Read on my website In Q4 of last year, an HR leader I know attended a tense performance review meeting. One engineering manager wanted to give an employee an 'exceeds expectations' rating because their output had doubled. Another manager disagreed, pointing out that the increase was just from using ChatGPT, while the employee's poor design choices had caused two production errors. Because the team lacked a framework to resolve this kind of conflict, the discussion quickly broke down into an...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Read on the website The last two editions of this “layoff analysis” series covered Block's 40% cut and Atlassian's 1,600-person restructuring. Both generated incredible feedback and conversations, so I'm keeping this going. This time, Snap is in the hot seat. If Block was a story about overhiring and Atlassian was a story about a broken cost structure, Snap is something worse: a company that keeps making the same workforce planning mistakes over and over again, repackaging each round with a...
4 months ago • 17 min read
The last edition, where I broke down the real reasons behind Block's layoffs, got a lot of great feedback and a few of you reached out asking me to keep going with this kind of analysis. So here we are. This time, Atlassian is in the hot seat. Like Block, Atlassian is not a startup, but the lessons buried in what happened there are directly relevant to anyone building and scaling a team right now. If anything, the Atlassian story hits closer to home for HR and people ops leaders because it...
5 months ago • 10 min read
Everyone Is Blaming AI for Block's 40% Layoff. The Data Tells a Different Story. I'm sure you've heard this news by now. Jack Dorsey cut more than 4,000 employees from Block, taking the company from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. I wasn't planning on writing about this, but the conversation on LinkedIn and elsewhere has been dominated by fear, hot takes, and very little actual analysis. So I decided to dig into the data and share what I found, because the story the numbers tell is...
5 months ago • 10 min read
The internet is full of HR advice. Most of it is written by people who have never set foot in a startup. They work at HR software companies marketing their tools, or they are enterprise HR veterans translating their experience into "startup-friendly" language. The problem is that startup HR is fundamentally different from enterprise HR, and advice that works at a 5,000-person company can actively harm a 50-person startup. The Enterprise Playbook Doesn't Work Here Enterprise HR is about...
6 months ago • 4 min read
Read on my website FREE LIVE WORKSHOP: AUGUST 26, 1:00 PM TO 2:30 PM CST Build an AI Assistant that Answers HR QuestionsSponsored by The Chi Alliance If you’re the HR team of one, you’re also the help desk. Every question about PTO, expenses, or remote work lands on you, and most of them are already answered in a policy document nobody reads. Register here Most startup layoffs are not caused by “bad markets” or “bad luck.” They are caused by undisciplined headcount decisions during growth,...
6 months ago • 10 min read
Read on my website In this episode, I sat down with Barbara Wittmann, founder of Digital Wisdom Collective and long–time IT and transformation leader who has spent decades inside complex organizations watching digital projects succeed, stall, or completely unravel. Barbara has led and advised on major transformation programs and now dedicates her work to one central idea: technology is never the core problem, people are. Our conversation explored why so many digital transformation initiatives...
7 months ago • 9 min read
Read on my website In this episode, I sit down with Nikki Barua, visionary entrepreneur, transformation expert, and CEO at FlipWork. Rather than centering on her impressive backstory, we dive quickly into her bold thesis: every leader today must think on a 300 year horizon, redesign how their organization engages with AI, and radically reimagine the role of people, leadership, and HR in this new era. From bootstrapping philosophy and funding discipline, to where AI should “live” in the org...
7 months ago • 8 min read
Read on my website In this edition, I sat down with Rob Gallaher, founder of ProfitX, to talk about profit sharing and how it can be a catalyst for business growth. Rob shares his journey from running his own company to realizing that the way most businesses handle bonuses and incentives is fundamentally broken. Out of that frustration grew a systematic approach to profit sharing that is simple, transparent, and sustainable. The conversation explores why traditional bonus programs so often...
8 months ago • 10 min read