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Twitter’s New CEO Sent a Curious Email About How She Plans to Change the Company. It All Comes Down to 2 Words

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By Justin Bariso

New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino cited a philosophy adored by Elon Musk. How can it help you and your business?

New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino sent her first memo to employees. Entitled “Building Twitter 2.0 Together,” it’s filled with boilerplate corporate-speak like:

  • “We need to think big”
  • “We need to transform”
  • “Literally everything is possible”
  • “You have to genuinely believe”

After these platitudes, though, we find an interesting sentence that indicates how Yaccarino is planning to make changes at Twitter:

“And we can do it all by starting from first principles–questioning our assumptions and building something new from the ground up.”

Let’s focus on two words:

First principles.

The concept of first-principles thinking is well-known in the world of physics, but it’s also related to emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage emotions.

What is first-principles thinking? What does it have to do with emotional intelligence? And how can first principles help you and your business? Let’s discuss. (If you like this article, make sure to sign up for my free course, which teaches simple frameworks that help you and your team build emotional intelligence.)

What is a “first principle”?

A first principle is a basic truth. It’s not an assumption that something is true based on popularity or analogy; rather, it is fundamentally sound and can be proved.

Thinking in terms of first principles is a great way to solve problems using emotional intelligence, because it helps you think rationally and keep emotions from clouding your judgment. It also keeps you from falling victim to social pressure, doing things because that’s what everyone else does, or because that’s the way it’s always been done.

To illustrate, consider the following:

First principle: Biology teaches us that a person needs oxygen, water, and food (in that order), or they will die.

Man has been able to send people deep underwater or into outer space for long periods of time, as long as their basic needs are provided for.

First principle: If a company hires an employee, it has significant costs and legal responsibilities to fulfil.

Early-stage and small companies can increase working capital and decrease legal risk by working with freelancers instead of hiring employees.

First principle: In basketball, the team with the most points when time runs out wins the game.

The Golden State Warriors focused on playing with a smaller, faster line up and shooting more three-pointers; doing so helped them win multiple championships and changed the way many teams approach the game.

It’s no surprise to hear Yaccarino speak of applying first-principles thinking at Twitter.

Her boss, Twitter owner Elon Musk, has credited first-principles thinking for the success of his companies. For example, Tesla gained a huge competitive advantage by focusing on producing large car batteries for less money. And SpaceX has succeeded because engineers found a way to efficiently reuse rockets, an idea scoffed at by experts years ago.

So, how can first-principles thinking help you and your business?

How can first principles help you?

The key to using first-principles thinking is to break a thing down to its most simple parts, and then work from there.

For example, your business may be struggling to get new customers. You don’t want to pay for ads, and you’ve tried to imitate competitors’ social media strategies but it hasn’t gotten you anywhere.

A first principle that can help: People like to do business with people they know, like, and trust.

Can you show a bit more of your personality in your advertising or social media? In doing so, your message, product, or service will likely resonate with more people.

Another example: You may struggle with the feeling that you never have enough time, and that you’re always behind.

In this case, remind yourself of the first principle that everyone has 24 hours a day, seven days a week–but some are much more productive than others.

So, ask yourself: How can I better structure my day and week to get more done?

These are simple examples, but the truth is first-principles thinking can help you tackle any problem you’re working on.

So, whether you’re struggling with the need to reinvent or simply recalibrate, try using first principles to take you back to basics, manage your emotions, and solve a problem from a brand-new perspective.

Feature Image Credit: Linda Yaccarino. Getty Images

By Justin Bariso

Sourced from Inc.

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Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino Is Teetering on the Glass Cliff

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By Vittoria Elliott

In December, Elon Musk, then only two months into his tenure as owner and CEO of Twitter, put out a poll asking whether he should resign as CEO of the company. When a 57.5 percent majority encouraged him to resign, Musk tweeted, “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software and servers teams.”

Ten days ago, Musk announced that he had indeed found someone foolish enough to helm the floundering social media company: Linda Yaccarino. Taking a CEO seat was a step up for Yaccarino, who previously led global advertising at NBCUniversal, and it enlarged the tiny pool of women leading tech companies.

But although Yaccarino is widely regarded in the ad industry as highly competent, people who study workplace gender dynamics  see her as the latest victim of a pernicious pattern known as the glass cliff, in which women are more likely to be promoted into top jobs at organizations in crisis. That makes women leaders appear less likely to succeed, because they are drafted when times are toughest.

“In some ways I have yet to see a better definition of the glass cliff than the challenge Elon has set out here,” says Christy Glass, a sociologist at Utah State University who has studied the phenomenon. “This just seems to be the perfect storm of a situation at Twitter.”

Past examples of the glass cliff in tech include the appointment of Google executive Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO in 2012, when the company was rapidly losing ground to Google and Facebook. She eventually negotiated a $4.5 billion sale to Verizon and stepped down. Investor Ellen Pao was appointed CEO of Reddit in 2014 to clean up the platform but resigned in 2015 after backlash from users.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter created textbook glass cliff conditions, sending the platform into a downward spiral. The company made 90 percent of its revenue through advertising in 2021 but has seen advertisers flee and revenue dip.

Shortly after purchasing the company in October 2022, the entrepreneur began a campaign of layoffs that included firing much of the company’s content moderation and policy staff. At the same time, he offered an “amnesty” to previously banned users, including neo-Nazis. In December, just two months after Musk’s acquisition, Twitter’s earnings had fallen by 40 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk’s plan to build a subscription business stream by charging for a service called Twitter Blue has netted little revenue.

Those challenges would be daunting for any CEO. But Alexander Haslam, professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia, who co-coined the term “glass cliff,” says that while many organizations contain capable women leaders there’s often a preference for the patriarchal status quo—until things come to a breaking point. When a company is in trouble and wants to send a clear signal it is making substantial changes, choosing a radically different leader is an easy option.

“You need to communicate as vividly and clearly as possible that you’re on some different trajectory. And the stronger the break from the past, the clearer the signalling,” Haslam says. “For that reason women or members of other minority groups are often preferentially appointed under these circumstances.”

Yaccarino’s background in advertising, Twitter’s primary source of revenue, certainly makes her a logical choice to try to salvage the company’s crumbling business. But experts who spoke to WIRED say that one reason women step into risky glass cliff roles is that they generally have few other chances to take leadership positions, despite being highly qualified.

“For a lot of executive women, sometimes their first opportunity to step into a role that’s really that powerful is to do a turnaround of an entire division or company,” says Coco Brown, CEO of the Athena Alliance, a networking organization for women executives in business.

That can make turning down a precarious glass cliff role difficult, even when the risks are evident. According to Glass of Utah State University, though women are more likely to be appointed in times of crisis they are also more likely to be blamed for the crisis itself and, later, replaced by a white male CEO in what researchers have dubbed the saviour effect.

“Very rarely are women CEOs given a second chance,” Glass says. “It’s a double whammy for women CEOs: These crisis appointments may be the only opportunities they have, and by virtue of stepping into them they put their future leadership careers in jeopardy.”

But, Glass says, many times women are often best suited to help right the ship. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, famously brought the company back from the brink of failure after the 2008 financial crash. Anne Mulachy took over as CEO of Xerox as it was flailing, making it profitable, before stepping down in 2009.

Yaccarino’s chances of success, says Sandra Quince CEO at Paradigm for Parity, an organization addressing the gender gap in businesses, will partly depend on how much time and freedom she’s given to turn the ship around. The support of the board and Musk’s willingness to truly let go of the reins could be crucial.

Musk has said that with Yaccarino in as CEO he will become executive chair of Twitter’s board as well as the company’s CTO. He’s also CEO of Tesla and of SpaceX, where president and COO Gwynne Shotwell is responsible for day-to-day operations.

“She’s going to need the board to be supportive of her vision that she has for the organization,” Quince says. “She’s going to need someone to run air cover for her. In times like this, where you’re trying to figure it out, no one is perfect, and mistakes can be made.”

It may be tempting to see Yaccarino’s appointment as the cynical last gasp of a failing company. But Brown of the Athena Alliance says Yaccarino’s bravery should be applauded, whether or not Twitter turns out to be salvageable.

“We shouldn’t be saying that has been set up to fail publicly but that she has decided that this is her shot to try something a bit heroic,” says Brown. “By most people’s accounts, she is going to fail. But wouldn’t it be cool if she pulls it out?” If Yaccarino manages that, it might be the most surprising twist of all in the spiralling tale of Musk’s takeover.

Feature Image Credit: Charles Sykes/Getty Images

By Vittoria Elliott

Sourced from WIRED

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Here are 5 missed opportunities from Jack Dorsey’s tenure as CEO of Twitter

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By Karen K. Ho

Jack Dorsey’s legacy as Twitter’s CEO is deeply mixed and one that doesn’t give his successor, Parag Agrawal, a smooth path forward.

Since its founding in 2006, the company has grown to 211 million active daily users, 37 million of them in the US as of September 30. It plays an important role in global politics, brand building, and daily discussions on an array of topics but also is a growing source of hate speech, conspiracy theories, and worsening mental health. Experts told Insider the company needs to address Dorsey’s missed opportunities regarding monetization, product development, and content controls.

During his leadership stints (2006-11 and 2015-21) Dorsey has been questioned for his “hands-off” leadership approach. He’s been public about his two hours of daily meditation, his 5-mile walk-commutes to work, plans to spend three to six months in Africa, and how often he delegates major decisions to people like Agrawal at both Twitter and the fintech payments company Square.

Here are the five most important missed opportunities, according to experts.

1. Banning Trump too slowly

On January 8, two days after the insurrection on the US Capital, the Twitter account for then-President Donald Trump was suspended indefinitely. But the move came after the account @realDonaldTrump sent out two tweets widely seen as increasing risk of “further incitement of violence,” the company said in a blog post.

For years, Trump was known for being controversial, insulting, and racist on Twitter, including making inflammatory comments about specific House Democrats. The account had 88.7 million followers at the time of its closure, but that number wasn’t necessarily an accurate representation of its popularity. One report in 2018 found 61% of the followers were bots, spam, inactive, or propaganda. Jane Lytvynenko, a senior research fellow at Harvard, wonders what would have happened if Dorsey had acted earlier.

“Would we have ended up with the shitstorm that was 2020 and disinformation had Jack Dorsey and Twitter decided to ban Trump in 2018, after the North Korean missile scare?” Lytvynenko asked.

A 2018 Gallup poll found 76% of Americans were aware of Trump’s Twitter usage, but only 4% of Americans overall have a Twitter account themselves, followed Trump’s account and read all or most of his tweets. The company also said it continued to gain users in January after Trump’s account was banned.

“We are a platform that is obviously much larger than any one topic or account,” Dorsey said during an earnings call that referenced Trump’s suspension from the platform.

2. His handling of misinformation

Research published in 2014 showed how the platform helped spread misinformation during the Boston Marathon bombing and the Ebola outbreak. During Dorsey’s second tenure, new research continued to show how Twitter enables the spread of false news much more quickly than true reports, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s much more that Dorsey could have done to address the problem domestically and internationally,” Lytvynenko said. “The problems that he was grappling with as a CEO persist. I don’t know if he succeeded in resolving them. I would say that he sort of left the job unfinished.”

3. His handling of harassment, death threats, and hateful content

Harassment and hate speech have been consistent issues at Twitter. Dorsey has been taken to task about this several times, as recently as last year during a Senate committee hearing. The platform has been criticized for its delayed or lack of response to white supremacist, Nazi, anti-Semitic, or anti-Muslim content, especially the disproportionate abuse and death threats directed toward people of color, specifically Black women.

In 2016, the actress Leslie Jones was targeted with racist and sexist memes. Dorsey reached out to Jones and later said the abuse and harassment were not part of “civil discourse” and promised more improvements. In 2018, he acknowledged how Twitter had become known for negative kinds of content.

“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” Dorsey wrote in a tweet. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”

In 2019, Dorsey said the company had not done enough to combat abuse online. Later that year, he was grilled about the issue by the head of TED, Chris Anderson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers, TED’s current affairs curator. Dorsey said Twitter was trying to be more proactive through machine learning and the use of algorithms to identify abusive tweets, “so we can take the burden off the victim completely.”

4. Failure to better monetize advertising and marketing

Twitter has become an essential part of mainstream media and the political economy worldwide. Politicians who build large followings on the platform can see real benefits, like raising more money and increasing their chances of being elected. Brands can go viral.

But a lot of Twitter’s viral engagement has been organic, rather than through paid promotion or marketing, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. “He missed a lot of opportunities to increase the company’s advertising share compared to other social-media platforms.”

The company also banned political advertising in 2019.

Yildirim said Dorsey’s ideals were focused on making Twitter a place for open discussion instead of trying to target them with lots of advertising and monetization like Facebook. “They remained very limited in these functionalities, which eventually made Wall Street not so happy.”

5. Slow product updates

One of the biggest changes during Dorsey’s time as Twitter’s CEO was the shift from 140 characters to 280 in 2017. But Yildirim said Dorsey’s vision kept the platform “in many ways, frustratingly, too simple.”

Yildirim said in her research and interviews with Twitter employees, the company has been working on ideas for monetization and to enhance the customer user experience, but they haven’t materialized. “They have tried many different things, many different beta products,” she said. “And somehow it hasn’t really been embedded into products. They have a long way to go.”

Feature Image Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

By Karen K. Ho

Sourced from INSIDER

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Does the Twitter CEO’s departure signal a platform identity crisis?

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Jack Dorsey will no longer steer the company he founded, but is this due to stagnating profits or a more fundamental change of direction?

So Jack Dorsey has stepped down as the CEO of Twitter. This means that the company has had four CEOs in its 15 years of existence, with Dorsey occupying the role twice, but in all that time it’s had only one business model, which may largely explain his departure.

There are interesting parallels between Dorsey’s relationship with the company he co-founded and Steve Jobs’s with Apple, for both were ousted at one stage by their board colleagues and were then brought back to rescue said colleagues from their incompetence.

And the parallels don’t stop there. During their sojourns in the wilderness, both men founded successful new companies, in Dorsey’s case the payments firm Square, in Jobs’s case the computer firm NeXT Inc, after which he went on to transform the Lucasfilm graphics company into Pixar. For both men, these were profitable periods of exile: Square is now valued at $100bn; Jobs sold Pixar to Disney for $7.4bn and got a seat on the Disney board. Which only goes to show that sometimes being fired is the best thing that can happen to a visionary.

The idea that became Twitter came from Dorsey’s brainwave in 2006 that if one could broadcast one’s SMS messages then that would be quite a thing. It was an instant hit, not least because most people already knew about text messaging and so the new service hit the ground running. In short order it morphed into a global wire service for ordinary people and, in the 2016 US presidential election, into a megaphone for a particularly adept and unscrupulous user of the medium.

So why is the guy who created this astonishing service stepping down? The proximate reason is that he’s being hassled by a couple of wealthy “activist” investors who can’t understand a) how Dorsey could be both CEO of Twitter and of Square (good question, IMHO); and b) why a service that has become such a central part of the networked public sphere isn’t attracting more users or making more money. The number of monthly active users (MAU) on Twitter has been pretty stagnant for a while, and although its annual revenues ($3.72bn in 2020) might seem substantial to those who live in the real world, in the reality distortion field of Silicon Valley they are viewed as small change. As one way of placating these impatient activists, Dorsey gave each of them a seat on the company’s board in return for substantial injections of capital.

But it’s clear that what they are pushing for is a change in Twitter’s business model. Like the other social network companies, Twitter makes its money from advertising, but because it doesn’t have any direct user-to-advertiser link, most of the advertising is brand, rather than product, related. Which means that much of the advertising that crops up in one’s Twitter feed is basically virtue-signalling by corporate brands.

It’s not clear how this can be changed without radically changing the nature of Twitter, thereby losing its uniqueness. The veteran tech analyst Ben Thompson had an interesting way of putting this in his newsletter the other day by comparing Twitter with Instagram. Both follow a broadcast model but their respective default media are different: for Twitter it’s text, for Instagram it’s photographs.

The implications of this are vast, argues Thompson. “Sure, you may follow your friends on both, but on Twitter you will also follow news-breakers, analysts, insightful anons, joke tellers and shit posters. The goal is to mainline information and Twitter’s speed and information density are unparalleled by anything in the world. On Instagram, though, you might follow brands and influencers and your chief interaction with your friends are stories about their Turkey Day exploits. It’s about aspiration, not information, and the former makes a lot more sense for effective advertising.”

Putting it another way, the mental states of users are different on the two platforms. Instagram is a way of combating boredom, endlessly scrolling in the hope of finding something interesting. A user in that frame of mind is more likely to be tempted by the prospect of an impulsive purchase.

Twitter users, however, are not bored. Instead, they’re combative, annoyed, outraged or looking for a fight or a joke. Often, my Twitter feed brings to mind a story I once heard from a Scottish comedian about Sauchiehall Street on Friday nights in the old days: he described a scene in which one drunk has grabbed another by the lapels, banging his head against the wall and shouting: “For the 20th time, Jimmy, there are 31 islands in the Greek archipelago.”

As Dorsey headed for the exit the other day, he dropped a delightfully wicked thought. “There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led’. Ultimately, I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure.” The funny thing is that while that may or may not apply to Twitter, that idea of “a single point of failure” very definitely does apply to another social network. And Mark Zuckerberg isn’t going anywhere, not even if the wretches on his board of directors thought it was time for him to spend more time with his money.

Feature Image Credit: Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, will pass the Twitter reins to Parag Agrawal. Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy

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Sourced from The Guardian

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