#corporateculture

I’ve watched a steady parade of senior leaders come and go, and after a while it hits you that there aren’t any truly new ideas. It’s the same playbook over and over, just repackaged with fresh buzzwords and a shiny new label. I can’t count how many times I’ve thought, we tried this five or ten years ago, they’re just calling it something different now. Once you’ve been around long enough, the pattern is impossible to ignore.

Should Dell be included?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlhrhhcLlaI

Corporations Viewpoint -

Of any employee.

The Bottom Line.

Remember this, always.

Employees are considered an (Expendable) line item due to Cost of Salary, and Benefits.

Corporations Viewpoint -

Of any employee.

The Bottom Line.

Remember this, always.

Employees are considered an (Expendable) line item due to Cost of Salary, and Benefits.

Yes. Next question.

https://nypost.com/2025/12/27/us-news/dad-of-slain-cvs-worker-edeedson-cine-said-son-spent-final-morning-with-family-before-fatal-shift/

Absolutely horrible response by this company towards law enforcement and the victims property considering this happened at one of their stores on Christmas.

Hans used 5G to try and distract us from reality. Dan is using AI. The long term plan is not dictated by either of these technologies and while the changes and headcount reduction are part of a plan, we will not know what that plan is until it happens. A sell off? A shut down of all stores and migration to resellers? Moving wireline work to the newly acquired Frontier team? We don't know.

What we do know is the constant gaslighting over the years that has become nauseating. Telling us we have the best network and customer service when customers tell us the opposite?

Layoffs will resume Q1 of 2026. I am ready and waiting for my number to be pulled. With the writing clearly on the wall, how many people will be back on this website panicking because they did nothing to prepare for the inevitable? I hope it's a minimal amount but some will be blinded by a new year and an attempt at Q1 kick off meetings to distract the easily distracted.

We have a week left of 2025. Once the clock turns midnight, the peace and quiet is over and the cycle will start again.

Ask questions, ask for clarification when the answer doesn't make sense, and remember you are not valued as a person, you are a dispensable number and will be treated as such very soon. Meanwhile, our executives are raking in millions, annually.

Dan Schulman

Verizon Compensation (2025 onwards)
Base Salary: $1.5 million annually.
Short-Term Incentive: Target of 250% of base salary (prorated for 2025).
Long-Term Incentives (Equity): RSU/PSU grants with target values potentially reaching $9.5M and $20M, vesting over time.
Total Potential: Can reach nearly $60 million, depending on performance.

Word is, Director level and up gave themselves a Christmas bonus this year quietly.. you know for all the hard work they did!

This has all of the signs of getting primed to find a buyer. Shed thousands upon thousands of highly compensated employees with 20+ years of tenure. No rhyme or reason to the ones chosen other than they are too costly to the bottom line. Not looking at the individual persons to see what value they bring to the organization; just treating them as nothing more than a line item on a spreadsheet. Welcome to the new Corporate America. Shareholders are the most important people; no longer the customer (internal or external).
Remember when they used to say "our employees are our greatest asset." Well, they don't say that anymore. They finally realized people are not assets, because they don't own them. People are free to take their talents elsewhere. You also don't layoff assets. People should never be treated like tangible objects.
After the 13K depart, try and make sense of a wounded and abandoned organization that's left with huge holes. Good luck to the ones that are left behind to clean up the mess. Try and pick up the pieces and keep your head above water until you can find the right buyer.
Your largest expense is employee payroll. Shed as much as you possibly can to attract the right buyer.
Just my two cents (pun intended).

Don’t know if anyone has seen the videos but there’s a big potential criminal case forming against PayPal and their subsidiary honey for multiple charges in more than 20+ class action lawsuits. Honey was acquired by PayPal in 2019/2020 for $4 billion when Schulman was still CEO. Investigative journalists have brought to light dirt on both sides primarily due to Honeys practices which now trickle under the PayPal umbrella/leadership.

Do you think this potentially is the reason some higher ups at PayPal are getting a free ticket out and coming here in case any action gets taken against PayPal? Does this question the new leadership at VZ?

While Verizon has a long history of failed execution from go90, aol, yahoo, hum, finance transformation, VGS, blue jeans, plus play, and even something as simple as RTO - Verizon does succeed at empty catch phrases. Better matters! Change energizes us! Go beyond! I’m anxious to learn what catch phrase our overlords will rally us around next.

I keep seeing people say “we are returning to working in the office because that’s how it always was”

Quick question - who had issues finding assigned seating, food, and stocked bathrooms with good toilet paper before covid?

Answer - nobody. Because RTO is not a return to how it was. It is way greedier and designed to be humiliating on purpose. Quit licking boots and be honest.

Canon's declining market share and toxic corporate culture isn't just in the US. China is no different! The Zhuhai and Zhongshan factories have closed. Canon China sales company is laying off employees every year. the CEO and the Japanese managers are very much into the a-s-kissing culture. This This Retired managers continue to be promoted, middle level cadres are laid off as much as possible, and younger employees are bullied. This is the worst company I have ever seen.

A post making the rounds has similarities to a certain company…..

Starbucks did not lose $30 billion because of bad coffee. It lost it because the company
mispriced what actually created its value. When Starbucks appointed a McKinsey-trained executive as CEO, the mandate was operational discipline. Costs were scrutinized. Processes were standardized. Stores were pushed to behave like efficiency machines rather than community spaces.

On paper, the logic made sense. Consultants optimize margins by removing friction. But
Starbucks was never a pure efficiency business. Its premium pricing depended on brand emotion, store experience, and cultural loyalty. Those are intangible assets, but they carry real monetary value.

As efficiency initiatives rolled out, customers noticed. Service quality declined. Stores felt
transactional. The brand lost its emotional moat. Foot traffic softened. Growth expectations reset.

Markets reacted quickly. Over 17 months, Starbucks shed roughly $30 billion in market
capitalization. Not from insolvency risk, but from a reassessment of future cash flows tied to brand strength.

The board reversed course. The CEO exited. Strategy changed.

The wealth lesson is structural. Consulting frameworks work best where value is mechanical and repeatable. Consumer brands compound wealth through trust, identity, and habit, not just margins.

When leadership optimizes the wrong variable, scale turns small misjudgments into massive losses.

Starbucks did not fail at execution. It failed at understanding what it was actually selling.

All of the boomers on here will tell you that you are fortunate and should be grateful for the opportunity you have to work for a company, blah...blah. The reality is that none of us matter to any company, and none of us have ever mattered. The entire system is built to keep us indebted to, and dependent on, corporations. I consider myself politically very conservative, and I am not afraid to admit this. America was sold out long ago. We haven't had a true free market economy for at least 50 years or more. Everything that is done now is done to enrich corporations and political leaders. Banks and financial companies are some of the worst exploiters of the American people in existence. As long as we are indebted just to live, we can't ever be truly free.

Yesterday, leadership stated that individual contributors will remain the primary model moving forward, and the entire organizational hierarchy is under review. There's talk from the C-suite about increasing the number of doors per RDM to between 20 and 30. At the same time, it appears they're planning to reduce the workforce by at least 20%, which would effectively double (and in some cases triple) the workload for remaining individual contributors. This comes at a time when these teams are already significantly reduced and stretched thin. It's frustrating to hear executives celebrate strong performance while simultaneously pushing for deep staff cuts. This feels like pure corporate greed on T-Mobile's part.

Imagine all the money our SVPs and exec staff make and Bain still runs the company. A substantial number of decisions are all based off Bain recommendations. We could save millions upon millions of dollars if we got rid of most of our SVP layer kept some of our VPs and kept our Sr and Director layers and just used Bain.

Otherwise why do we need SVPs who are totally incapable of making decisions without Bain?

My manager just kinda informed us in a soft way that the budget is tight and layoffs are probably pending. She says that I am a corporate employee but I am working under a states plan. When layoffs happen, do corporate employees get cut too or that particular plan.

Haven’t they heard that this particular phrase went out of fashion? They can’t even keep up with corporate fluff.

Did you all see the email the other day? I cannot keep up with the changes anymore. I also heard of a shakeup for the HMS people. Top heavy folks leaving over there and huge re-org changes. I have never seen a company like this!

expect several months worth of small, targeted little potshots and pruning to avoid more bad PR and WARN, etc. hopefully some bigger changes will come at the top level.

What Dan Schulman is proposing isn’t new. You can find old videos of Tami Irwin bragging about how customer centric we’ve become and old videos of Shankar Arumugavelu bragging about how much gen AI has improved things.

We’ve had reorgs that didn’t make much sense every year and a slew of executives who overpromised , underdelivered, and then moved on. Hans, Ronnan Dunne, Manon Brouillette, Shankar, Linda Avery, Diego Scotti, etc…

It’s been years since I’ve worked for other companies. There were problems but I don’t remember it being this bad. I’m worried this might be the new standard in corporate America.

What a joke of a management committee, board of directors and the government for letting a US company bring IOL (100 year old company) to the s**.

What happened to corporate separateness? Now TG and DW have plans to exploit Canadian molecules, hose the minority interest investors (upwards of $500M of value based on rough estimates) and set up a wholly owned shell Trading shop in Canada in 2026.

Again, is the IOL board of directors asleep? Critical jobs are being migrated south to Houston at a higher cost and at the same time decimating fundamental knowledge that’s required for any stand alone O&G company which is a huge risk. How about the provincial and federal governments? Canadian taxable income is about to be stripped for the US to benefit. At this rate, all weak leadership contributing to this mess should be managed out of India in the “Global Hub”based on the lack of long term value they bring to the company and how far they are from the real Canadian business.

@ the government and BoD - wake up and block this immoral trade shop from starting up and exploiting Canadian molecules at the expense of the independent shareholders. Audit the s*** out of any proposals being presented including risk to long term value to the company. The move of Calgary head office to Strathcona Refinery and lack of diligence assessing the econs and long term risk to the company due to losing its top talent was already a disgrace.

I think belk is trying to do better

I’m sure I’m gonna get slammed for this post, but I heard belk has gotten so much negative publicity for their store operations that they are trying to do better. Hometown stores seem to have it the toughest, while mall and golden stores have a less demanding workload for each employee.

I certify don’t want to see belk suffer, it’s an iconic part of North Carolina.

I do think they are slowly realizing that some of their managers and corporate leadership are toxic.

Srini?

If people are worried about more layoffs so close to Christmas, you know something is seriously wrong with BofA.

100+ LAID off today no rhyme or reason lots of tears

The company should feel ashamed of themselves for the way they conduct business! The worst company on this planet for sure!

Another week of high profile corporate exits. Head of channel (VP) out after just 5-6 months in the job. 5th channel leader in 18 months. Replaced by 2 senior directors.

Marketing leader leaving Dec 31.

It seems that this reorg was mainly corporate. Very little in the field (sorry to those impacted). It went from building consolidation, massive layoffs etc to very few. If this is the end FOR NOW they should announce that.

The slow pace of widespread job replacement by AI is not a reflection of AI's capability, but a direct consequence of organizational dysfunction. Current "agentic AI" systems are only as effective as the structured workflows they execute.

The reality in most legacy corporations like Verizon is a landscape of fragmented, siloed organizations operating under conflicting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This structure is the root cause of systemic inter-departmental conflict and blame-shifting.

An AI agent does not engage in finger-pointing; it issues a clear error code indicating a break in the designed workflow. Crucially, that error will persist until the systemic gaps are reconciled and the workflow is made functional. Many legacy companies are littered with years of broken processes, often obscured by anecdotal reporting, polished presentations, and manipulated performance metrics.

These old habits will fail when faced with systems built on hard, fast rules.

Therefore, the initial push for corporate restructuring—the mass simplification and removal of organizational layers—is not just about efficiency. It is the necessary preparation. Once these fundamental workflow gaps are addressed and optimized, the corporate architecture will be ready for large-scale agentic AI implementation. The organizational cleanup precedes the technological deployment. Get ready for the next phase.

The executives at Verizon who announced their retirements are getting big bucks to leave at the expense of employees. Most who leave have do-nothing jobs with no direct reports until they're off payroll, then get 60 weeks of severance with full benefits. These are the people who made the bad decisions, like buying Yahoo, over-supporting volunteerism, DEI programs, ERGs, Super Bowl parties, private jets, big consultant spends, etc. etc. F them.

The atmosphere at Verizon is now marked by unprecedented hostility and desperation, reflecting the deep impact of organizational change. The coming months will reveal the true nature of workplace relationships under duress.

To those departing, you were part of Verizon’s most successful years. Be grateful for the skills you acquired and view this transition as a funded escape from what will likely be the company’s darkest period. Leverage this moment to build a new, appreciative career or, preferably, establish your own business, which may offer greater long-term stability.

To those of us remaining, Dan Shulman’s business decisions are necessary to stabilize the company, but the full collateral damage is not yet understood. November was the start of sweeping changes that will test the character of your peers.

Remember this fundamental truth: the workplace is an exchange of time and talent for resources. Morale-boosting efforts are irrelevant against the cold reality of corporate restructuring.

Your mandate is self-focus: Secure your finances, deliver maximum value, and prioritize your personal well-being and family. Get your money. Build your empire.

God speed.

Under Corporate risk - Credit Risk - Risk modeling.

Massive cut yesterday.

Most of these guys are Quants making over $250K

The rumor is lots of Quants and risk analytics in corporate risk are in the chopping block early next year

A good post from “Neo” in the Citrix Systems forum:

https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1kc3j9256

You work for wealthy people that invested 16 billion dollars to make a substantial profit using whatever playbook is at hand. That's just business.

Clearly and contrary to the vision of the founders of Citrix, they are just interested in low effort approaches because they are efficient money wise. Making everything cheaper and simpler to manage in order to pursue a financial Eye Candy effect, for an eventual sale or a return to the public space, is an example.

There is no interest in keeping strong teams or long term plans for product innovation, its just paint. Layoffs are not personal (and not particular to these guys), they just don't care about keeping you because you are the negative term in their growth/profit equation. So they will minimize you (head count) with all the techniques available in the book (forced % of layoffs, silent firing, colleagues competition for forced rankings, internal divisions, fear, you name it)

So where are you positioned in this game? You are the exploited employee they (or any other company) will squeeze until the product is at visible risk. You will willingly accept recurrent extra loads of work, cause you are scared to loose you livelihood and you have no other choice. Also you are the next person to be laid off (its about when, not if) On the other hand you also have free will, knowledge and skills (don't buy into the AI BS, you are needed), and dignity.

Now, if you know the game, the players, and the rules, you would likely be better off using this platform also to bring ideas on what can be done to make it a bit more fair to you and your colleagues and to minimize irrational expoitation, unethical meassures, and everything else everyone has been posting here. (Never forget this is Corporate America, don't expect miracles)

Complaining, and spreading subjective fear (distict from useful info and heads up) will only work against you as that is the expected behavior.

There are problems, bring ideas to help solve or make them better.
After all, you were all hired for your problem solving skills and intelligence.
Use it!

PD: This post encourages fairness and ethics. Expect pushback, misleading statements, and attacks from some players in the comments section.

You work for wealthy people that invested 16 billion dollars to make a sustantial profit using whatever playbook is at hand. That's just business.

Clearly and contrary to the vision of the founders of Citrix, they are just interested in low effort approaches because they are efficient money wise. Making everything cheaper and simpler to manage in order to pursue a financial Eye Candy effect, for an eventual sale or a return to the public space, is an example.

There is no interest in keeping strong teams or long term plans for product innovation, its just paint. Layoffs are not personal (and not particular to these guys), they just don't care about keeping you because you are the negative term in their growth/profit equation. So they will minimize you (head count) with all the techniques available in the book (forced % of layoffs, silent firing, colleagues competition for forced rankings, internal divisions, fear, you name it)

So where are you positioned in this game? You are the exploited employee they (or any other company) will squeeze until the product is at visible risk. You will willingly accept recurrent extra loads of work, cause you are scared to loose you livelihood and you have no other choice. Also you are the next person to be laid off (its about when, not if) On the other hand you also have free will, knowledge and skills (don't buy into the AI BS, you are needed), and dignity.

Now, if you know the game, the players, and the rules, you would likely be better off using this platform also to bring ideas on what can be done to make it a bit more fair to you and your colleagues and to minimize irrational expoitation, unethical meassures, and everything else everyone has been posting here. (Never forget this is Corporate America, don't expect miracles)

Complaining, and spreading subjective fear (distict from useful info and heads up) will only work against you as that is the expected behavior.

There are problems, bring ideas to help solve or make them better.
After all, you were all hired for your problem solving skills and intelligence.
Use it!

PD: This post encourages fairness and ethics. Expect pushback, misleading statements, and attacks from some players in the comments section.

I’m over the whole “we’re one big family” nonsense Capone tr--s out every chance it gets. The minute trimming heads boosts numbers, whole groups vanish like they never mattered. The slogan is just a guilt trip to keep us quiet while they cash in. There’s nothing family-like about any of it.

If you're smart enough to read between the lines, you should see BIG changes coming up on the horizon

What piece of art would you select - I vote for we are a family...

Corporate teams just spin papers, PowerPoint and wage a lot of time in meetings
Look at all failed product launches, marketing initiatives, strategic bs, bad acquisitions.
Yet its regions who have to pay the price