Good luck with your layoffs. I hope your firings go really great.
That's it, that's the post.
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While leadership is touting that AI will help augment staff (train your coworker), the truth is that they are banking on CIEC to provide significant cost savings by oursourcing to FTEs.
Outsourcing to contracting firms has proven time and time again to be a waste of money for what was provided, but outsourcing to actual offshore FTEs will save a bundle.
@kz I wasn’t sure if you knew what you were talking about and you’ve now removed all doubt.
@ee The maximum high of Comcast stock was $61.80 on 9/2/21, and with the exception of one brief jump in Aug 2023 it has steadily and reliably fallen ever since. You also can't reasonably judge a company's current value based on it's stock from IPO in 1972; most people didn't buy it, I can pretty much guarantee you didn't buy it and it's not relevant to the fact that the stock price is presently $21.57. It's one-third the value it had 54 years ago.
Look at Amazon, look at Google, look at most of the top stocks. You can't intelligently argue that Comcast is a healthy or impressive company when its stock has gone down and to the right for 50+ years. That's the sign of systematic, repeated poor investments and leadership failures. Echostar (DISH) is dancing on the edge of bankruptcy and their stock price is $94.25 a share.
This is basic math. Why are you defending the Titanic?
@ee You just replied to a reply that has shown up word for word in two different posts. It's either copy and paste or a bot.
@dx Curious what you mean when you say that Comcast’s stock has “always been trash.” Always? If you bought $1,000 worth of Comcast stock at the IPO in 1980, you would have $426,165 today, roughly 426 times the original investment - a 13.75% compound annual growth rate over 47 years. A few years ago, when the stock was doing better,m then it is today, it would have been worth over $1 million.
@dx Spot on. There are certain leaders who keep running the same playbook, create chaos, then parachute into the next company and do it all over again. There are specific names that make the boards roll their eyes when they hear they’re incoming in as CEO because they already know the disruption that tends to follow.
And apparently the answer is: keep doing it until you retire. It’s sad, exhausting, and incredibly cynical.
Don’t put blind trust in anyone at that level of an organization. The agreements and decisions being made at the top are often about protecting the business, the board, and the numbers. Not necessarily what’s best for employees or even customers. The days of assuming leadership will automatically do right by the people beneath them are long gone.
I know that may be sobering for some people. Others probably know it far too well and have learned to emotionally detach just to keep functioning.
Always have a backup plan if you can. I know that isn’t realistic for everyone, but protect yourself, pay attention to patterns, understand that their incentives may not be the same as yours, and when you have the ability to vote with your feet.
You guys are missing the point of why McKinsey exists. They aren't there to help put a company back on track. Not one McKinsey powerpoint in god's existence has resulted in someone gaining a job, or a layoff being avoided.
McKinsey is a Sin Eater (read up on the concept). Comcast leadership already knew they wanted to cut labor. It's the easiest target on every company's P&L statement that executives can cut, sell as "efficiency" or "cost savings" and because Wall Street is incredibly stupid and gullible, it will slightly bump the stock (Comcast stock has always been trash for the record).
This isn't about the company, or economics directly; a McKinsey report always serves only one purpose - it allows failed executive leadership to go to the board of directors, point to the report and say "I have no choices, there are no other alternatives, even McKinsey says so; we have to do this and it's not my fault we're here." Now the executives take no accountability as McKinsey said they have to do the layoffs, they get to stay on or keep their golden parachute on the way out - only to go do the same damned thing at the next company. McKinsey keeps being brought into the same company every few years for the same exact reason, execs need air cover to make cuts to cover up their sc--w-ups. No senior executive will ever admit to making errors or being wrong.
Also remember, most board of directors are the same executives running this play every few years in other companies. Board members sit on Comcast's board, but have jobs elsewhere double dipping for a salary. The gentleman's agreement is I'll let you slit your employee's throats so long as when I ask you allow me the same.
You must be new here. Welcome to round one of hunger games.
Because they need someone else to validate the decisions they already know they’re going to make. God forbid the accountability sits with the company that made or failed to make the decisions that got us here in the first place. Revenue isn’t growing, the organization became bloated and overly layered, and now an outside firm gets brought in to recommend the cuts so leadership can point to “the analysis” instead of owning the outcome.
Imagine this, you ignore a leaking roof for years, let the water damage spread, then hire an inspector who says the drywall has to come out. The inspector didn’t cause the damage; they just documented the consequences of not fixing it sooner.
This is what I don’t understand. We keep hearing that McKinsey is telling companies they can replace people with AI, but their own research doesn’t even say that. Their research says AI can automate parts of jobs, which is very different from replacing the person doing the job. They also found that companies expected much bigger headcount reductions from AI than what actually happened. So where is the proof that replacing these people with AI actually works? Because right now it feels like we’re treating a prediction as if it’s already been proven.
@OP McKinsey has been telling senior leadership that they can use AI to replace people, but there isn't a single case study backing that up. Most of these high-level problems don't actually need AI; they just require a genuine willingness to innovate and make operational changes, neither which they are interested in doing.