The Merholz Agenda
Peter Merholz's semi-weekly newsletter on organization design, design leadership, and bringing humanism into the places we work.
Unsubscribe anytime · RSS feed
Monkey see, monkey mandate
By Peter Merholz · · View online →
Layoffs are top of mind again due to Meta's and Intuit's actions this past week. They are just two of many companies that have recently reduced headcount as part of restructuring in the face of AI, including Block, Oracle, Cloudflare, Atlassian. And doubtless more are coming, for reasons I will soon explain.
When this recent layoff wave began, in late 2022, along with it came commentary from business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who called out this behavior as a "social contagion." Since there's no evidence that layoffs are good for business, these decisions are made because other executives are doing it.
What's become clear these past five years is that much executive behavior is driven not by evidence, but by a "monkey see, monkey do" approach to leadership:
The hiring boom of 2021-22. Companies scaled because they saw other companies scale, and were afraid of being left behind.
Return-to-office (RTO) mandates. While there is some evidence that fully remote work leads to a 10% reduction in productivity, it's not because of anything inherent in remote work, but because companies lack