thoughts on at&t ceo john stankey’s memo to employees

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is changing the work landscape.

We’ve come a long way since COVID and the Great Resignation of 2021, where corporations were scrambling to find qualified workers, and corporate employees could largely call the shots due to a dearth of available talent. (FWIW, the term “The Great Resignation” was coined by Professor Anthony Klotz of University College London’s School of Management).

But now, the tide has shifted.

Leaders across industries now talk openly about a tougher bargain: fewer concessions on flexibility, more emphasis on output, and less presumption of long-term loyalty.  We can still remember that famous February 2025 DOGE email that went out at the beginning of the Trump-Musk bromance, asking government employees to report what they accomplished in the past week.

In early August, AT&T CEO John Stankey’s memo that proclaimed that “workplace loyalty is dead”.   Aki Ito wrote incisively about his memo in The Business Insider about the “psychological contract” between corporate employees and their employers, and how Mr. Stankey’s blunt memo to AT&T kind of skewered the tacit understanding that many corporate workers have: essentially that if you keep showing up, you’ll be rewarded.  (And of course we know that the tacit contract that existed before reached its apogee during the corporate golden age of the post WWII-era (1950s, 1960s). The implicit deal—show up, do good work, and the company will look out for you, for life—is giving way to a narrower, transactional model. 

 Stankey’s message was: don’t expect hand-outs, or the flexibility to work from home. This message has also been echoed in the post-COVID era by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, Elon Musk, who famously called Work from Home “morally wrong”.

Gone are the days in which CEOs were eager to address employees’ every concern – from rest spaces and cushy work from home policies that catered to in-office-averse workers. And while I can understand why a boss would take issue with workers looking for hand-outs (and rewards for low quality work), it’s also notable that more and more CEOs are openly challenging the idea that companies should take care of their workers.

Of course, the concept of a “familial culture” has been declining in the US since the 1980s (with its preponderance of staff cuts, buy-outs and corporate raiders)…few can expect to get lifetime job security or a pension for years of service.  Actually, for Gen-Z and Millenials, job-hopping is more the norm than the exception. But I think it’s worth noting that when we stop thinking of each other as ‘family’ on some level – when we openly regard our human interactions as transactional – there is indeed a deeper shift that begins to take root.   

When someone as powerful (and, we can assume, well-compensated) as AT&T’s CEO John Stankey comes out openly and tells workers who are not aligned with his vision to get lost, he’s saying a lot about how he views their human worth.  He doesn’t care whether AT&T is employing someone’s son, or their mother – he only cares for that worker to the extent that he can promote his own objectives.  For Stankey, that worker is merely a pawn, an object of AT&T’s corporate strategy: expendable and faceless.  Perhaps Stankey’s own compensation of $25.2 million (reportedly $2.4 million cash, with a $5.992 million bonus and $16.5 million as stock) is not high enough for him to be magnanimous and treat his workers with the respect that as CEO, he himself ostensibly commands.

But human beings have a funny way of striking back when they feel disrespected or belittled.  Stankey exposes himself as a leader who is out of touch and selfish.  Perhaps AI, with its promise of leaner teams, is, as Ito writes, emboldening CEOs to devalue the contribution of actual humans.    But threats aimed at the team will have, I believe, short-lived benefits to the company.

We all know the origins of the term “corporation” – it derives from the Latin term for “body”, or corpus.  They say a house divided itself cannot stand.  I think we can stretch that term here to “a body cannot thrive if it is divided against itself”.  Stankey’s words can hardly set the stage for a thriving and robust corpus – leaders who seek to threaten and intimidate workers cannot hope to retain the most innovative and hardworking talent for long…

More broadly, it seems American society is becoming more fragmented, more intrinsically adversarial – if our company leaders don’t view themselves and their employees as part of a unified team, where we work together for the good of the whole “corpus”, how can we expect to outperform?    Don’t get me wrong – I’m all about competition and inspiring people to give their best work.  (And confidentially, since that DOGE Email of February 2025, I have become more inspired to stringently adhere to my own “5 weekly goals” and holding myself accountable for wasted efficiencies.)

But I don’t believe the best long-term strategy is “threats” or bullying.  We’ll see how this all plays out!