corporate restructuring – Scott Loftesness

No Gradual Bleed

Jack Dorsey just cut nearly half of Block’s staff, and he didn’t use the usual “macroeconomic headwinds” rationale. This wasn’t a desperate move to save a sinking ship; it was an admission that technology is rapidly impacting the need for staff.

His explanation is blunt: the business is growing, but they just don’t need the people anymore. AI and “flatter” teams have changed the math.

“…we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”

Dorsey had a choice between a quick, brutal cut or a “gradual bleed” of layoffs over several quarters. He chose the quick cut. Slow reductions can create a culture of paranoia where nobody actually works because they’re too busy updating their resumes. You can’t build anything meaningful when you’re waiting for an axe to fall.

We’re seeing the rise of the hyper-efficient company where intelligence tools do much more of the heavy lifting, and a few people can do what used to require an army.

Block’s cut is a deep one. It sure feels like a cold, Darwinian shift. Dorsey is betting that a leaner, smaller team is the only way to survive in a world where “scale” is no longer tied to head count.

He might be right, time will tell. Meanwhile the market reaction is very positive!

Turning Out the Lights

[Note: see also The Murder of the Washington Post by Ashley Parker who writes: “Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special.”]

I was struck this morning by the brutal dismantling of the Washington Post’s international reporting capabilities. The list of bureaus being shuttered by the paper reads like a roll call of the 21st century’s geopolitical fault lines: New Delhi, Sydney, Cairo, the entire Middle East team, China, Iran, Turkey.

It is a stunning retreat.

But to view this merely as a corporate restructuring or a casualty of the dying business model of print journalism seems to miss a deeper, darker signal. This seems like an actual cultural symptom.

“The world is becoming less America-centric by the minute while the United States is becoming more America-centric than ever.”

At the exact moment technology has rendered the world indistinguishable from a single room—where a virus, a meme, or a financial crash in one corner sweeps across the floor to the other in seconds—we are choosing to partition off that room.

There is a tragic symmetry to it. As the center of gravity shifts away from the us, the we respond not by engaging harder, but by closing its eyes.

When a newspaper that has shaped history decides that “reporting on the world” is no longer of valuable enough, it is doing more than saving money – although clearly that’s the primary motivation. It seems to be a surrender to the idea that what happens “over there” doesn’t matter enough to us because the people who were supposed to tell us it was coming are gone.

We seem to be turning out the lights in the rooms we find too difficult, believing that if we cannot see the world, the world cannot touch us. Feels wrong.

The moves closing these bureaus are part of broader cuts at the paper:

Closing the Sports section
Closing the Books section.
Restructuring and shrinking the Metro desk.
Suspending the Post Reports podcast.

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