#agility

• 3,500 jobs eliminated: American Express plans to cut approximately 5% of its global workforce.
• Profits surge 28%: Q3 2026 net income reached $3.71 billion, despite planned layoffs.
• Revenue grows 9%: Quarterly revenue climbed to $20.06 billion, reflecting strong customer demand.
• AI drives restructuring: Executives cited automation, efficiency, agility, and preparation for artificial intelligence.
• $336 million restructuring charge: The company recorded significant costs associated with organizational changes.
• Customer spending increases: Average quarterly cardmember spending rose 5% to $6,375.
• Earnings outlook improves: American Express raised its full-year adjusted EPS forecast to $17.60-$17.90.

https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/10/24/american-express-to-cut-3500-jobs-despite-28-profit-surge-490669/

Curious if all the “Agilist” and “Agile Coach” roles have been retitled. Most people I see who used to have that title removed it from their profile. Has USB finally realized the Agilist was a glorified assistant?

Kaumil Gajrawala
Analyst, Jefferies LLC Q
Hey, everybody. First of all, Jamie, thank you for all your help over the, I guess, what's now been decades. And
Ramon, a question on the asset base and sort of following on with some of the answers to your questions on one
North America maybe being regional, a focus on agility, a focus on being fast. A lot going on in terms of
innovation and rightsizing. To what degree are you open to the idea of franchising some of these operations on
the beverage side, particularly maybe just from a regional perspective because it feels like many of the intentions
of what you're looking to accomplish, some of could be moved along by pushing sort of a re-franchising initiative.
So curious what you think about that. Thanks.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Ramon L. Laguarta
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, PepsiCo, Inc. A
Yeah, listen, we are – Kaumil, as I said, we're going after growth and margin with high speed and a very strong
sense of urgency. We are – at this point, we're open to all the ideas and we appreciate all the perspectives to
create shareholder value. So we'll listen, we'll do what's best for PepsiCo.

https://investor.pepsico.com/docs/default-source/investors/q3-2025/q3-2025-pep_transcript_kza87jr4cih3omqu.pdf

Agreed and confirmed 100%, these moves will drive the company forward

We are going to be more agile, leaner and will deliver value faster and more effectively

Our car parks are going to be full 7 days a week. You will need armour to protect yourself from someone trying to get to their desk before you so they can do their best work

The Trade Desk is implementing a significant workforce reduction, impacting fifteen percent of its employees. This move is part of a strategic restructuring aimed at creating smaller, more focused operational units. The company's CEO cited a need for greater agility and sharpened focus in his internal communication. This downsizing follows a period of disappointing financial performance and significant executive turnover. The company aims to improve execution and platform capabilities through these changes.

New York, New York

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-trade-desk-lays-off-15-of-staff-2026-9

Music production platform Splice has confirmed a strategic restructuring that includes staff layoffs. The company stated these changes are intended to increase focus and agility. Splice is reallocating investments to better serve creators. They expressed gratitude to departing employees for their contributions. The goal is to build next-generation tools for musicians.

New York, NY

https://musictech.com/news/music/splice-confirms-staff-layoffs-and-restructuring/

McKinsey have been poking around on cost for years why has the T5 layer of managers not been removed. In my experience they largely work from home, demand lots of travel and are blockers to true change viewi g everything through their personal lens.

At many large enterprises like SAP, having a highly concentrated, top-heavy layer of senior executives (like the T5 band) can become a major drag on agility. While senior leadership is necessary for governance, an over-reliance on a massive executive tier often does more harm than good.
Here are some other reasons why a heavy executive management layer can be a bad idea, a waste of resources, and a massive blocker to organizational change:

1. The "Telephone Game" of Communication
   When strategic goals have to travel down from the board through T5 executives, T4 directors, and T3 managers before reaching the people doing the actual work, the original message gets distorted. Key details are lost in translation, and the boots on the ground often end up executing something entirely different from what was intended.
2. Decision Paralysis and Over-Analysis
   With too many high-level leaders wanting to leave their mark, decisions require endless rounds of reviews, steering committees, and alignments. Simple choices that should take days get dragged out for months because too many executives need to "sign off" or feel included.
3. High Compensation, Low Direct Output
   Executive-level talent commands premium salaries, stock options, and bonuses. When a company carries a bloated executive tier, a massive portion of the budget is spent on individuals who manage and coordinate, rather than those who build, sell, or support the actual product. This is a highly inefficient allocation of capital.
4. Preservation of the Status Quo
   Executives at this level have often spent decades navigating the corporate political landscape to achieve their status. Because their success is tied to the existing system, they are naturally incentivized to protect it. Truly disruptive change threatens their established domains, making them quiet saboteurs of radical innovation.
5. Silo Creation and Empire Building
   To justify their premium titles and budgets, senior managers often focus on expanding their "empires"—hiring more people under them and fiercely guarding their departmental boundaries. This breeds internal competition and political infighting rather than cross-functional collaboration.
6. Detachment from the Customer and Technology
   The higher up a leader goes, the further they get from the actual product and the day-to-day frustrations of the customer. Decisions are often made based on polished PowerPoint decks and sanitized reports rather than the raw, messy reality of the market.
7. Death by PowerPoint (The "Tax" on Middle Management)
   To keep senior executives informed, middle managers and individual contributors must spend countless hours preparing status updates, dashboards, and presentations. This "reporting tax" drains valuable time and energy that should be spent on actual execution.
8. Dilution of Accountability
   When a project involves multiple senior stakeholders, responsibility becomes diffused. If a major initiative fails, the layered structure makes it incredibly easy to point fingers, meaning no single executive is held accountable, and the organization fails to learn from its mistakes.
9. Suffocation of Grassroots Innovation
   Great ideas in tech usually bubble up from the engineers, designers, and customer-facing staff. When there is a thick layer of top-down management, these ideas struggle to get noticed. If an idea doesn't align with an executive's personal roadmap, it is often ki-led before it can even be trialed.
10. Heavy Friction for Agile Pivots
    In a fast-moving market, companies need to pivot quickly. A massive executive layer acts like a heavy anchor. Reorganizing, shifting budgets, or changing product direction requires untangling a complex web of executive egos, personal OKRs, and political alliances, making rapid adaptation nearly impossible.

Legaltech startup Darrow has laid off approximately one-third of its staff, impacting around 60 employees. This significant reduction includes many legal analysts who were instrumental in developing the company's AI platform. Despite being profitable for three consecutive years, Darrow cited market evolution and technological advancements as reasons for reorganization. The company aims to become a more agile and multidisciplinary organization to support future growth.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hy7svt97ge

AI is fundamentally changing how work gets done, according to HR leaders. HiBob CEO Ronni Zehavi states AI allows companies to scale output without proportional hiring. He emphasizes that successful organizations will prioritize workforce design and agility over headcount. This involves organizing around skills and capabilities, pushing decision-making closer to the work. The future workforce will be dynamic, focusing on human-machine partnership and developing human potential.

West Palm Beach, FL

https://hrexecutive.com/the-death-of-the-megacorporation-may-be-a-bigger-story-than-layoffs/

The Wall Street Journal evaluates how leading US corps stack up in 6 areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility.

State Street ranks #208 overall with an Overall Score of 51.3, placing it 23rd out of 41 Financial Services companies. Its best factors are Resilience Rank #170, Agility #176, and Financial Fitness #222, which are respectable but not strong. The company does not screen as a major outlier in either direction.

The weak points are AI Rank #325, Innovation #233, and Talent Readiness #292. Strategically, State Street looks like a mature financial infrastructure company with decent stability, but limited future-readiness momentum. Compared with Visa, Mastercard, Charles Schwab, and S&P Global, it lacks the same evidence of AI, innovation, and platform-style upside.

Source:

https://www.wsj.com/rankings/best-companies-for-the-future/full-rankings-2026

It’s been over 1.5 years since COP purchased MRO and the question is- was it worth it? What were the positives and negatives? Is COP stronger and more agile now? What’s next?

The Wall Street Journal evaluates how leading US corps stack up in 6 areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility.

Cisco is one of the clearest winners in the entire table. It ranks #5 overall with an Overall Score of 78.9, and it is #1 out of 21 companies in Technology Hardware & Equipment. The profile is unusually balanced: AI #13, Innovation #13, Talent #20, Financial Fitness #57, Resilience #11, and Agility #37.

This is not a one-factor story. Cisco screens as a balanced infrastructure compounder: strong in AI readiness, strong in innovation, financially sound, resilient, and organizationally agile. The strategic implication is that the market often talks about AI in terms of chips and hyperscalers, but the WSJ model is also rewarding enterprise network infrastructure. Cisco’s ranking suggests it is viewed as a durable enabler of the AI and connectivity cycle, not merely a mature hardware incumbent.

Source:
https://www.wsj.com/rankings/best-companies-for-the-future/full-rankings-2026

The Wall Street Journal evaluates how leading US corps stack up in 6 areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility.

Optum does not appear as a standalone company in the uploaded table, so I used UnitedHealth Group as the closest listed proxy. UnitedHealth ranks #89 overall with an Overall Score of 57.7, ranking 6th out of 44 companies in Health Care Equipment & Services. Its strongest factor is Financial Fitness Rank #48, with Innovation at #85 and Agility at #130.

The weaknesses are Talent Readiness #297 and Resilience #283, which are notable for a large health-services platform. The strategic read is that UnitedHealth, and by proxy Optum, screens as a financially strong, moderately innovative healthcare infrastructure company, but not as a fully resilient or talent-leading organization. The table supports a “platform with scale advantage” thesis, but not an unqualified future-readiness leadership thesis.

Source:
https://www.wsj.com/rankings/best-companies-for-the-future/full-rankings-2026

The Wall Street Journal evaluates how leading US corps stack up in 6 areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility.

Wells Fargo ranks #187 overall with an Overall Score of 52.3, putting it above the bank-sector average of 48.7 but outside the top quartile of the full 500-company universe. The positive surprise is AI Rank #16 and Innovation Rank #66, both strong for a traditional bank. That is not a trivial finding: among large banks, Wells Fargo screens as more forward-positioned on digital and AI-related readiness than its overall rank implies.

The problem is execution culture and adaptability. Wells ranks #386 in Talent Readiness and #453 in Agility, which are severe offsets. The data reads Wells Fargo as a bank with meaningful technology potential but weak organizational velocity. Strategically, that creates a familiar incumbent-bank problem: digital investment is necessary, but not sufficient, if employee systems, operating model, and institutional agility remain behind the curve.

Source:
https://www.wsj.com/rankings/best-companies-for-the-future/full-rankings-2026

In the Monday, June 8, 2026 the Wall Street Journal included a complete section listing the top 500 companies across all industry segments. Each company was ranked by AI readiness, Innovation, Talent, Resilience AI Readiness & Agility. The lower the ranking the better the company.

#1 Nvidia
#2 Alphabet
#3 Microsoft
#4 Meta Platforms

Telecommunications Services sector (only 3 companies in this sector)
#56 T-Mobile US (Agility rank 82, Innovation 283, Talent 136, AI 71)
#149 Verizon Communications (Agility rank 447, Innovation 250, Talent 155, AI 26)
#375 AT&T (Agility rank 465, Innovation 181, Talent 390, AI 33)

What do these numbers tell you? AT&T looks significantly less prepared for future success than its two major wireless competitors when all of the ranking factors are combined. The ranking appears to view AT&T as substantially weaker in attracting, retaining, developing, or positioning its workforce for future needs than its peers.

"AT&T has some innovative capabilities, but the organization is viewed as bureaucratic, slow to adapt, and less successful at developing and retaining the talent needed for future growth."

That combination can be especially damaging in a "future readiness" ranking because future performance increasingly depends on AI adoption, digital transformation, and workforce quality rather than simply owning a large network.

From an investor's perspective, the most concerning number in the table is probably not the innovation rank, it is the 390 talent rank, because that sees AT&T as having a weaker human-capital foundation than either Verizon or T-Mobile.

No time to think…just Go!

Intuit exceeded financial estimates for its third quarter. The company announced a significant reduction in its employee count. The CEO said artificial intelligence did not cause the layoffs. The reason was to create a more agile and efficient organization. The company increased its financial outlook for fiscal 2026.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/intuit-earnings-stock-price-layoffs-a96cfca9

Agropur announced the closure of its Sussex-area plant. The facility is scheduled to cease operations in 2028. This decision came months after the company received a significant provincial loan. The $2.4-million non-repayable loan was intended for modernizing Agropur's Miramichi facility. Critics suggest the province should have been informed about the impending layoffs before the loan agreement.

New Brunswick

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/holt-says-agropur-should-have-told-nb-about-layoffs-before-loan-deal/vi-AA21Rfo3?cvid=69f04d0d8d46447bb9248ddd9c6063b4&ocid=hpmsn

Ingka Group, Ikea's largest franchisee, plans to cut approximately 800 jobs. These reductions will occur within its Group Functions. CEO Juvencio Maeztu stated the company grew too complex. The move aims to simplify the organization for speed and agility. The company will also invest in employee training and development.

https://www.retaildive.com/news/ikea-800-job-cuts-layoffs-ingka-group/815202/

The recent influx of new hires in Spring, many of whom are early-career professionals, has required significant onboarding support—including mentorship, recognition, plus dedicated workspace and perks—to ensure productivity. In contrast, previous teams delivered results with agility, often relying on strong analytical skills and quick decision-making. It’s worth examining whether current strategies align with long-term business goals, especially given that recent growth may be tied to temporary demand spikes and uncertain future revenue. I had expected the company to maintain a more results-driven, resilient approach.

If you are a PO, PM, scrum lead, BA, RTE in P-M - how are you not losing your mind? The amount of administrative BS we have to do is pure insanity. I have no other word for it. How, on gods green earth, is this an efficient way to work?

Glossier reduced its workforce by over 50 employees. This represents approximately one-third of its total staff. The company reorganised its operations on Wednesday. Colin Walsh, the new chief executive, leads this change. Glossier aims to improve agility and regain market leadership.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/news/beauty/glossier-layoffs-2026/

Ebrahim Poonawala (Bank of America) asked about the sustainability of revenue growth and margin targets if the environment worsens; CEO Robin Vince highlighted BNY’s agility and ability to adjust expenses, emphasizing their diversified revenue engine and reduced macro sensitivity.