Jack Dorsey isn’t wasting time in his new appointment as Twitter’s permanent CEO. He’s planning to fire over 300 people in an attempt to get the struggling company back on track. And he’s trying not to waste words, either. In a memo to the staff released today, he wrote, “Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I’m going to give it to you straight.”
For its genre, Dorsey’s memo is indeed admirably brief and to the point. But it’s still riddled with jargon. Why is it so hard for executives to write in a truly straightforward manner? Here is Dorsey’s memo, with our suggested cuts in strikethrough and additions in bold.
* * *
From: Jack Dorsey
To: All Employees
Date: October 13, 2015
Subject: A more focused Twitter
Team,
We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce cutting our staff so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow spend the money better. Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I’m going to give it to you straight.
The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap for simplify our plans for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The roadmap is focused on the experiences which will have the greatest impact doing stuff we hope people will like. We launched the first of these experiences last week with Moments, a great beginning, and a bold peek into a pretty big gamble on the future of how people will see what’s going on in the world Twitter.
The roadmap is also a plan to change how we work, and what we need to do that work. Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead bear the brunt. We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team We’ve got way too many engineers while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel and once we’ve cut that group we’ll have too many of everybody else.
So we have made an extremely tough decision: we plan to part ways with fire up to 336 people from across the company. We are doing this with the utmost respect for each and every person. But it’s not their fault; we hired them when we shouldn’t have. Twitter will go to great lengths to take care of each individual by providing generous exit packages give them decent severance and help finding a new job.
Let’s take this time to express our gratitude to all of those who are leaving us we are firing. We will honor them by doing our best Letting them go will make it easier for us to serve all the people that use Twitter. We do so with a more purpose-built team which we’ll continue to build strength into over time, as we are now enabled to reinvest in our most impactful priorities Having shed the people we don’t need, we’ll have the money to hire the people we really want.
Thank you all for your trust and understanding here. This isn’t easy. But it is right. The world Our shareholders needs a strong Twitter, and this is another step to get there. As always, please reach out to contact me directly with any ideas or questions.
Jack