I have nothing positive to say.
But I'm not the one struggling.
Happy Thursday,
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This week's newsletter will be slightly different than other newsletters. Or perhaps not, after all. My newsletter reflects where my head is at, and this week it's been all over the place, and for the first time in ages, I struggled with what to write.
Not because I don't have an opinion over how Elon has handled the whole Twitter debacle, it's just been hard to sort the thoughts and what to make out of it. It's all been developing so fast.
But here goes nothing.
My relationship with Twitter has been on and off since I started tweeting in 2009. How much I tweeted is fortunately no longer disclosed but let's say this: I've tweeted a lot, and I have Twitter to thank for much, which makes it even harder not to pay attention.
I'm not going to touch upon the twists and turns leading up to Musk now owning Twitter; a million pieces are written about it. This is a good one, should you want to read about it.
Instead, let's focus on what he's done as a leader since he declared that he is the Chief Twitt and that we all should let that sink in.
(As much as I love a good meme, this is, well..yeah.. no, I don't k…I have no words.)
Fired 50% of Twitter's staff.
Realizing that he needed some of the people, he fired and asked them back.
Fired people for speaking their minds in a Slack channel.
Fired an engineer in public (in a tweet, which is now deleted, but the engineer got fired.)
Sent an email around Twitter 2.0 - demanding long hours and high intensity from workers.
It's mindboggling that this has happened in less than three weeks.
And these are only some of the public changes that have happened that relate to employees and leadership. And while I disagree with the decisions taken, it's impossible not to watch and read about everything happening.
Usually, here's where I would write something about what we could learn from all of this. I am trying to find a positive angle on what's happening. After all, I'm a "the glass is always half-full" type of person. But it's damn impossible to find that here.
Sure, Elon Musk is very clear and deliberate about what type of company he is now building. If you've been reading FullStack HR, you know I like clarity. He is not sugarcoating anything. What you see is what you get.
But even if this works, whatever that means, is this the kind of organization we want to build? Is this how we'd like companies to be run? The leadership we want?
No matter how I twist and turn this and try to look at it from different angles, I always end up with a solid and firm no on these questions. One can only speculate about how this will end, but this is far from over, and I guess we’ll have to wait and see where things will land.
What’s your view on this?
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Join me there and let’s continue the discussion around the moves Elon Musk does with Twitter.
Thanks for the kind recommendation, Johannes! 🙏🏼