"Congratulations, we work for an underperforming business in a crappy industry and it's going to be hell for the next 12 months." As emails from the boss go, this one is a doozie. "As we reduce the number of customers we serve, fix some of our problems, strip out layers of management, we will need fewer people to run the business." John Pluthero, the new head of Cable and Wireless, certainly knows how to get the attention of his staff.
Such an approach is admirably frank, in a business more usually characterised by waffle and circumlocution. It is also dangerous. In saying that the company will abandon customers and staff, Pluthero is advertising C&W as an unreliable supplier and an uncertain employer. Other suppliers and other employers will be quick to use this to tempt the best away. Hardly a good start to the year of reconstruction.
While the memo also includes more positive themes — for those who like a wild ride, Pluthero says, this is the right place to be, and by the end C&W will be more Armani than Top Shop — it will be remembered for its dour analysis of the state of the telecommunications business and C&W's particularly dowdy condition therein. All true, but good leadership is about rather more than just telling the truth.
Pluthero is an experienced businessman. He can have been in no doubt that the memo would leak to the press, and will have no misconceptions concerning the demoralising effect to staff at reading about their demise in the Sunday papers. This is tough love indeed, unless the intention is to save on redundancy payments by provoking a wholesale exodus of all staff regardless of merit. In that case, a massively shrunken company consisting mostly of long-term contracts with large companies will result – barely more than a collection of assets in an easy to swallow format for an acquisitive competitor.
If Pluthero turns C&W around, it will indeed be one of the most astonishing reversals in recent times. We wish him luck. Yet it's all too easy to read the memo as part suicide note, part eBay listing. We take no pleasure in the thought of yet another big name in British technology being consigned to history, but the ghost of Marconi may soon have company in its Hertzian heaven.
Talkback
I must admit I almost laughed out loud when I heard about this.
One of the most explicit corporate suicide notes I have ever had the pleasure of seeing - not!
I can't imagine there is a single salesperson in Cable and Wireless relishing their task at the moment. How on earth can one sell C&W product after that!
What was said may be true - I don't know. But baldly telling both your staff AND customers to eff-off takes the concept of management incompetance into hitherto unexplored areas of human credulity.
In a single memo in "David Brent" style has metaphorically assigned his staff and clients to Death Row, but left them with the keys to the prison and given them a 6 month head start, before his inevitable successor goes desparately running after them begging them to return to face the lethal injection.
This reminds me of a David Brent classic: -
Bad news: - "Mass redundancies and contract terminations"
Good news: - "I've been promoted....so...evey cloud has a silver lining eh".......you're not still thinking about the bad news are you"
"Hell for 12 months"???? The staff are lucky as the public have had years of hell from Conthem & Winddown. C&W have gone from one disaster to another, in the UK, for many years. It's high time the DTI took permanent action, shut them down and never allow Conthem & Winddown to trade in the UK ever again. In fact, they should shut down all US corporations and ban them permanently. The public didn't ask for companies to shut down our cafes and sell us poor quality burgers instead of a tradional fry-up. We didn't ask for phone companies that disconnect phones for paying the bill 1 day late. We didn't ask for ISPs that disconnect their servers at weekends to save money but still charge the subscriptions. The dollar is corrupt and will destroy all good businesses to replace them with sub-standard ones. Solution? ReNationalise BT and BTBroadband and shut US ISPs down..