Stock holders could care less what you do…so long as the stock price goes up which it did not do. Jane being the first CEO etc… wanted to continue to break the glass ceiling, and wanted to really set a standard as an innovator. She focused on ESG and diversity and just stopped. Wait for feedback….no feedback…try this and try that for ESG, really get that message out there…..still no feedback….lets try these other ESG things too…rinse repeat and just gave up it seems on other avenues of improvement. Almost all emails and all TH meetings were nothing but “we we stand on diversity and ESG perception”.
Its all good stuff, true but “so now back to the stock price” and here we are. Using the only tool we have left. The way you show stock holders you are serious about making it budge upward in worth, is to cut costs. The fastest way to do that is to layoff.
No, I have no idea what it takes to run a multi billion $ company, but then again, I’m not getting paid 20+ million per year TO know either, which by the way lets not forget that she gave herself a rather healthy raise in year 1 while other banking CEO’s opted to take a pay cut.
So here we are, all sweating with worry, crossing our fingers that we are not “on the list” of layoff due to bad decisions and lacking leadership.