Anne Morris

Surprising to no one, our point of view is that move fast and break things is not the right approach here.

Does that mean we're going to give Elon advice?

Yeah, we'd love to give Elon some advice and his boss and the Republican Party, because this is not just about one or two men at the top, which is how this story is being told.

We gave advice to the Democratic Party last year, and it only seems fair to include our Republican friends as well.

I like it.

In the meantime, today, we're going to talk to the people left holding the bag at any organization that's experiencing layoffs.

We want to answer the question, where do you go from here?

Let's get into it.

All right, Francis, to put this conversation in context, if we look at tech as an illustrative example here, what seems to be happening is that after a spike in layoffs in the last few years, some companies are continuing to shed workers in 2025 and rethink exactly who they're going to need to compete in an AI world.

As we record this, Meta just laid off about 5% of its workforce.

Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, they've all announced job cuts while still hiring for more specialized roles in AI and machine learning.

I think a fair way to characterize the general mood is that even as the economic news is relatively good, at least here in the U.S., disruption and uncertainty in the business environment are still driving a fair amount of caution.

And layoffs have almost been normalized at this point as a way to deal with our economic anxiety.

Yeah.

And just to underline that, because that's exactly where we're going next.

I am sensing also the opposite in some organizations.

Like, hey, look at this as a sign of strength.

We're willing to inflict this kind of damage on people.

I don't know if that's the kind of masculine energy some of these leaders are talking about, but I think they are deeply misreading the situation.

Yeah, for sure this step is not being framed as failure.