#corporateculture

This morning's memo from SK is effectively confirmation of everything we have been discussing. In corporate communications, an executive letter like this is called a "Pre-Announcement Framework."

When a CEO writes a long, weirdly emotional, metaphor-heavy letter (the fishing analogies, "caring family," "peace of mind") to the entire continent, it is designed to soften the blow for what is coming next.

Strip away the awkward language ("gently turn," "beautifully evolve") and look at the cold corporate math, this letter lays out the exact roadmap for the upcoming RIF. And it was painfully obvious.

The calls to stop spending money and the pain continues..... our customers and our network continues to suffer, let's not get into how much the employees are suffering. What is Stinky doing to AT&T...?? We are told to save a dime, but then he spends millions on stupid cr-p.

Why is he still around?
Why hasn't the board asked for his resignation...?
Are the stock holders and board members as blind and as stupid as he is..??

We are definitely in a spiral downhill... sad to see how much the company and upper management continue to fail us all.

So I heard that we’re not retaining any non tenured Rosemont employees except for one of the Veeps. How is this a merger? Sounds more like a real estate transaction.

Common (and Sometimes Nefarious) Practices with LLC/Entity Changes
Changing an LLC—through formation of a new entity, asset sales, mergers, conversions, or “successor” setups—can create separation from prior liabilities. Legitimate uses include limiting personal exposure (via proper formalities like separate finances and operating agreements). However, abusive tactics include: 
• Forming a “new” LLC or shell entity and transferring assets: The old entity is left with debts/liabilities (sometimes leading to bankruptcy or dissolution), while the new one continues operations with a “clean slate.” This can attempt to evade contracts, judgments, or union obligations. Courts may “pierce the veil” if there’s commingling of assets, undercapitalization, fraud, or treating entities as alter egos. 
• Asset sales vs. stock sales: In asset purchases, the buyer may argue they’re not a “successor” bound by the old entity’s union contracts or liabilities (unlike stock purchases, where the entity identity often continues). Nefarious versions involve structuring deals to minimize continuity while keeping operations, workforce, and customers largely the same. 
• Using shells or related entities: Creating multiple layers (e.g., holding companies) to obscure ownership, fragment operations, or shift liabilities. This is sometimes used in union contexts to claim no bargaining obligation. 
• Rebranding/restructuring to reset terms: Announcing a “new company” to pressure renegotiation of wages, benefits, or seniority.

Our favorite minister of people and culture is still proving herself adept at survival and sorcery. Taking out and clearly eviscerating a Chairman of the Board with allegations of misconduct is pure corporate Hunger Games! Is KD’s on borrowed time? Or at this juncture a useful pawn?

1. IceBerg is getting groomed to take over as CEO, multiple moves to get experience, but huge gap in how the actual operation works
2. CPDO turned EVP of Innovation turned into a Car Sales headpiece finally given his golden parachute. Golden boy of investors didn't move the needle for Sandeepsht
3. New CIO announced outsourcing most technology to India.
4. Failed workforce planning department thought they were getting better by Israeli Palantir, but were off and now field ops is on a hiring freeze.
5. New HR sends more emails, but hasn't fixed the negative culture, banking on Miss Ditz in the communications team to spin the ugly truth.
6. Gillybean spends more money on cigars in a week than all of the money toward capital improvements at the field locations for the year.
   To be continued - comment with big items missed

The chatter surrounding Verizon's workforce changes has been a major point of anxiety and discussion across the company, especially following the major structural realignments that began late last year.
Here is what is currently happening on the ground and what is projected for July:
The July 16th Outlook
While Verizon's executive leadership has not issued a formal, public press release detailing a specific number of cuts for mid-summer, internal communications and widespread industry grapevine reports have consistently pointed to July 16, 2026 as the next major milestone date for localized headcount reductions and structural adjustments.
PhoneArena
Rather than a single, massive sweeping announcement, these upcoming cuts are tracking as part of a "rolling" optimization strategy. This next phase is expected to heavily tie into:
The "R2B" (Retail to Business / SMB) Shifts: Wholesale changes to Small and Medium Business sales structures are scheduled to fully take effect in July, leaving internal groups bracing for localized role eliminations or commission structure realignments.
Network & Field Engineering Pressure: Field operations have already taken massive hits over the last two quarters. Staffing discussions on internal forums indicate severe strain on the remaining field engineers, who are carrying an unprecedented number of cell sites per person to keep up with break/fix backlogs.
Reddit
The Broader Multi-Year Blueprint
The July activity isn't happening in a vacuum; it is the continuation of the aggressive cost-reduction mandate set by CEO Dan Schulman when he took the helm in October 2025.
Wireless Estimator
The Mandate: Achieve $5 billion in annual operating expense savings and reduce capital expenditure down to the $16–$16.5 billion range by the end of 2026.
Wireless Estimator
To put the current trajectory into perspective, the operational shifts follow a clear timeline:
Timeline Action / Focus Area Operational Impact
Q4 2025 The Initial Wave Verizon initiated the largest workforce reduction in its history, cutting over 13,000 corporate positions (roughly 13% of total headcount) and taking a $1.8 billion severance charge.
Early 2026 Outsourcing & Contracting Leadership aggressively squeezed third-party expenses, renegotiating cell tower construction vendor contracts well below 2021 pricing and moving heavily toward automated customer service tools.
Mid-2026 Retail Franchising & AI Shifts Ongoing transition of 180 to 200 corporate retail locations into outsourced franchise models, removing store employees from the direct payroll.
July 2026 & Beyond Rolling Departmental Audits Expected targeting of overlapping management layers, marketing, and the newly restructured SMB sales organizations. Total 2026 role impacts are projected to hit closer to 15,000 total roles as automation tools scale up.
The "Age of AI" Pivot
A significant piece of the narrative coming from the top floor is that these cuts are "inevitable" to free up capital for core 5G network innovation and subscriber acquisition to fight off T-Mobile and AT&T. Management has leaned heavily into framing these transitions as preparing for an "AI-first" operating model—even establishing a $20 million skill development fund for departing workers.
The HR Digest

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  However, the internal reality remains incredibly challenging for the staff left behind, who are absorbing massive workloads, navigating altered corporate reporting structures, and managing the friction of a leaner, highly consolidated organization

Everyone quit your crying 😢 about RTO and get back to the office five days a week. If the complaints don’t stop you will required to work seven days a week on 12 hour shifts. Oh and no holidays off either!

Welcome to corporate America 🇺🇸!

If you put on your blinder and look down and support the company like they’re your own flesh and blood, you’ll do well. But at what cost?

Not sure if this is company wide or just certain departments, but it looks like they’re going to start cracking down on hours in office for salaried employees. Last month a girl on a neighboring team was placed on “administrative leave” as she was being investigated for hours spent in office. Then earlier today, a guy on my team received an email titled “Corporate Investigation - RTO”, but he was able to come back to his desk and continue his day. He said he’ll talk to me off campus about the meeting.

Is this mainly focused on the groups in the “corporate functions” overhead org or all of the embedded functions in the businesses as well? Been hearing the overhead groups already found out last week or week prior not sure about the others.

Here are some new words for our friends at Corporate CommsGPT:

• Macroeconomic atmospheric turbulence
• Strategic velocity dampening
• Opportunity realization drag coefficients
• Enterprise momentum asymmetry
• Dynamic value-capture friction
• Market digestion oscillations
• Revenue-adjacent gravitational forces
• Go-to-market viscosity

Feel free to add your own.

If you think Shell is messed up…it’s actually a fine running Swiss watch. Enjoy what a near peer is going through…Any time you hear energy transition and BP beyond petroleum…

After 20+ (mostly hellish, but somewhat productive) years at Centene, I had the misfortune of being re-orged under a Sr. VP that had no idea what anyone's background and contributions had been over the decades, so I and some others were shown the door in layoffs a couple months ago. I came across this article today that lays out perfectly how the last 20 years have been for a lot of us:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/gen-x-doesn-t-want-to-work-and-their-reasons-actually-make-sense/ss-AA1VYmbT?ocid=msedgntp&pc=W069&cvid=6a1dd379fcb443ba814542eb7b86d0fe&ei=107#image=1

Slides 16 (Corporate Culture Prioritizes Appearance Over Measurable Results) and 19 (Performance Reviews Emphasize Arbitrary Metrics Over Actual Contributions) really hit home, especially this from slide 16 - "Elaborate presentations mattered more than project outcomes. Workers who delivered results efficiently got overlooked while colleagues who mastered workplace theater earned promotions."

I have never seen a company waste so much time and money on worthless slide decks that are forgotten immediately after they are delivered. If you totaled all the wasted manpower in terms of the salaries of the people that had to drop everything they were doing to work on a deck for some muckety-muck that was coming to town or wanted an update on something, I would venture it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted salaries over the life of the company.

Anyway , time to get back to figuring out how I want to spend the rest of my career. I promised myself it would be doing something that provides meaningful, measurable, tangible results, so going back to Centene is off the table.

No time to think…just Go!

At some point, layoffs at SAP stopped being a last resort and started being a standard business tool. Instead of exhausting every other option first, cutting employees is now the main go-to move whenever costs need trimming.

Oracle is reportedly undertaking its largest-ever layoffs. A report on Blind alleges the company exploits loopholes. Internal systems show hybrid workers reclassified as remote. This reclassification aims to avoid the WARN Act's 60-day notice. The post described this action as 'morally bankrupt'.

https://inshorts.com/en/amp_news/oracle-exploiting-loopholes-to-avoid-staff-benefits-amid-its-largest-layoffs--report-1780299406240

I've worked at several companies over the years, and I have never seen anything quite like the culture of secrecy that exists here. Management hoards information, doling out tiny scraps only when absolutely necessary. They don't trust any of us to handle bad news or make decisions, so they treat us like children instead of empowering us to do our jobs well. The result is a workforce that's disengaged, frustrated, and constantly in the dark about where the company is actually headed. It's frustrating, to say the least.

At some point, there needs to be real transparency around bloated administrative layers and whether they are creating proportional value. The people building, selling, supporting, and moving the business deserve a fairer share. Every company is flattening. If Cisco does not do the same, it is only a matter of time before employees, customers, and the market start questioning Cisco’s relevance.

Well said, @cp+1kr4j9r3b.

There has been a noticeable and disappointing shift in leadership culture within the Quality department, moving away from collaborative corporate values and toward an authoritarian, military-style command-and-control structure. A prime example is the expectation for staff to use artificial, forced scripts and mandated pleasantries during casual daily interactions, mimicking a rigid military hierarchy. This level of forced conformity completely invalidates the deep institutional knowledge and dedication of long-tenured employees who have spent years building this company.

Furthermore, the communication style from leadership in this department is deeply unprofessional and counterproductive to a healthy business environment. Meetings are frequently disrupted by leaders bringing aggressive military briefing tactics into the corporate world, cutting people off mid-sentence if they do not receive an immediate, hyper-concise answer. This dismissive behavior shuts down open communication, erodes psychological safety, and shows a blatant lack of respect for the team's expertise. Employees joined a corporation, not the armed forces, and they should not be subjected to this type of combat-zone impatience.

What is most concerning is that upper management has completely failed to address or call out this unacceptable behavior. By allowing these toxic, drill-sergeant leadership tactics to go unchecked within the Quality department, executive leadership is actively damaging employee morale and driving away top talent. This company used to thrive on mutual respect and professional dialogue, but the current lack of oversight and acceptance of rigid, disrespectful behavior makes the workplace culture unsustainable.

My neighbors ask me all the time when did Dell become so toxic? I tell them it's been this way for many years. But lately, it's accelerated because our inept, incompetent, inexperienced, nepotistic leadership clowns started thinking it could replace employees with AI chatbots. All driven by greed. Dell leadership or HR absolutely DOES NOT CARE about employees.

Zebra became very hierarchical at the Director and VP level several years ago. It’s an acute problem now.

Seems to be deep reluctance to cull the herd of ineffective Directors and VPs, or do away with layers.

For a $6 B company Zebra is ridiculously hierarchical and top heavy these days. It didn’t use to be this way.

Part of the issue is that Zebra leadership felt compelled to promote hordes of the best and brightest, and to promote women and minorities to make a declarative statement as an unapologetic liberal leaning and DEI embracing company.

All well and good but look around today.

It is incredibly exhausting to watch the Verizon Corporate playbook unfold this way.
The FCC's approval of Verizon’s $1 billion acquisition of Array Digital Infrastructure’s spectrum licenses highlights a frustrating reality in the telecom industry. Capital investments in assets are prioritized while internal human infrastructure is treated as a disposable expense.
Late 2025 – Early 2026...Under the mandate of "restructuring the expense base," Verizon executed the largest workforce reduction in its history, slashing roughly 15,000 roles (about 15% of its workforce). The cuts heavily targeted non-union management, thinning out deep layers of institutional knowledge and technical leadership.
Then the Frontier acquisition makes the whole scenario even more cynical.
Frontier itself is a patchwork of legacy systems, heavily built out of old Verizon copper and fiber properties (like the FiOS territories Verizon dumped on them a decade ago), alongside various independent local exchange carrier (ILEC) networks. Merging those complex transport layers, legal demand operations, and routing architectures into Verizon’s wireless core is an incredibly complex engineering task.
When a company replaces thousands of veteran technical minds with vendor-managed solutions and automated scripts, they compromise the actual resilience of the backbone. They may own the physical glass in the ground and the spectrum in the air, but they’ve stripped away the very people who possess the diagnostic intuition to keep it running when a major regional routing failure hits.
May 2026...Just months later, the FCC cleared a $1 billion deal for Verizon to absorb spectrum licenses across 618 counties in 19 states.
In the eyes of the executive suite and Wall Street, spending $1 billion on airwaves is viewed as building a "simpler, leaner, and scrappier business." From a purely architectural standpoint, low-band and mid-band spectrum are the lifeblood of network capacity. Executives argue that you can't run a network without the spectrum to back it up, and they are willing to spend billions to keep pace with T-Mobile and AT&T. But the glaring flaw in this philosophy is that spectrum doesn't manage itself.
When a company strips away over 15,000 employees—decades of hands-on expertise, system engineering, and operational continuity—they are betting entirely on automation, vendor solutions, and junior staff to stitch the new infrastructure together. It ignores the reality that the "meat" of a reliable network isn't just the raw megahertz you own; it's the architectural knowledge required to deploy, secure, and maintain it without catastrophic failures.
Squeezing the people who built the system to fund a balance sheet optimization is a short-term strategy that frequently backfires on long-term operational stability. It’s the ultimate corporate paradox - buying up the highway while laying off the engineers who know how to pave it.

Corporate environments today are not the stable, lifelong paths they once claimed to be. So often we see people changing assignments, leaving the company, being put on PIPs, or facing layoffs. Stop repeating corporate talking points “At ExxonMobil, we hire for careers. ”Instead let employees build adaptable skills and navigate change effectively. This brain washing needs to stop

Not to add fuel to the fire on here - but while most people worry about if they will have a job, some higher-ups were listed on this page.

Business as usual for them. Guessing they didn't use AI for the transactions to delight the executives?

https://www.stocktitan.net/sec-filings/VZ/

Groundbreaking stuff! A CEO acknowledging that employees outside the US are also, in fact, employees. And framing the bonus as damage control for American democracy imploding? Absolutely riveting corporate theater!

Thank you, Dr. Goodnight!

The most recent mandatory course on fincrimes included an example of bad things happening when firms operate outside the law - the GS Malaysian corruption scandal that cost GS $600 million to settle. Anyone wanna guess the initials of one of the GS execs implicated. (Google it)

"Now that the latest Colleague Engagement Survey has closed, it is important to reflect on the strategy behind it. Evidence suggests that these 'colleague engagement' tools are increasingly being repurposed as diagnostic filters for layoffs.

• Treat Surveys as Legal Documents: Do not view these as 'safe spaces.' Anything you wrote can and will be used by an algorithm to assess your 'retention value.'

• Identify the Push: When leadership becomes obsessively focused on survey participation rates with multiple VPs and Directors badgering staff for 'opinions', it serves as a critical RED FLAG for an impending organizational 're-alignment,' signaling that they are gathering the necessary paper trail to justify a workforce reduction in the next 8–16 weeks. This predatory use of feedback doesn't just destroy morale; it marks a total collapse of corporate integrity, proving that the company views employee honesty as a liability to be exploited rather than a resource to be valued.

#WorkplaceTransparency #CorporateCulture #EmployeeEngagement #JobSecurity #HRTrends #LeadershipWarning #CorporateIntegrity #TheSurveyIsATrap #LayoffAlert #ToxicWorkplace #RedFlags #ProtectTheWorkforce #WorkplaceRights #EmployeeRights

Do you guys not see what happened when Dan Schulman was installed?

Dan was on the board of Verizon for years. That means he saw the profit loss, the bad decisions, the damage to the company image, the lack of innovation, the failed investments, and the growing disconnect between leadership and the people actually keeping the company alive.

He saw the damage being done to customers too, especially long tenured customers who stayed loyal for years only to watch service, support, and consistency deteriorate while prices continued climbing.

None of this happened overnight.

What happened next was a corporate coup.

The old guard and leaders who could advocate for employees, customers, and the necessity of certain roles were removed. Thousands were laid off. Fear was injected into the workforce. Then a new class of leadership was installed, leadership whose loyalty is upward to the executives who promoted them, not downward to the employees carrying the business.

People who spent years chasing titles like Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, and VP are not going to risk those positions fighting for workers, customers, or the long term health of the company. Their mission is survival within the system.

Meanwhile experienced talent leaves, morale collapses, customers grow frustrated, and the company keeps pretending it does not understand why performance and public perception continue declining.

Never forget what they did and who they did it to.

This was not some random restructuring. It was calculated, coordinated, and executed with precision.

So that Bill Ackman can make 5 billion instead of 3 and so that do nothing fat cats can get their multi million bonuses.

Anyone else think corporate surveillance has gotten completely out of control?

Badge swipes trackd... VPNs tracked. Teams status tracked. Meetings in Calendar tracked. All emails scanned. Fu--ing Productivity Metrics... AI note takers in meetings nobody ever asked for.

Then leadership wonders why morale is unlived and nobody trusts mgmt anymore.

At this point I just assume every company laptop is basically a monitoring device with some work tools installed on it.

Deloitte mostly copies what we do, adds a few minor changes, and then presents the same work across other projects. They’re also very good at replicating our frameworks and showcasing them to other clients. I’m not sure why Yael Cosset and Jim Clendenen keep supporting hires from Deloitte, but it definitely feels like there’s some kind of Deloitte backchannel benefiting them.

I found Robin Vince’s LinkedIn post last week… fascinating. He calls it a “full circle moment” with his Goldman buddy Lloyd Blankfein, yet it plays like another round of leadership cosplay. It might even be touching if BNY employees weren’t here describing a workplace stitched together with fear, offshoring, and corporate theater. Nothing says “excellence” like inviting a billionaire mentor to discuss humility lessons learned at Goldman while thousands of his BNY employees beg for clarity, stability, or even basic honesty.

Vince praises Blankfein’s lessons on uncertainty and values — meanwhile BNY’s workforce is drowning in ambiguity, morale is on life support, and “risk taking” mostly means gambling with people’s futures.

He talks about embedding values “every day,” yet avoids the very public concerns about layoffs, offshoring, collapsing trust, and a workforce treated like expendable inventory in a never-ending transformation cycle.

The real full circle moment won’t be a photo op with a retired Goldman titan. It’ll be when Vince realizes that inspirational quotes and curated leadership moments don’t fix morale, don’t slow attrition, and don’t rebuild credibility.

Fran faking her compassion and reading her statements tell you all you need to know about how much this C-Suite cares. Her and Mark sit in their posh million dollar homes and talk about cutting travel while they travel the world. The hypocrisy of this group is amazing as they continue to guard their stock price and protect their multi-million dollar payouts.

The only reason we are sponsoring them is because the executives get free lounge and box access for free. So much for being "good stewards", "shareholder oriented" and "value creators". Couple this with free private jets, it's one never-ending party for the ultra rich. The rest of us get pink slips and anxiety.

Has T Rowe Price ever had a "corporate tent" at the Preakness race? If so, did they have one this year? Hiring cheap labor really opened the door for "leadership" to treat themselves right - VIP suites at Orioles and Ravens and waterfront harbor views. Paid lunches and dinners in Harbor East. Who knows what else. Must be nice.

It is not about expecting a reward. I actually get a real sense of satisfaction from doing a job well, no matter where I am or who I work for. But here is the thing all of us have to accept. Do not expect loyalty back. Do not expect appreciation. Do not expect any of it to protect you. When cuts come, you will be out the door just as fast as the person who does nothing. Maybe faster. Whatever corporate culture this place supposedly had is long gone. If it ever existed at all.

Many of the holes are being now plugged with today’s org announcements. AD to the Chief of staff office. That pretty much confirms CH can stop dual hat and will be head of downstream.

Yet to be seen if Meg has the fortitude to send GB and WL packing. Or at the very least move GB over to some Tech center role where he can’t continue destroying value.

This site is a potential gold mine for management, assuming they genuinely care about understanding what employees are thinking. Reading this board gives a pretty clear view of what is happening inside the organization, though I could be wrong.

Management should identify the main themes being discussed on Layoff.com and measure engagement around them, then do the same on LinkedIn. Combining those two data points would likely provide a much more accurate picture of what is happening on the ground.

The board should require executives to do this instead of relying on sanitized surveys that get massaged beyond recognition.

Food for thought.