Employees and Families First!

Beginning today, we will be enacting a number of organizational changes at ESPN to better support our future goals – a process that will include the elimination of a number of positions, impacting  friends and colleagues across the organization. via espnmediazone.com

Not to the life rafts but to the gangplank.

The quoted text is from an internal memo shared on their site: ESPN Media Zone.

I don't know all the details of what led to their decision to lay people off. They mention changes they're planning to implement after the layoffs and how they plan to soften the blow to those selected employees.

I would love some day to read a company's announcement that goes something like this:

We need your help. We need everyone's help. As you know competitive pressures in our industry have forced prices down by over 70% in the past 18 months. Where we once competed against one or two companies we now compete against dozens, if not hundreds of companies, many whose advertising budget is larger than our total revenues.

To date we have done this successfully. That's thanks to you.

However, the pressures continue to change, to refine, to streamline, to be more efficient while still maintaining our commitment to each other, our families and community.

That commitment is what makes our company great, it's why we love - okay, most days - coming to work, working with each other, telling our families about our work. It's why our customers love doing business with us, love recommending us to our customers.

Let's continue to find those solutions that will allow us to sustain our culture, our company, our relationships and our promises.

To do that, we need to find solutions that drive growth in topline revenues and/or bottomline cashflows. Over the next 12 months, we need to find 4 percentage points more of cash-flows in order.

As we've found in the past, these solutions come in all sizes, big and small. They're all around us. All we have to do is look for them, ask ourselves and each other, share them and find the best ones, execute them.

We can do this.

 

I know we have the solutions, we just need to bring them out and then execute them. Let's do that.