Category: Corporate

PagerDuty sends the worst layoff email ever written

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We have a new winner. In this season of tens of thousands of tech layoffs, I thought Twitter’s short, insensitive, anonymous layoff email was the worst possible. I was so wrong. PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada laid off 7% of the company’s workforce with an email that included this impressive list of sins: And . . … Continued

Ask Dr. Wobs: How do you get people to read to the bottom?

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I recently received this query from a loyal reader: In an era where merit is accorded on the basis of social media ‘likes’ and increasing numbers of TLTR [too longer to read] messages I would like to (read) your comments on how to get the audience to ‘read to the bottom.’ Good question. Is “read … Continued

Slideware

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I’m currently writing some serious business content for a company that has many, many PowerPoint presentations about its ideas. I want to be clear here. This is not a complaint. The ideas are good. The slides are good. And I am certain that the people delivering the presentations were effective in persuading their audiences about … Continued

Southwest Airlines apology: poor, late, and insensitive

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Thousands of travelers with Southwest Airlines reservations are stranded and unable to get where they are going (or to return home). While weather delays initially caused this problem, Southwest’s own inadequate systems made recovery slow and infuriating. It took many days for the company to finally position itself to make things right. Let’s take a … Continued

Writing while hangry, sleepy, etc.

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When are you most productive as a writer? I’m best from about 8 to 11 am, or 1 to 4 pm. If I’m writing something important, I try to time it for those periods, when my blood sugar and writing flow are typically at their best, and when I can block out distractions and concentrate. … Continued

Leadership lessons from Elon Musk

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Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has done nearly everything wrong, destroying tens of billions of dollars in value in a few short weeks. Last night he conducted a binding Twitter poll to see if he should step down, and received a resounding vote of no confidence. What can leaders learn from Musk’s short and … Continued

Disruption wins — except when it loses

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Disruptive innovation requires viewing the world differently from conventional wisdom. Disruptors who succeed manage to change the conventional wisdom. Disruptors who fail end up victims of the conventional wisdom. And that includes the conventional wisdom inherent in government regulation Disruptors who ignored the rules YouTube was built on pirated, copyrighted content. It violated rules and … Continued

How things fail

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Things break on the internet. The question is: is there anyone left to fix them? And how much of the resulting friction causes people to leave you for a competitor? Friction, like entropy, is ever-increasing Code is forever. It should keep working. But it requires maintenance. Why? Because it does not exist in a vacuum. … Continued