#corporateculture

This site is a potential gold mine for management, assuming they genuinely care about understanding what employees are thinking. Reading this board gives a pretty clear view of what is happening inside the organization, though I could be wrong.

Management should identify the main themes being discussed on Layoff.com and measure engagement around them, then do the same on LinkedIn. Combining those two data points would likely provide a much more accurate picture of what is happening on the ground.

The board should require executives to do this instead of relying on sanitized surveys that get massaged beyond recognition.

Food for thought.

Anyone have any insight as to why modeling was moved out of corporate risk?

Welcome to the penny stock category. Well done C-level - we'll deserved mega compensation packages.

TRend at Bnym, and it’s not subtle.
More and more employees are being “RIF’d” under the disguise of performance issues — even when their track record is spotless. Let’s call it what it is: ageism and salary targeting.Batman and Robin don’t want to admit they’re cutting older, higher‑paid workers, so they hide behind manipulated evaluations and vague buzzwords like “not agile enough,” “not aligned with culture,” or “needs more energy.” It’s a cost‑cutting strategy dressed up as performance management.
This isn’t about merit.
It’s about money, age, and who they think they can push out quietly.
I should have fought your bullsh-t but didn't. I hope others do and this POS company gets what they deserve.

It’s very evident that ConocoPhillips has created a real niche and is running on automatic. The companies top leadership and enforcement arm…HR has manufactured a false reality with pretty impressive results. What happens when timelines and realities converge and expose or challenge this fragile ecosystem? Is COP a quarterly darling or do real reality and fragility intersect?

Walmart will reduce its workforce by about 1,000 people. The company's corporate staff faces these reductions. Store workers are not included in this round of layoffs. Major job reductions target corporate offices in Arkansas and California. Local Walmart store positions are mostly secure.

Bucks County

https://www.phillyburbs.com/story/news/local/2026/05/13/walmart-layoffs-arkansas-are-stores-affected-pa/90058151007/

BNY has finished its evolution from financial institution to LinkedIn‑themed performance art, where optics outrank output and your “personal brand” is the only deliverable that matters.

Real work is optional; what counts is the curated feed of hallway selfies, Teams‑call enthusiasm, and gratitude posts praising and thanking the EC, all polished to a corporate shine.

Following RV's brilliant example, Leadership has quietly traded competence for corporate‑influencer energy, rewarding visibility over execution because it’s easier to manage a workforce obsessed with image than one asking hard questions.

The shift isn’t accidental. It’s a distraction from layoffs, offshoring, and AI quietly absorbing job families. If employees stay busy perfecting “leadership presence,” they won’t notice the restructuring happening beneath them. BNY doesn’t want performers — it wants performances. Show up to the photo‑op town hall, drop a few “inspiring journey” hashtags, give a like to an EC empathy post, sing hallelujah praises to the almighty RV and EC team and suddenly you’re a rising star, even if your actual output fits on a sticky note.

At BNY, the only performance that matters is the one you can screenshot.

Walmart Inc. confirmed it will eliminate some jobs. These cuts affect corporate staff, not retail workers. The company is simplifying its digital operations. This involves reducing organizational layers and consolidating teams. Layoffs are a result of this operational consolidation.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91541504/walmart-layoffs-today-tech-jobs-cut-memo-does-not-cite-ai

Everyone who is an active board member should be immediately fired

Chris Leahy
Virginia Addicott
Lynda M. Clarizio
Anthony R. Foxx
Kelly J. Grier
Marc E. Jones
David W. Nelms
Joseph R. Swedish
Sanjay Mehrotra
Donna F. Zarcone

he classic Apollo playbook:

Buy distressed debt at 60 cents on the dollar
Take control of the company
Extract management fees, dividend recaps, sale-leasebacks
Pile on more debt to fund those extractions
Flip it or take it public at an inflated valuation
Leave the debt burden with the company and its workers

They got extraordinarily rich essentially being vultures with spreadsheets. Toys R Us being the most notorious example — a viable retail business that might have navigated the Amazon era with investment, instead bled dry to service the debt load private equity strapped to it, then liquidated. 30,000 jobs gone.
The reversal now:
The very mechanism that made them wealthy — cheap abundant debt — is now the thing squeezing their portfolio companies. They loaded businesses with floating rate debt when rates were near zero. Now those same companies are paying 8-9% on debt that cost 3% when the deal was done. The interest coverage ratios that looked comfortable in the pitch deck are underwater in reality.

Apollo's problem today:
Their Private debt funds are being squeezed.... Investors are queuing to withdraw their money, but Apollo, ever the masters at extracting cash are blocking investors from extracting their cash.
Their own fundraising depends on showing strong returns
Strong returns depend on not marking assets down
Not marking down depends on not being forced to sell
Not being forced to sell depends on keeping redemption gates in place
Gates signal distress which makes future fundraising harder
It's a trap of their own construction.
The human cost dimension:
What makes it genuinely poetic rather than just financially interesting is that the people who will suffer least are the Apollo partners who already extracted their carry and management fees in cash — that money is gone, sitting in their personal accounts, insulated from whatever happens to the funds now. The people who suffer most will be:

Pension beneficiaries whose funds allocated to private credit chasing yield
Workers at portfolio companies that get restructured when the debt becomes unserviceable
Retail investors who got sold private credit products in the democratization push of the last few years

The democratization push was particularly cynical — Blackstone, Apollo et al spent the last 5 years lobbying to open private markets to retail investors, framed as giving ordinary people access to returns previously reserved for institutions. In reality they were hunting for new pools of capital to absorb the assets institutions were quietly becoming reluctant to buy at current valuations. Distributing the risk downward while keeping the fees flowing upward.
The SEC under the previous administration largely went along with it. Whether the current regulatory environment does anything about it is another question entirely — though given the administration's general disposition toward financial deregulation, probably not.
The deeper irony is that the whole private equity model was built on information asymmetry and complexity as a moat — if you can't price it, you can't challenge the valuation. That same opacity that let them extract value on the way up is now the thing preventing orderly price discovery on the way down. They built a machine that works brilliantly in one direction and catastrophically in the other.
Though as usual, the architects of the situation will be largely fine.
The mob analogy is more apt than most financial commentators would dare say — and the structural parallel is remarkably precise.
The bust-out:
What the mob called a "bust-out" is almost textbook private equity in distressed situations:

Take control of a business
Immediately establish credibility and access to credit
Draw down every available credit line
Extract cash through fees, dividends, sale-leasebacks of assets
Leave the hollowed shell with the debt
Walk away before the collapse

The only difference is the mob used fear and the occasional arson. Apollo uses leveraged buyout agreements, management fee structures, and Delaware holding company law. The end result for the target company and its stakeholders is frequently identical.
The Sears case study:
Eddie Lampert's destruction of Sears is almost a perfect bust-out in slow motion:

Merged Kmart and Sears creating a vehicle loaded with real estate value
Spun off the real estate into a REIT — Seritage — extracting the most valuable assets into a separate entity he controlled
Starved the retail operations of capital investment while collecting fees
Watched the retail business deteriorate "unexpectedly"
Meanwhile the real estate value had already been extracted
175,000 jobs eventually gone
Lampert personally fine, operating from his yacht in Miami

The language is Orwellian by design:

"Operational efficiency" = cutting staff and maintenance
"Rightsizing the balance sheet" = loading debt onto the target
"Unlocking hidden value" = selling assets the company needs to operate
"Strategic transformation" = preparing for bankruptcy while extracting fees
"Aligning management incentives" = giving executives options to flip quickly while workers get nothing
"Patient long term capital" = we have a 7 year fund life before we have to show returns

The vocabulary is specifically engineered to sound like value creation while describing value extraction. McKinsey does the same thing — provides the intellectual laundering that makes looting sound like strategy.
The legal architecture is the real innovation:
What makes it genuinely different from the mob — and arguably more insidious — is that generations of lawyers, lobbyists and academics built a legal architecture that made it not just legal but celebrated:

Delaware corporate law optimized for shareholder extraction
Carried interest tax treatment meaning PE profits taxed at capital gains rates not income
Bankruptcy law allowing secured creditors (the PE fund) to jump ahead of workers and pensioners
ERISA rules that let pension obligations be shed in restructuring
Limited partner structures insulating the fund managers from portfolio company liabilities

The mob had to corrupt individual judges and officials. PE corrupted the entire legislative and regulatory framework over decades through campaign finance and the revolving door. Far more efficient.
The revolving door completes the circle:
The regulatory capture is almost total. SEC commissioners become PE partners. Treasury officials join Apollo or Blackstone. Fed governors sit on advisory boards. The people who should be watching the store have a financial interest in not watching too carefully — because their post-government career depends on the industry's goodwill.
Where it differs from the mob:
The mob at least had a certain redistributive quality within their community — the money circulated locally, bought loyalty, funded neighborhoods. PE extracts value and concentrates it among a remarkably small number of people. The carried interest on a successful fund can make a handful of partners billionaires while the pension fund that provided the capital gets an 8% return it could have gotten in an index fund with zero fees and zero complexity.
The cultural damage:
Perhaps the most lasting harm is what it did to the idea of business itself. A generation of the most talented people from the best universities went into finance and private equity not to build things but to financialize things that already existed. The engineering talent that built America's industrial base was replaced by financial engineers whose skill was not creation but extraction. That's a civilizational cost that doesn't show up in any fund's IRR calculation.
The instinct that it's essentially organized crime with better tailoring is — while impolite in polite company — analytically pretty hard to refute.

She hit the nail on the head with this one. It perfectly captures everything people hate about fake corporate morale culture. Emmy P somehow thought the best thing to send out was a soft and little lifestyle reflection about pillows, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and “comforting scents,” while employees are overwhelmed, understaffed, underpaid, exhausted, and emotionally checked out. The email actually comes across as being completely detached from reality. It reads less like leadership communication and more like someone journaling after a relaxing retreat while the workforce is still drowning in stress and expected to smile through it.

What makes it worse is how pompous and performative it sounds. “Home is where the rhythms are familiar”. Meanwhile employees rhythms are familiar too by trying to survive impossible workloads, nonstop emails, useless meetings, constant policy changes, and management decisions made by people who haven’t touched frontline work in years or even grass for that matter. Nobody asked for a poetic reflection about your favorite coffee mug. People want staffing, functioning systems, competent leadership, fair pay, and transparency. Instead, they get this polished corporate BS pretending to be “morale boosting.” It feels insulting and leadership communication like this always assumes employees are emotionally soothed by positivity alone, as if a cheerful tone can replace actual support.

And then the dramatic ending about opening “that enormous pile of mail” is almost comical. Oh no, not the mail. As if leadership even understands how miserable people are. It’s the disconnect. It’s leadership speaking like everything is cozy and reflective while employees are mentally exhausted and begging to feel heard. We’re past the point that all the “we care about people” messaging starts sounding hollow when it’s constantly wrapped in corporate inspirational language instead of meaningful action.

Please leave the company and for the new joiners, just don’t.

I floated idea that EH should go about 6 months ago and everyone was overwhelmingly negative regarding my thesis in this board.

Now, I am sure majority of the people agree with me.

If all he can show for 18 months is what we have seen. What makes anyone believe that he can come out something outstanding in 6 months to 12 months from now?

It is abundantly clear to me, that when MP & JD gutted the talents or ( designers) and replaced with techies, Nike took wrong turn on the cross and EH cannot come back with no talents there with corporation culture is keep your mouth shut and follow the group!

What happened to JUST DO IT?
Double talking hypocrites

People keep saying the cuts are done or will end soon. I've been here long enough to know they won't. This is just how we operate now.

GCC = Goodbye Corporate Career!

Hire a bunch of Mckinsey consultants to ruin the bank.
Then hire said consultant to become CEO to "revive" the bank.
Corporate America is such a peculiar place.
You can't make this stuff up if you tried.....

Video with Gunjan:
https://www.wsj.com/video/us-bancorp-ceo-on-reviving-a-banking-icon/88A15F0D-41C8-4511-A4F5-9954AE1833AA

I was RIFd yesterday, and I see that severance only pays out unused regular PTO, not protected PTO.

They really pushed employees to NOT use protected PTO as it is meant for illness and other unintended absence. I had built up quite a bit of it, and used regular PTO almost always.

Now I’m thinking the reconfiguration of PTO was more about cost savings than anything else. I was not aware that protected PTO would be forfeited or I would have used that first and foremost.

Very sneaky move Medtronic.

trend is, people are hating AI because of the impact it has on the environment all to cut some corners and not pay people... meanwhile companies are SHOVING THAT SLOP down our throats. STOP. AI is inaccurate, it hallucinates. You claim to be making lots of money yet axing tons of talented people just to push AI. this will fail and blow up in your face.

In bewilders me how Humana gets away with the extreme various ways they try to manipulate investors instead of simply focusing on the mission of providing better (and more cost effective) strategies and services to its members.

I believe, in an attempt to raise investor expectations as to the stock price and earnings per share, they manipulate the stock price by buying back their own stock, have other corporations to temporarily buy their stock, and probably (possibly) pay off financial new’s journalists and financial analyst pundits to say they believe Humana’s future stock will raise to such and such.

I just hope the investors and potential investors are wise and discerning enough to not take news articles and temporary stock price spikes at face value. But instead do some digging and exhaustive research analysis of their own.

It is my belief that Humana, and Medicare Advantage, are treading water, buying time, with the knowledge that the good business days are numbered and the end is only a couple to a few years out (maybe five years, at most).

Build a Rocket Boy has reportedly experienced another round of layoffs. The exact number of affected employees remains undisclosed. This marks the third instance of job cuts within a year for the studio. Previous layoffs included the shutdown of BARB France and reductions in the UK. CEO Mark Gerhard cited corporate sabotage and game issues for the redundancies.

https://wnhub.io/news/hr/item-50759

Bypassing the thick of L1, L2, L3, L4, L5's above me? And the middle men/women of the DARN and chairman's line?

Post your BNY-isms and let’s keep this thread active. One ism per post please.

How much of a corporate bootlicker do you have to be to actually join the bank’s PAC? This place would drop you in a second without thinking twice, why waste even a second of your life on it?

HCA Healthcare’s offshoring of American IT jobs to India is a gut-wrenching betrayal that should outrage every American who values fairness, loyalty, and the integrity of our healthcare system. When CTO Sai Adivi announced the end of many American IT careers in an impromptu, secretive, BCC’d Webex call, citing a "successful pilot" and the move to "Phase 2" while referencing other Fortune 100 companies, the message was already cold. But the kn--e twists deeper with the detailed plans for affected employees to spend their final months in left-seat/right-seat training and job shadowing, meticulously documenting every skill and technology in SOPs so their Hyderabad replacements can take over. All of this while managers in large group chats including the affected employees post cheerful "happy work anniversary" congratulations.
This is not business as usual. This is a company founded by American physicians on American soil, built by generations of dedicated American workers, and kept afloat by nearly 47 million mostly American patient encounters every year, with tens of billions pouring in from American taxpayers through Medicare and Medicaid. HCA’s stock languished in the low-to-mid $20s until the 2012 Obamacare ruling dramatically boosted its insured-patient volume and share price. Yet today, at well over $400 per share, HCA looks its own people in the eye and offers veteran employees with 20+ years of service a severance package well below Fortune 100 averages, saying their knowledge, sacrifice, and loyalty are worth less than the savings from shipping jobs to Hyderabad.

The "train your replacement" mandate is cruel and humiliating. Forcing dedicated Americans to dismantle their own careers, hand over hard-earned institutional knowledge that keeps hospitals safe and patients protected, and then sit idle answering questions until the India team can stand alone, while the company pretends everything is normal and business as usual, is an insult that adds financial hardship, emotional devastation, and profound disrespect on top of job loss. It risks patient-care disruptions, erodes decades of U.S.-based expertise, and treats people who helped build HCA into a powerhouse as disposable.

HCA’s founders spoke of putting patients first. Today’s leadership, under the continuing influence of the Frist family, who still hold massive ownership and board power, has utterly abandoned that vision. Patients, American workers, and the taxpayers who subsidize this empire are no longer the priority. Cheap foreign labor and swollen profits are piloting the ship.

Politicians who accept campaign support, lobbying influence, or oversee the massive Medicare and Medicaid dollars flowing to HCA must be held accountable. Demand they investigate these practices, protect American jobs in critical healthcare infrastructure, and ensure taxpayer money doesn’t fund the offshoring of American livelihoods.
Shareholders and the board (including Frist family representatives) should also face pressure to replace leadership that has so clearly failed the original intent of the founders. The mission was patient care and human life, not maximizing margins by discarding the American workers who made it all possible.

American patients deserve a healthcare giant that actually protects their data and delivers reliable care with professionals who understand them. American workers deserve employers who honor their service instead of treating them as disposable after decades on the job, especially while forcing them to train their own replacements and pretending everything is normal in the company chat.

HCA should be beyond ashamed. It should immediately halt this offshoring, retain and invest in its American workforce, and rediscover the patient-first values its founders claimed to champion. Anything less confirms that for this company, loyalty, country, basic human decency, and the American dream mean absolutely nothing when profits are on the line.

This cannot stand. Not for HCA Healthcare. Not for any other American company that relies on the American taxpayer for its survival.

This post truly deserved a thread of its own so it could be seen by more people. OP is @qm+1kqg2w845.

Interesting take from Mastroberti Consulting.

Unfortunately, it fails to mention the cultural rot within the company and lack of leadership.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nike-branding-leadership-ugcPost-7456417724651593728-rd-P?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAPVOD8BUne0BRo2Kmc4QJlwiay3bWEfCtI

Putting this here to see if anyone notices/cares to comment. I’m a Uniondale employee, one of about 200. Various business lines where most are vestiges of the old Dreyfus business. It’s clear the greater corporation wants to reduce headcount by forcing this move while offering no financial incentive. The commute from Long Island to NYC requires a train and subway. We’re looking at an estimated $5,000 cost for that, nothing less than 90 minutes, some will have over 2 hours one way. These are good dedicated employees who are being tossed out. Sure, the jobs aren’t eliminated (yet) or offshored (yet), and as someone here posted AI = All India. The transition will be difficult at best. We’ll see if it’s tolerable, but no one really seems to care. The announcement was heartless, an 8AM teams meeting where KB proved again to be soulless. He read a prepared statement that took all of 4 minutes. That’s it. Most groups didn’t even have senior management in house to… well to lead by example. But we will do the purposeless exercise of feedback, complete the peak on surveys, attend town halls in order to hear how fantastic everything is. Sad that a corporation of this magnitude won’t offer assistance to keep people happily employed. Oh wait, I just received an email from KB titled Uniondale Office - Helpful Resources. It contained two links. One for a commuter benefits program where BK hires a company to explain/manage your ability to have a maximum pretax (fed only) contribution of $340/month to cover commuting costs. Something but very very minor. And don’t forget that our taxes will now increase because NYC taxes will apply. Another 2-2 percent salary increase would go a long way in meeting the extra cost as well as supporting the idea that BNY cares about its employees. In reality leadership cares about the next McKinsey project (how’s P-M treating you?) and publicity for the CEO. All hail the smirking emperor who had a massive pay increase on the broken backs of his overworked employees. Let’s see how they react to people agreeing to move but resign at the last minute.

Remember that it’s nothing personal if they let you go. Medtronic was here before you and it will be here after you, unless we merge with Home Depot to form a freak baby birthed from unchecked capitalism. The point is, the corporate machine doesn’t care about any of us. Good employees and bad employees alike get chewed up and sp-t out. You are worth more than whatever identity you have in this job.

Good luck.

The Ruckus-to-Belden sale has all the smell of a polished used-car pitch: shiny numbers, big promises, and just enough spin to make the buyer believe they were getting a prize.

In my view, Chuck and the Carlyle playbook were not about building a great company or a great product. They were about packaging the story, dressing up the numbers, and extracting value before someone else had to live with the consequences.

Best used-wasel-car salesman energy.

poor ba----ds.....

John Stankey built his entire career on exactly the kind of institutional loyalty he now tells 130,000 people is dead.

He joined Pacific Bell in 1985 straight out of college. He has never meaningfully worked anywhere else — Pacific Bell became SBC, SBC acquired AT&T, and he climbed every rung of the same organizational ladder for 40 years without ever having to compete in an open market for a job.

He didn't get to CEO by being market-based. He got there by being loyal, patient, politically savvy, and present for four decades in the same building. He is the living embodiment of boomer corporate loyalty — and he abolished it the moment he reached the top.

That is not irony.

That is a specific kind of moral corruption that comes from people who pull the ladder up behind them.

Tomorrow is May Day and it is national no work, no school, no buying day to stick it to the big corporations. I'm not working or buying anything on May Day. Let's see how it impacts the big companies.

They just want the board to be pleased. No one wants AI, we don’t use it except for occasional copilot. NONE of the products use AI in true fashion. It’s all fake

McDonald's laid off employees across Global Tech. Some individual layoffs were done in advance of the group layoffs to artificially keep the total numbers down.

Saks Global is reducing its corporate headquarters workforce. The company is cutting 16 percent of these positions. This action impacts approximately 640 workers. These layoffs reflect an optimized operational footprint. Saks Global filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year.

New York, New York

https://wwd.com/business-news/retail/saks-global-sets-more-layoffs-at-corporate-office-1238935066/

Why don’t they change the people on the executive level? Should changes not start at the top?

MG: If you’re gonna post an update, can we please drop the phony familiarity and assumption that we know who the he-l you’re talking about? Ridiculous & juvenile tone

WARNING: this post is longer -and possibly more useful- than you may expect.

So, for those who still have meetings to attend, dashboards to ignore, or layoffs to survive, here is the TL;DR:

Xerox tolerated years of weak performance, endless restructuring, and a stock chart that looked like it fell down the stairs.

Then, in February, the company raised $450M through an IP-backed JV with TPG Credit, basically borrowing against part of the Xerox crown jewels.

A few weeks later, creditors were reportedly paying attention, and suddenly Steve B was out “effective immediately”.

Maybe it is all coincidence.

Or maybe poor performance made Steve vulnerable, but the IP deal made him disposable.

Now the full blown post to see if we’ve got this right.

For years, Xerox performance looked like death by a thousand paper cuts - not one clean fatal blow, just endless small wounds: shrinking revenue, restructuring fatigue, disappearing morale, executive-level delusion... until the patient was technically alive but nobody wanted to check the pulse too closely.

The stock was crushed. The core business kept shrinking. “Reinvention” became the corporate version of putting a fresh tie on a skeleton. Employees were asked to run, rush, sacrifice, and also restructure, realign, resize, reskill, re-something every quarter.

Meanwhile, the top of the house kept pumping out “Reinvention” slides like PowerPoint decks could pay down debt, grow revenue, and make the stock chart stop looking like a cliff.

And through all of that, Steve B stayed.

The board tolerated him. The company tolerated him. The market tolerated him less enthusiastically. Employees tolerated him because, well, employees are not usually invited to vote on the circus.

Then suddenly — bo-m.

March 30, 2026: Steve “steps down”.

Louie Pastor becomes CEO effective immediately. No long transition. No elegant handover. No “after a distinguished tenure, Steve will remain through year-end”. Just corporate-speak for: “Please exit through the back door”. Xerox also reaffirmed 2026 guidance in the same announcement, which makes the timing even more interesting.

If nothing was wrong, why the trapdoor?

Here is the part employees should pay attention to.

Six weeks earlier, on February 17, Xerox announced a $450 million IP joint venture with TPG Credit.

Translation for normal humans: Xerox took valuable intellectual property (the sort of assets that make Xerox, Xerox) and put them into a special financing structure to raise cash. Xerox said the deal was designed to strengthen the balance sheet and support liquidity, Reinvention, Lexmark integration, and possibly debt repayment.

In plain English: when a company starts pawning the crown jewels to keep the lights on, people are allowed to ask whether this is a clever financing move or the corporate equivalent of playing your last card.

Now, is that illegal?

Not necessarily. Smart lawyers get paid obscene amounts of money to make aggressive things look technically permissible. Xerox disclosed the deal. Serious advisers were involved. The paperwork was almost certainly blessed by lawyers billing at rates normally reserved for organ transplants and ransom negotiations.

But let’s not pretend this was a normal “strategic partnership”. This was not two companies joining hands to invent the future.

This was Xerox raising money against the crown jewels because liquidity matters when the "balance sheet" drops "balance" and starts looking like "sh*t".

And creditors noticed.

Octus reported that Xerox lenders were preparing a cooperation agreement following the “deal-away” transaction. Debtwire/Ion Analytics later reported that a lender group had signed a cooperation agreement after the $450 million TPG-led deal-away transaction.

That is finance-world language for: “The people who lent money are not calmly sipping herbal tea”.

Why would lenders care? Because if valuable assets are moved into a new structure where new money gets priority, existing creditors may worry that value has been shifted away from them.

Again: maybe legal. Maybe documented. Maybe clever. But definitely suspicious.

So now look at the sequence:

• February 17: Xerox announces $450 million IP-backed JV with TPG Credit.
• Late February: lenders reportedly start organizing after the transaction.
• March 30: Steve B is suddenly out, Louie Pastor is in, effective immediately.
• April 2: Xerox files Steve’s separation terms, including non-disparagement, non-compete, non-solicitation, cooperation obligations, continued vesting, and severance mechanics.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just your average corporate spring cleaning: monetize IP in February, creditors start circling, CEO disappears in March, and everyone smiles for the press release.

Maybe it is all coincidence.

Maybe Steve suddenly discovered a passion for gardening.

Maybe the board, after years of tolerating him as the corporate equivalent of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Chief Clown, finally woke up one Monday and said, “You know what? Leadership quality matters”.

Or maybe the IP deal changed the risk.

That is the real theory.

Poor performance made Steve vulnerable. But poor performance alone does not explain the suddenness. Xerox had been under pressure for years. The stock did not collapse overnight. The business did not become difficult in March. Employees did not suddenly notice the “Reinvention” machine was mostly powered by layoffs and vocabulary.

The more plausible question is this:

Did the board get scared?

Scared that the IP-backed financing was too aggressive?
Scared creditors might challenge it?
Scared the company had moved from “bad strategy” into “legal exposure”?
Scared that if this thing went sideways, directors might be asked what they knew, when they knew it, and why they approved it?

Boards can tolerate weak CEOs for a long time. They can tolerate bad morale. They can tolerate stock charts that look like ski slopes. They can tolerate employees screaming and leaving.

But creditor lawyers? That is different.

Once lenders start organizing, the room gets colder.

This does not prove Steve did anything illegal. It does not prove the board did anything illegal. It does not prove the TPG deal was invalid. But it does suggest Steve’s sudden exit may have had less to do with “fresh leadership” and more to do with risk containment.

In corporate terms, Louie Pastor may not just be the new CEO. He may be the adult brought in to stand next to the smoking g-n and say, “Everything is under control”.

The official story is simple: Steve stepped down, Louie stepped up, guidance was reaffirmed, please continue working harder with fewer people.

The unofficial employee version is more interesting:

Xerox may have borrowed against the crown jewels in February, creditors started paying attention, and by March the CEO was gone.

Maybe that is coincidence.

But at Xerox, there are no coincidences.

• Debt has ballooned to $27B -- more than $6B higher than at the end of 2025
• Cash from operations at a loss of $2.3B for the quarter
• Cash from operations ex working capital of $700MM
• Debt to cap of 48%! - this is a BB+ to B- rating (speculative credit) at S&P and implies a significant re-rate of PSX debt and increasing cost of capital

Yet management continue to claim a strong balance sheet.

$3B of cash tied up in working capital with no sources of cash to fund it = debt

The commercial organization is an anchor around the necks of PSX shareholders

PSX has increased volatility by increasing exposure from commercial trading activity and is is competing in shark infested waters. We don't have the stomach or the people to participate in this business. Everyone knows it and they are taking advantage of it.

On top of this, Midstream underperformed and increased capacity in a market that is swimming in capacity and putting downward pressure on renewal rates.

Corporate costs have also ballooned despite business transformation efforts.

Renewable fuels losses are accelerating again.

Yet the tone from management remains optimistic and they can't be honest with shareholders.

This management team must go. A CEO that is out of his depth and a CFO that has taken on increased risk at the expense of a once pristine balance sheet.

Article published that Infosys won a GCC (outsource work to India) worth $500 Million. Well done Steve, but about 25 years too late and now wasting the company’s money. Scarier thing is Bill and the board even think this is a good idea. Our jobs are even more at risk across tech ops and data. I’m sure the OC (aka purple ponies) will visit on the corporate jets.

The last four years were tiring. I am tired boss. I feel the supervisory board made a lot of decisions to favor the CEO and executive board instead of customers and shareholders. And they joined forces with HR and the executive board to royally scr ew employees. Here are some of the questionable changes they made. All of this is public knowledge but I don't think there will be any consequences.

On November 7, 2024, the Supervisory Board resolved to replace the KPI operating margin increase with the KPI free cash flow for the Executive Board STI as of 2025.

On December 8, 2024, the Supervisory Board resolved to replace the KPIs cloud revenue and software licenses & support and services revenue with the KPI total revenue for the Executive Board LTI as of 2025.

On April 30, 2025, the Supervisory Board resolved to extend the term of Christian Klein’s appointment to the Executive Board from May 1, 2025, to April 30, 2030.

On May 5, 2024, the Supervisory Board resolved, by way of circular resolution, to extend the term of Christian Klein’s appointment for three years from May 1, 2025, to April 30, 2028, and to appoint him as chairperson of the Executive Board with immediate effect.

On May 6, 2025, the Supervisory Board decided to exchange the Women in Executive Roles KPI with the Business Health Culture Index in the LTI as of 2025, resulting in a temporary deviation from the compensation system and the German Corporate Governance Code to ensure compliance with executive orders in the United States.

At the beginning of 2026, the Supervisory Board decided to exclude the effect of the expenses related to the Teradata litigation from the Company’s non‑IFRS definition, as "these one‑off effects are not indicative of our operating performance". The Supervisory Board also decided on February 18, 2026 to exclude these effects from the target achievement for the KPI operating profit... The exclusion of current expenses of €387 million has a positive effect on the performance factor for the financial PSUs of 0.011 for the 2023 tranche under the LTI 2020. As the ongoing performance period is measured using cumulative results, the impact will be shown when the LTI tranches 2024 and 2025 are due for payout.

On July 27, 2023, the Supervisory Board decided to exclude the impact of the Qualtrics divestiture and resolved updated targets for the STI 2023 and the LTI tranches 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Furthermore, in September 2023, the Supervisory Board decided to exclude the expenses related to compliance matters from the variable Executive Board compensation for 2023 and 2024. The exclusion of expenses related to compliance matters from the variable Executive Board compensation led to a higher performance factor of 0.005 for the financial PSUs of the LTI tranche 2021 and 2022, a performance factor of 0.049 for the STI 2023, and had no effect on the performance factor of the STI 2024.

As I read this, it feels that the supervisory board goes above and beyond to help CK and the board to get as much money as possible from SAP bank accounts to their personal bank accounts. I wonder how René would be any different.

What is the over/under betting for Arvind's golden parachute as IBM stock drops to $228 down from $324 in a year. I am going with $250,000,000.

Look at the raid of IBM (and imagine the totals for all the other do nothing "execs") below for the last 4 IBM CEOs.

No one knows anyone on the IBM BoD Board of Directors nor what they do other than show up for the steak and lobster dinners. Remember, Arvind is his own boss being both CEO and Chairman of the Board. That is perverse when the CEO is both.

IBM has a very fat and bloated BoD with 14 do nothings. All make approx $500,0000 a year. That is a cool $7,000,000 that goes to them every 12 months plus stock options all stolen from IBM shareholders and employees.

Gerstner started the IBM raid and walked away with over $400,000,000+ and laid off over 100,000 amazing people over 18 months (I was there IBM Chatbot cheerleader).

Gerstner's book "Who says elephants can't dance" should have been titled "Who says I can't rip off IBM in the largest corporate raid in hostory?".

Palmisano $271,000,000

Rometty $144,000,000

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/96-Norrans-Ridge-Dr-Ridgefield-CT-06877/57345758_zpid/

https://news.lrionline.com/why-white-collar-workers-organize-tech-banking/