Prince Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool... as if the way one fell down
mattered.
Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.
from the play The Lion in Winter
This has little to do with writing, but it is a great story.
In the last several years a
company called Groupon came upon the scene, offering discount packages for
restaurants. The firm started out hot, with great prospects for going public, but
then started a slow, painful descent as business owners realized what they
always knew: when you offer customers deep discount deals, you are only training
them to show up for the deals. They seldom come back to pay full price.
The company is making changes, but for CEO Andrew Mason, it is too little, too late. He got sacked this week. As pointed out by many people, he did it with class. Here is his letter to the employees of Groupon.
People of Groupon,
After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding — I was fired today. If you’re wondering why … you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.
You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company — it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.
For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be — I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.
If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple
pilgrim would like to impart upon you: Have the courage to start with the
customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override
my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you
some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer
happiness — don’t waste the opportunity!
I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew
That’s class. Andrew Mason ought to be a writer.
Thanks to the The Merrill Dubrow Blog for reminding me of this story.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo by Mindaugas Urbonas from Lithuanian wikipedia (Profile, Homepage, Photo Gallery, E-mail, Vestuviniai papuošalai nuotakoms ) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
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