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I've been through this a few times. It's very bumpy. Work flows will get interrupted and the remaining leadership will learn quickly to prioritize the bare mi

I've been through this a few times. It's very bumpy. Work flows will get interrupted and the remaining leadership will learn quickly to prioritize the bare minimum to keep the lights on. Some will fight the situation and they will also be leaving. The remaining individual contributors will feel stunned and dazed for a bit. Some people will be on edge and/or depressed for a while. I would expect in this case that Elon would bring in people that he trusts from his other businesses. Those people will feel awkward and uncomfortable. With time the remaining Twitter staff and the new employees will learn to get along, realizing they are all individual contributors and that this is not their fault. With time, things smooth out and the business evolves. The most bumpy parts are a result of the people that walked out the door with undocumented tribal knowledge. I greatly over-simplified the answer but this topic is worthy of a book.

yrgulation 4y ago
> I greatly over-simplified the answer but this topic is worthy of a book. Is it tho? In any company small and large once ownership of high level management changes hiccups can happen.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Is it tho? Only if one wanted a more thorough and in depth picture of what this typically looks like day-to-day, week-to-week. Hiccups happen but when a company has been around for a long time and processes are very entrenched, a take-over can disrupt business processes and work flows enough for customers/consumers to feel it. The business will learn with time what undocumented relationships it has/had with vendors and what contractual obligations must be met that may not have been accounted for. Someone will discover for example some message-queue server that nobody documented or knew about when it finally fails and turns out all of Twitter depends on it. This is not hypothetical, I found two very old workstation-class "servers" under a CTO's desk in a financial company [Edit] I should also add that since this is a take-over and not a chapter 11 reorg, there are no legal protections for contractual obligations so all of those will have to be discovered and addressed. Not doing so in a timely manor can be extra bumpy or costly. One can only hope they had good record keeping. Experienced leaders that have been through mergers and take-overs should not really face any problems they can not solve, but lesser experienced leaders will have opportunities to make some monumental and profound mistakes. This is the gap that leaders could benefit from reading books on the topic and even then some leaders will misinterpret the intentions of the books or will not get the lessons to be learned but it is still better than trying to apply the logic from ones past experiences alone. Leadership techniques and business logic that worked at one company may not translate appropriately to Twitter. Along that line I should also add that leaders should not literally use such books as step-by-step instruction manuals but rather they should apply some critical thinking how does this translate to the current situation.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    I see your point, makes sense.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Which is exactly why a book on the topic would be well received!
juancn 4y ago
You forget the key-retainers. This subset of the org, were set aside first, informed of their condition and promised something so they stay 1 or 2 years and plow through the upheaval.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Indeed, the golden hand-cuffs. I left out a myriad of events or my comment would evolve into a book. I'm trying to get better about not doing that.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Or, write the book and sell that. :)

yrgulation 4y ago

> I greatly over-simplified the answer but this topic is worthy of a book. Is it tho? In any company small and large once ownership of high level management changes hiccups can happen.

LinuxBender 4y ago
Is it tho? Only if one wanted a more thorough and in depth picture of what this typically looks like day-to-day, week-to-week. Hiccups happen but when a company has been around for a long time and processes are very entrenched, a take-over can disrupt business processes and work flows enough for customers/consumers to feel it. The business will learn with time what undocumented relationships it has/had with vendors and what contractual obligations must be met that may not have been accounted for. Someone will discover for example some message-queue server that nobody documented or knew about when it finally fails and turns out all of Twitter depends on it. This is not hypothetical, I found two very old workstation-class "servers" under a CTO's desk in a financial company [Edit] I should also add that since this is a take-over and not a chapter 11 reorg, there are no legal protections for contractual obligations so all of those will have to be discovered and addressed. Not doing so in a timely manor can be extra bumpy or costly. One can only hope they had good record keeping. Experienced leaders that have been through mergers and take-overs should not really face any problems they can not solve, but lesser experienced leaders will have opportunities to make some monumental and profound mistakes. This is the gap that leaders could benefit from reading books on the topic and even then some leaders will misinterpret the intentions of the books or will not get the lessons to be learned but it is still better than trying to apply the logic from ones past experiences alone. Leadership techniques and business logic that worked at one company may not translate appropriately to Twitter. Along that line I should also add that leaders should not literally use such books as step-by-step instruction manuals but rather they should apply some critical thinking how does this translate to the current situation.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  I see your point, makes sense.
lolinder 4y ago
Which is exactly why a book on the topic would be well received!

juancn 4y ago

You forget the key-retainers. This subset of the org, were set aside first, informed of their condition and promised something so they stay 1 or 2 years and plow through the upheaval.

LinuxBender 4y ago
Indeed, the golden hand-cuffs. I left out a myriad of events or my comment would evolve into a book. I'm trying to get better about not doing that.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Or, write the book and sell that. :)