CEO Talk

It is after a long time that I gave out a hearty laugh reading a serious post. This is to do with the recent axing of employees in the Yahoo! Bangalore office. Now, if a diplomat is one who makes you look forward to a trip to hell, I think CEOs are much more hideous on the "usher-to-hell" scale. Read this:

CEO Jerry Yang had mentioned a 1000 Targeted job cuts in an investors earnings call last month, and a strategic workforce realignment by mid-February, aimed at eliminating redundancies in bureaucracy and redeploying talent. (emphases by me)

Wow. Such clarity! I can bet my ESOP (It tells more about the ESOPs than my confidence. But never mind) that the release was written with one main objective and one side(y) objective. Main: Convey no useful information that investors do not know. Side(y): Confound the common man to the maximum extent possible through a 3-line press release. A normal person just doesn't comprehend anything out of these statements. If you are smart enough to comprehend what is exactly happening, well you wouldn't be listening to the bullcrap that CEOs spew out in the press meets. You just know. Period.

I think all CEOs must be made to have a few drinks before press conferences. May be then the stock market woud be an entirely different ball game:

Well. We are not doing so well these days and you know what's happening. So we thought we'd fire a few to keep the boat afloat.

Just imagine how much of print real estate, ink, hard disk space, technical analysis, internet bandwidth, and tape could have been saved if he had made that more concise and to-the-point statement. Few IBankers would lose their jobs, but then who cares?

Sigh. Straight talk and management never meet eye-to-eye. Bring on the lagers, somebody.