So let's talk about Twitter

So, Twitter is imploding, and a couple of points come to mind.

First off, obviously, Holy Shit! Like, truly, what the fuck?

Second, on behalf of B-school professors everywhere, let me extend a huge shout out to Elon Musk for giving us this Supernova of a case study with which to educate and entertain students for years to come. In the annals of bad managerial decision-making – and those annals are not thin – this is shaping up to be one of, maybe the most extraordinary displays of destructive incompetence. Kodak's decision not to pursue digital photography, Time Warner's decision to merge with AOL, Yahoo's decision not to buy Google – all immensely bad decisions – nonetheless look like farm-league level boobery compared to what's happened and, as I write, continues to happen at Twitter. So let's quickly review the main takeaways from this Game-of-Thrones-Season-8-level debacle.

Really, there's only one takeaway: don't act so badly that you lose all your good people. I mean that is so self-evidently and blindingly obvious, you'd think it wouldn't have to be pointed out. But apparently ...

This has been a true masterclass in how not to manage people. Firing half your staff in the middle of the night as apparently useless, forcing remaining employees back to the office forthwith, and then requiring some bizarre oath of loyalty to "hardcore" commitment and 80-hour workweeks? I mean, just read that again – and ask yourself how that could have possibly seemed like a good idea. How was it not abundantly clear that treating highly-educated employees who can easily find work elsewhere like they're recalcitrant teenagers working the graveyard shift at a Pizza Hut was not going to produce, as we say, an "optimal outcome"? And "hardcore" lol. Did Musk ride into the Twitter head office on a skateboard?

So the takeaway is - yea, don't do any of that. (Unless there's some 3-D level chess strategy at play here and the idea is to drive Twitter into the ground and claim it as a tax write-off. Seems unlikely.) But there's a deeper value in this entire train wreck, one that all firms can learn from. Something I have pointed out many times in my classroom is the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of all enterprise. Employees, although vaunted on corporate websites everywhere as "our greatest asset," are in real, i.e. accounting, terms defined solely as a liability on the company's books. Musk's management decisions at Twitter, although breathtakingly reckless, reflect an impulsion driven by that that basic paradox. Looked at through the lens of the numbers, which at Twitter were apparently pretty bleak, it may well have seemed that a bloated, overpaid, and underproductive workforce represented a threat to the company's overall viability. And let's grant that may even have been, at least partially, true. Nonetheless, I think we can all agree that the answer to that problem is not to swing a gigantic wrecking ball that in the space of a week demolishes a culture that has been building up over more than a decade, resulting in the mass exodus of all your systems-critical talent. There are, to put it mildly, better solutions.

But insofar as this has served as reminder that employees and the culture that collectively they create are the vital asset of any firm, perhaps this episode will prove to be salutary. Meanwhile, feel free to connect with me over on Mastodon.