremoniously dump it on Inline’s doorstep.

“Here you go, team. Innovation!”

Except it isn’t innovation. It’s a tu-d wearing a futuristic PowerPoint deck.

The concept is incomplete. The consumer story is vague. The business case is missing. The execution is barely house-trained. Yet somehow, everyone stands around admiring the bowl and congratulating themselves on the flush.

Then Inline gets handed the plunger.

They have to clean it up, make it manufacturable, explain why anyone should buy it, and somehow turn the whole steaming pile into an actual product. When it struggles, Innovation can conveniently claim that Inline “didn’t protect the vision.”

What vision? The one circling the drain?

Nike Innovation doesn’t deliver finished solutions. It delivers Innovation tu-ds™: expensive, poorly positioned droppings packaged with buzzwords, dramatic renderings, and absolutely no toilet paper.

Just Flush It

Welcome to Nike Innovation, where we fearlessly reimagine everything except leadership, accountability, and how people are treated.

Here, “innovation” means arranging the same executives into exciting new organizational charts and announcing the results in a presentation titled The Future of Innovation.

The process is revolutionary:

Talented people generate the ideas.
Talented people do the work.
Management adds “strategic guidance.”
Leadership presents the outcome.
The people who created it are reorganized, deprioritized, or shown the door.

That’s the famous Nike carrot-and-stick model.

The carrot: You get to tell people you work at Nike Innovation—the magical place where the future of sport is supposedly invented.

The stick: You eventually realize the most carefully engineered product is management’s protection of management.

Failure is pushed downward.
Credit is pulled upward.
Accountability disappears somewhere in the middle.

But don’t worry: after treating the people doing the work as disposable, leadership will schedule an all-hands meeting about courage, belonging, vulnerability, and putting athletes at the center.

Because nothing says “innovation culture” like frightened employees listening to protected executives explain the importance of taking risks.

Nike Innovation doesn’t have a shortage of brilliant people or powerful ideas. It has a system that consumes both while congratulating itself for being visionary.

The employees innovate.
Management appropriates.
The PowerPoint celebrates.

And when the people responsible for the work are finally exhausted or eliminated, leadership can proudly announce another transformation.

Nike Innovation: If we rename the dysfunction often enough, eventually someone might mistake it for progress.

With all the focus on productivity and transformation, should S&T also be looking at its own organizational structure?

As more infrastructure moves to cloud, the traditional I&O footprint is changing, but we still seem to have multiple organizations with overlapping responsibilities across I&O, Common Services, Tech Strategy, Deployment and Transformation. In some areas it is difficult to understand who actually owns the work versus who coordinates, governs or gets the visibility.

India Operations is another example where the operating model and accountability are not always clear. There is a perception that resource quality has declined and that PepsiCo is increasingly being used as a stepping stone, while it is not always clear how performance and outcomes are being monitored.

Common Services also seems to overlap with Operations and other teams, without a clear understanding of what it uniquely owns.

Maybe the bigger question isn’t just whether I&O should be consolidated. Should S&T be looking at simplifying its overall structure, combining overlapping organizations and reducing some of the senior leadership layers? If we expect the rest of the organization to become leaner and more efficient, shouldn’t S&T be asking the same question about itself?

Verizon paid employees, can we come together and do more. We can cry about an infinite number of reasons why the work is hard, yet we stay and we quit putting in any effort. Since we are stuck together at work, do we have the professionalism to help each other, or are we going to pout and refuse to put in any effort? We can avoid RIF, but a collective lack of effort only provides the company reasoning for further RIF and rebadging.

This site addresses many groups but overlooks the one that has always been, and remains, in charge, the Anglo Alliance. They dictate both the culture and its declining quality, contributing nothing of substance while speaking white.

Their individualistic cuddle culture makes them hyper-sensitive to their own emotions, yet they still preach nationalistic sermons of teamwork. They target DEI, H1Bs, and non-Anglos for their own failures, excused by therapists who tell them it is not their fault.

Where is the Anglo self-accountability that their own self-help books supposedly encourages.

Dear John. We would like some market based accountability on your dismal performance as Chief Ego Officer. All your inflated projections that don’t make a dent in your very poor performance. If we are treating talent based on performance you should have been gone a long time ago you mo--n.

Some leaders are remarkably skilled at standing near innovation and taking credit for the temperature.

They wander through the work, ask carefully rehearsed questions, nod with executive concern, repeat whatever language is currently fashionable, and then disappear before anything difficult requires courage, judgment, or accountability.

Their greatest innovation is turning self-promotion into a full-time position.

While talented people build, test, fail, solve, and push through resistance, these leaders focus on the truly important work: remaining visible, politically protected, and conveniently adjacent to every success.

No meaningful decisions. No barriers removed. No risks taken. Just endless positioning dressed up as leadership.

It is an impressive performance, really.

To contribute so little while appearing so important requires a very specific kind of talent. Real innovators leave behind better products, stronger teams, and meaningful progress.

Performers leave behind meeting invites, talking points, and the lingering question of what exactly they do all day.

Dear ex members of the ELT,
It has now been proven that you were completely remiss and liable for the total destruction of this once great company. You placed personal ambition above fiduciary duty, personal gain and opulence above shareholder value and introduced a culture where sycophants were promoted and prudent employees dismissed. It is time you put your hands up and explained and took account for this. You have hurt a great many people, their families and loved ones along the way. Whilst at least one of you is a known narcissist, the silence is deafening. Where is this empathy that you all so dearly told us we must have?

Apparently Erik Day and other MB managers are saying they laid people off because sellers said they wanted more accounts in Tell Dell? Has anyone else heard this too?

How incredibly insulting!!

Nike employees below management already know how the system works. The people closest to the work carry the deadlines, solve the problems, document the processes, train the teams, and rescue failing projects. Management controls the narrative. When the work succeeds, leadership takes the visibility. When it fails, an individual contributor takes the blame.

Employees are told to be bold, challenge convention, speak candidly, and bring their full selves to work. But the real rules are very different. Do not challenge the wrong manager. Do not expose incompetence. Do not question favoritism. Do not document too much. Do not become inconvenient. And do not expect HR to protect you from leadership.

At LBJ Innovation, politics can matter more than performance. Personal relationships can matter more than expertise. Loyalty to management can matter more than loyalty to the work. Employees quickly learn that speaking up is only encouraged when what they say is safe, flattering, and easy to ignore. Raise a serious concern and suddenly the conversation becomes about your tone. Document a pattern and you become difficult. Ask for accountability and you become the problem.

The same company that publicly celebrates inclusion can become remarkably efficient at protecting itself when employees raise concerns about discrimination, retaliation, disability, or unequal treatment. That is how fear becomes culture. It does not require everyone to agree. It only requires enough people to understand the consequences of speaking honestly.

Employees watch underperforming managers survive while strong contributors disappear. They watch favoritism get reframed as trust, political loyalty get rewarded as leadership, and self-preservation get dressed up as business judgment. They watch the people doing the actual work treated as replaceable while those managing appearances protect their titles, reputations, and stock awards.

Most employees see it. Few feel safe enough to say it. That silence is not proof that the culture is healthy. It is proof that the consequences are understood.

Nike does not have a shortage of talent. It has a leadership accountability problem. Innovation cannot thrive where employees are afraid to speak. Inclusion cannot exist where vulnerable employees are treated as liabilities. Accountability cannot exist where managers control the story and workers absorb the consequences.

Culture is not what appears in a town hall, an employee survey, or a presentation about values. Culture is what happens when someone tells the truth and leadership decides what to do with them.

The people doing the work already know what the culture is.

They live it every day.

Spin doctor Louie just handed you nothing again while blaming tariffs, prices of fuel, inflation, and some other world event outside anyone's accountability. Yeah, we know the everything is up, except for our own income year after year.

Worked here some time ago, the management was terrible. Their so called 1, 2, and 3rd level leaders were extremely terrible human beings. They treated people poorly and there was no recourse for the staff. The higher level management just believed their lies, no accountability, it was a really terrible gruling experience.

Tick tok... amazing how Congress is zeroing in publicly on Verizon/Jack Smith artic frost.

Amazing Hans fired when first surfaced.... other Execs named who ate no longer here either.

Finally, the Vz Board gets exposed on Hans failure.

I know people don't want to hear that but it's true. Hear it out.

BAIN is running the company now. That's why there is such a stark deviation from the way Dell has always operated in the past. Bain & Company is one of the top global Management Business Consulting firms - emphasis on the term "Business Management" since Dell has exercised very little of that discipline up until now.

Rest assured BAIN is going over the portfolio with a fine-toothed comb. They are looking at delayed and failed projects. They are looking at the number of employees per project. They are looking at burn rates. They are looking at abysmal productivity ratios. They are looking at fixed, variable, and sunk costs associated with underwater ROI for numerous projects that have failed year in and year out.

The truth is Dell operated with little to zero accountability in the past. Now there is accountability and people are surprised?? It should be the other way around. We should all be surprised it took MD this long to clean up the fat, the bloat, the waste, the inneficiencies, the lack of execution, the lack of accountability. And whether you want to believe it or not, he's cleaning it up to get the company ready for sale before he retires.

Granted, Wall Street loves these types of moves because layoffs in particular artificially prop up EPS on the income statement. Investors love that. However, when there's no one else to lay off, and productivity is still floating around 3%, Dell is dead in the water. That's a fact! That's why MD is trying to sell pieces/parts before it caves in on itself. Dell has run its course.

BAIN Is calling the shots now people. Get used to it. The more layoffs we have, the more you can assume long overdue waste and bloat are being discovered in the numbers.

They stage the whole cycle so they can manufacture nonsense feedback. The entire year I kept asking my manager for a real project because I was under‑utilized and stuck doing basic data analysis. I even reached out to others for work, but he blocked everything and insisted that all assignments had to come “directly from him.” Then in the PA meeting he claimed I “didn’t build credibility.” How exactly was I supposed to do that when he deliberately prevented me from taking on meaningful work?

Over the last decade, this company shifted more and more toward hiring and promoting people who are friendly and easy to manage, instead of those who are smart and willing to challenge the status quo. Anyone who asks tough questions or push for better ways of working are immediately labeled as difficult and punished, while yes-people are rewarded. This is exactly why you hear less debate, see less accountability, and see fewer ground breaking ideas. Maybe it’s time to recognize that agreeableness is not the most valuable trait for a company’s success.

Related note, but toxic positivity is also overwhelmingly present here.

Every year the "top" contributors get to go (with a plus one) to the Diamond Club event. Waste of $$$$. Always, a 5 star place. Top entertainment. Stop the Waste. They have to have 1 person from each group nominated.

What does the strategy team actually do?

They spend their time building polished, fancy decks, but there’s often no execution plan because execution isn’t part of their mandate.

I also want to build a rocket. But do I have the budget, resources, talent, or infrastructure? No. Anyone can propose ambitious ideas if they’re not accountable for delivering them.

So how do we justify the existence of these teams?

In the November layoffs, VCG eliminated entire strategy teams. Yet in the new organization, they’ve rebuilt another army of people doing…strategy.

I hear that Jira Boards are being heavily scrutinized to see whos' doing what

My only question is: why do we need so many stakeholders to get anything done?

Many companies today are looking for technically strong product leaders who own both the customer experience and the underlying technology. At Verizon, however, it often feels like too many non-technical stakeholders control the UI and experience decisions, which creates bottlenecks and slows down execution by the engineering and product teams.

If we’re not going to build experiences that fully leverage the technology we’re investing in, then what’s the value of building those technical capabilities in the first place?

Whatever you just saw was 7%. No where is that anywhere near enough for whatever Visa is trying to achieve as part of the 2030 strategy that is constantly being touted.

Layoffs will be an annual strategy moving forward. More offshoring to lower cost regions like Poland. For those teams with sister teams in lower cost regions, you're merely training your future replacements.

By the time Ryan and Rajat leave the company, Visa will be a shell of its former self, and they'll just point to CBDCs as the cause instead of take accountability for their actions.

Who are the Teflon's ? The one who always manage to dodge accountability by shifting responsibility onto others, while the rest of the team is left to pick up the pieces and work twice as hard to go unrecognized as always.

Arizona is led by a VP of Network and Contracting who seemed completely disconnected from what it actually takes to build successful departments. Every decision bottlenecked at the top, progress stalled, and problems lingered until they became the norm. Yet somehow the answer was never better leadership—it was always another initiative, another slogan, another “Mission Simplify.”

Mission Simplify wasn’t a solution. It felt like an admission that the executives couldn’t solve the problems they were paid to solve, so the burden was pushed onto the very employees who had been carrying the organization all along. Workers were expected to innovate, fix broken processes, absorb impossible workloads, and still somehow drag leadership across the finish line.

That’s the real tragedy: executives collecting major salaries while frontline employees did the heavy lifting. Then, when the consequences arrived, the people who built the company were the ones shown the door.

Leadership isn’t measured by titles or résumés. It’s measured by results. And when departments crumble under poor direction, accountability shouldn’t stop at the people doing the work.

There’s a certain poetic justice in discovering that a title alone doesn’t create value. Eventually every leader has to face the same reality as everyone else: your paycheck should reflect the impact you make, not the position you hold.

Enrique was chairman of the board. He did not have equal status with other board members.

To say a Board Chair is "equal" to other board members during a CEO search completely misunderstands how corporate governance works. I am refuting what someone else said to me.

While every board member gets a single vote on the final candidate, the Chairman of the Board has a completely unique and dominant role in the process.

They control the filter: The Chairman selects and directs the executive search committee.

They choose which recruitment firms to use and set the core qualifications for candidates. They decide who makes the shortlist before the rest of the board even sees them.

Controls the Agenda: The Chair manages the meeting schedules, decides which candidates get the most discussion time, and acts as the official gatekeeper of information.

Leads the Negotiations: The Chair is the person who actually sits down to negotiate the final compensation, perks, and contract terms with the chosen candidate.

Becomes the Boss: Once hired, the CEO reports directly to the Chairman.

The Chair is the one who establishes performance metrics, runs executive evaluations, and holds the leverage to initiate a firing.In corporate governance, the Chairman is not just sitting in an equal circle. They guide the entire trajectory of who gets hired, how they are managed, and how the board votes.

Enrique bears greater responsibility for hiring Alex Chriss. To the one troll on this site that probably sits on the comms team, you are wrong on this.

I had a customer screaming at me over something that wasn't my error. My supervisor heard the whole thing, knew the customer was wrong, and still threw me under the bus to save face. He apologized to the customer for my confusion, then he pulled me aside and told me to just let it go with a lecture about customer experience. I hate it here.

Long story short, employee sent complaint about their manager (ED) to HR. MD doesn't gaf. End of story.

I hate recon!! How are we finding stuff that wasn’t there during inventory?? Also, does your store manager participate in any of it? Mine doesn’t do cr-p then expects everything from everyone!! We don’t have AP so they are “supposed to be” AP.

Book by Jim Collins. If you know, you know.. Somehow, seemingly NOT ONE of our “leaders” have read the book, or understand, or care to understand the importance of ‘Getting the right people on the Bus’. To me, this is a direct acknowledgment that T is nothing more than a stock or commodity, with no real interest in being a competitive and top performing company. Settling for financial position, dividends, and gains is their game and none of us should expect anything more. We are all an operating expense that can be reduced when needed.

All PE in IT should stop doing grade 5 and 6 assignment. Have every PE provide their top 3 project. Take projects away and assign them to a Grade 7. If the Grade 7 executes, the PE gets BE. Most India worker better than American PE.

Who, or what, is behind the long string of failures in ISG? Jeff B? Travis? Arthur? Who/what else?

Never have we seen such a continuous pattern of sustained failure without a change in behavior or accountability.

BAIN should be looking at common threads in each of these and clean house.

x400 - Failure
ScaleIO - Failure
XC4000 - Failure
DM5500 - Failure
Santorini - Failure
Hydra - Failure
VxRail - Failure
PPDM - Failure
Cyber Recovery - Failure
Apex - Failure
CloudIQ - Failure
EMC Storage Strategy - Failure

I've been at the bank long enough, and in enough different roles, to finally understand how the place actually rewards performance.

The reward for hard work isn't recognition. It isn't career growth. It isn't additional compensation. It's more work.

Not just any work, either. You get handed the complex, politically sensitive, high-risk initiatives that everyone else has quietly managed to avoid. The kind of work where failure has consequences, success is expected, and if you somehow pull it off, leadership thanks you by immediately assigning you the next impossible project.

Competence isn't rewarded here, it's exploited.

The irony is that the less capable you appear to be, the less you're expected to do. People who consistently fail to deliver, miss deadlines, or spend more time trying to hand off work than actually completing it somehow develop an impressive track record of failing upward. They become experts at managing perception instead of outcomes, while the people actually producing results are too busy carrying the organization to spend time marketing themselves.

Then there are the teams that seem to have won the organizational lottery. Small teams. Clearly defined responsibilities. Minimal scope creep. Leadership that actually protects their capacity instead of treating it like a public utility. Flexible delivery timelines. Dedicated administrative support. They get measured on exactly what they signed up to do.

The rest of us? Apparently our job description is simply "everything else." Need another critical program? Give it to the team that's already drowning. Another governance function? They'll figure it out. Production support? Add it. Executive requests? Sure. Regulatory deadlines? Why not? Twenty-four-hour operational oversight? Of course. After all, they've always found a way before.

Then leadership has the audacity to act surprised when capacity becomes an issue. The best part is pretending this is all accidental. It isn't.

Leadership has the reporting. They have the staffing numbers. They have the capacity plans. They sit through prioritization meetings. They review resource models. They approve organizational structures. They know exactly which teams have half the support and two or three times the responsibility. They know which groups are expected to supervise critical operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year while simultaneously delivering strategic initiatives.

They're not uninformed. They're informed enough to know exactly what's happening and comfortable enough to let it continue. When you escalate the issue, you get the standard corporate script.

"Prioritize better."

"Focus on the highest-value work."

"Be more strategic."

"Challenge your assumptions."

As if no one has ever considered making a priority list.

You can spend weeks documenting workload, mapping every deliverable, demonstrating capacity with actual data, and proving mathematically that there aren't enough hours or people to accomplish everything being demanded. The response?

"We understand."

Translation: We have no intention of changing anything, but we'd appreciate it if you'd continue accomplishing the impossible so we don't have to explain the problem to someone above us.

The most frustrating part is that leadership often mistakes resilience for excess capacity. Every time a team sacrifices nights, weekends, vacations, morale, or retention to somehow meet another impossible deadline, leadership congratulates themselves on successful planning instead of recognizing they've just normalized another unsustainable expectation.

And so the cycle continues.

The competent become the organizational pack mules, carrying increasingly impossible loads because they've demonstrated they can survive them. The underperformers continue to enjoy manageable expectations because no one expects much from them anyway. Meanwhile, leadership points to another successful delivery as proof that the current operating model works, blissfully ignoring that it only works because a handful of people refuse to let the wheels come off.

At some point, you realize the system isn't broken.

It's functioning exactly as leadership designed it.
The people doing the work absorb the cost.
Leadership gets the credit.

And every year, everyone wonders why the people capable of carrying the organization eventually stop volunteering to do it.

This feels like a textbook example of people believing their own narrative. Instead of meaningful transparency or honest discussion, it’s filled with self-congratulation and carefully crafted talking points.

There’s very little substantive information here. It’s just selective framing, unsupported claims, and messaging that doesn’t align with what many people are actually experiencing. Rather than acknowledging legitimate concerns or difficult realities, the focus seems to be on celebrating themselves and controlling the narrative.

Real leadership is measured by results and accountability, not by how enthusiastically you praise your own performance. At some point, the applause for yourselves has to give way to honest conversations backed by facts.

Me to Claude: should all these people lose their jobs?

Claude: “Thanks for the question. It would appear so.”

Arvind, read your own headline back. “Company culture was too slow to change.” Not “I set a strategy that leaned on debt-funded acquisitions for five years.” Not “I ki-led a working deployment focus six months ago and had to rebuild it under pressure.” Not “I chased a stock price number instead of asking whether the growth underneath it was real.” Culture. As if the culture is some ambient weather system that happens to a company, instead of the direct, measurable output of what leadership rewards, funds, and tolerates.
Here’s what “culture” actually means when a CEO says it out loud: it means employees. It means the people three, four, five levels below you, absorbing blame for decisions they didn’t make and couldn’t have stopped. You don’t get to spend years building a strategy on acquisitions and mainframe timing, watch the props come due at the same time, and then, when the market notices, hand the bill to “culture.” Culture doesn’t sign off on M&A. Culture doesn’t set the incentive plan. Culture doesn’t decide which function gets ki-led in January and rebuilt in July. You do.
And the board’s own language makes this worse, not better: confident in the strategy, but will “hold leadership accountable for execution.” Read that twice. The strategy stays untouchable. Execution is the only thing on the table, and execution is exactly the layer where the people with the least power to change the strategy live. That’s not accountability. That’s a firewall, built to make sure the decisions at the top never have to answer for the results at the top.
So here’s the honest question, asked directly, not through a euphemism about culture: why is it always easier to say “we faltered” as a company than to say “I got this wrong” as the person who ran it? Why is the sentence “culture was too slow” acceptable in a headline, while the sentence “I ki-led a function I should have left alone” never makes it into one? If you were confident enough to reshuffle the entire org on a six-month clock, be confident enough to put your own name on the outcome instead of a word that conveniently has no face and no bonus attached to it.
Own it, you said. So own it. Not the culture. You

We’re now having to work on accessibility standards and compliance, and it’s clear this should have been addressed years ago. The reality is that someone dropped the ball in starting this project, and now we’re operating under a deferral that forces us to catch up under time pressure.
What makes this especially frustrating is that accessibility should have been built into the work from the beginning, not treated as an afterthought. The cost, delay, and rework required to fix this now are significant, and the project is far less efficient than it should have been. Someone failed to start this work when they should have, and now the company is stuck doing expensive retrofits under pressure. And they’re laying off the most important ppl needed to go forward.

Furthermore, accessibility matters, but government should not impose one-size-fits-all solutions on every business or building. The real issue is whether a mandate is proportionate to the cost, because a badly timed retrofit can become a huge and unnecessary expense if the work was never planned from the start. Private organizations should have flexibility to solve access problems in ways that fit their size, budget, and actual use, and accessibility should be built in early rather than forced in later through an expensive scramble. You can support equal access and still criticize wasteful, retroactive implementation.

internal sentiment at this company is too negative. hard to work with some people/teams with sh-t attitude and outlook as a motivated new hire and outsider, trying to make it work. cant even explain how much worse my last gig was and it was rated one of the best global employers, for years, as fortune 100. opentext is no different than other companies: team, manager, business group dictates all. if you’re developing a 30+ year old product to match what industry solution peers already have……please. like get real about who you are, what you do, the market, the future, and show up with some humility and accountability. /rant

In John’s Q2 results email he said, “We’ll need to embrace a market-based culture and continue executing against our 2026 priorities.”

That got me thinking… what exactly does “market-based” mean?

A market-based system generally means rewards and consequences are tied to performance. High performers create more value and are rewarded accordingly. Poor decisions and poor performance have consequences. Resources flow to what works, and what doesn’t work gets changed or terminated… That’s not how this place feels.

For employees, compensation isn’t meaningfully tied to individual performance. Top performers and average performers often receive very similar outcomes, while broad policies apply to everyone regardless of results.

And if we’re truly going to talk about a market-based culture, shouldn’t that standard apply at every level of the organization, including leadership?

A market-based culture shouldn’t just measure employees. It should measure strategies, capital allocation, recruiting, retention, culture, innovation, and long-term shareholder value.

The phrase “market-based” only has meaning if accountability flows both ways. Otherwise, it’s just another slogan.

Robin Vince announcing his appointment to the OpenAI board reads like peak corporate satire: the CEO of a bank whose employees publicly describe leadership as opaque, dismissive, and allergic to accountability is now helping steer the future of “responsible AI.”

Sadly, it’s almost poetic. At BNY, Vince champions AI as a “capacity creator,” which is a polite way of saying it helps leadership know more, move faster, and replace people more efficiently — a theme not lost on the thousands of workers and former workers posting their experiences on this forum.

His statement about deploying AI “responsibly, securely, and with strong governance” lands awkwardly when employees can’t even get responsible communication about layoffs, offshoring, or the never‑ending transformation cycle. And the part about AI benefiting “all of humanity”? BNY staff might settle for it benefiting even just a fraction of its workforce.

The real comedy is the humility act — Vince describing himself as “humbled and grateful” while employees describe him as absent, evasive, and increasingly disconnected from the reality inside his own institution.

If OpenAI truly wants to understand how AI impacts people, they’ve now got a board member whose own employees already feel like failed test cases.

How can someone who is so out of touch possibly guide humanity’s future while BNY employees can’t get straight answers during his entire tenure with the firm?

Eliza? . . . Eliza? . . . Can we get a little help here?!?!

Are we submitting questions or assuming that even with the format pivot we aren’t going to get real, honest answers to questions.

Personally, I hope people submit their toughest questions and demand accountability from MKW. It’s been a sh*t couple of years and that’s largely on him and the rest of leadership.