By Mohan Krishnamoorthy
A large-scale, and rather disruptive transformation is playing out at Twitter in full public view and the details continue to emerge one tweet at a time. Elon Musk in his avatar of Knight in shining Armor rode in to ‘rescue’ the tech giant after a fierce corporate battle, ousting the shareholders and the Board. Less than a month after he took control of Twitter, Mr Musk began cleaning house, firing the incumbent CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
After takeover, Mr Musk has fired over 3,500 high-paid employees, by some accounts nearly 50 per cent of its workforce. As expected, his actions have generated highly polarized tweets on the very same platform he is shaking up. Some corporate watchers and the media reacted in shock and awe, while Musk’s supporters gleefully tweeted about the large-scale house-cleaning. There was a lot of chest-thumping over the fact that the ‘services’ of the social media platform continued uninterrupted despite 50% of workers being fired.
The move comes at a time when rest of the Tech giants Meta-Amazon-Apple-Netflix- Google (MAANG) are also reeling after announcing large-scale layoffs.
Can I run my IT organization with just 50% of the workforce?
IT strategy consultants and EAs sometimes muse about “hypothetical” questions like these, but now we are watching a live case-study unfold. My guess is that tech executives and CxOs across large corporations are probably watching this drama play out at Twitter and wondering if they followed Mr. Musk’s lead too.
As a tech giant, Twitter runs (or ran) a rather large IT organization with Comms, Marketing, Legal & Compliance, HR and supporting functions. Users like you and me are its key stakeholders and the source of income include advertisers out to capture our eyeballs and a the ‘elite class of users willing to pay $8/month for the privileged blue-tick.
Every time there is a major leadership change in an enterprise, corporate IT folks begin to read the organizational tea leaves. When new CEO, CFO or CIO takes charge, they bring in their distinct vision and announce “100 day” or Q1 plans. These start off as a quick round of analysis, followed by behind-the-scenes number crunching focused on headcount. After all, skilled techies are still backbone of IT departments, and such IT resources are not cheap!
Transformations are announced and change management plans are set in motion. There is a lot of soul searching over the layers of management and legions of Project Managers, Business Analysts, Architects and Tech Specialists. Managers scramble to justify the headcount required to sustain complex IT platforms including ERPs running finance, manufacturing & HR, CRM, Analytics and order management engines. Despite large scale automations, it still takes a small army to manage and sustain large platforms.
At the end of “100 day” or Q1 plans, the CxO might announce transformations impacting headcount. Before the dust settles on the transformation, leaders begin showcasing a net reduction in FTE headcount. In reality, a percentage of folks simply re-badged to outsourcing vendors who promise to sustain operations, while many laid-off folks come back as high-paid contractors. After a bit of creative accounting guided by ‘smart’ finance consultants, the resulting hands-on-deck to run IT operations remains relatively unchanged. IT is after all a people intensive business, and tech workers are expensive.
In a viral tweet @MattWallace888 said “49 days and I still can’t figure out what the employees Elon Musk fired actually did for Twitter. ” This is where Twitter’s ‘new strategy’ differs from Corporate IT.
About the Author
Mohan Krishnamoorthy is an Indian American technology executive with a multinational company. His viewpoints and papers have been published in several international technical and nontechnical journals.
He can be reached at mohan@garamchai.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohanbabuk/