getting the sack, the old professionalism way.
Let’s take a look at someone breaking bad news entirely the wrong way, with genuine real-world disastrous consequences. No, it’s not AI getting it catastrophically wrong again, but a human being apparently. Albeit an air-breather so lacking in essential humanity he may as well be made of zeros and ones and originated in a laptop in Silicon valley.
Vishal Garg – screen-grabbed fuzzily in the very middle of his act of infamy - is the Founder and CEO of the mortgage broker Better.com, an online start-up he’d founded to give Americans, fast, hassle-free mortgages. He was a former Morgan Stanley analyst turned serial entrepreneur who scored his first big success founding the US student loan company MyRichUncle in 2000. In 2014 he founded Better.com with some hefty backers in the form of Goldman Sachs, Softbank and American Express Ventures. By 2021 Better.com was doing extremely well, and there were rumours of a major investment in the pipeline. Then, out of the blue, one day in early December Garg summoned 900 employees onto a mass Zoom call, where he sat in a blue sleeveless gilet and kicked proceedings off by telling them: ‘I come to you with not great news’.
And guess what that ‘not great news’ was? That if they were one of the people unlucky enough to be on this call, they were to be ‘terminated, with immediate effect.’
That’s right. Garg sacked 900 people just like that, right before Christmas right in front of everybody. No pre-warning emails, no selective leaks/messaging to prepare the ground and mitigate the shock. Just an unexpected zoom call with the boss.
Imagine how that felt for a second. Imagine losing your job like that. In public. In an electronic environment you don’t control, with all your work friends, work enemies and hundreds of people you don’t know from Adam watching. Think about the panic, the horror, the sheer humiliation of being cast out like that, as a faceless one of a mass. A number. Erased.
Garg could do this because he didn’t see nine hundred individuals on his screen. Instead, he saw a problem to be solved, numbers to be taken from one side of a spread sheet – the red, problem zone – to another – the place where they weren’t there at all, problem solved. People had nothing to do with it, even though it was people out there on those tiny little boxes on the call. People listening to this. People who had lives and futures dependent on this. People who were getting fired – the single most horrible thing that can happen to you at work – in front of hundreds of strangers.
Never has the phrase human resources seemed less apt or indeed less human. Focusing on the process of getting rid of his staff, rather than the impact on the individuals at the receiving end, their needs, their fears, their dignity and dreams, was a classic mistake of what we call the Old Professionalism.