Dorsey just fired half his company. Wall Street loved it.

Leaner doesn't mean ready

Last week Block cut 4,000 people. Nearly half the company. The stock jumped 24%.

Gross profit grew 24% year-over-year. Customers up. Profitability improving. Dorsey was blunt: “Our business is strong.” He cut because the company he built for 2021 is not the company he needs for 2027. And he predicted most companies will reach the same conclusion within a year.

Amazon said it needed “fewer layers.” Salesforce quietly cut hundreds. Microsoft replaced its Xbox head with an AI executive. Autodesk’s CEO said revenue per employee is now the defining metric. Block just did what everyone else is thinking about doing but doesn’t have the nerve to announce on an earnings call.

People compare this to the industrial revolution. But that comparison misses the point. The industrial revolution displaced labour but created new roles that still needed people. Factory owners needed floor managers. Railways needed engineers. Telegraphs needed operators. Every wave of disruption created a roughly equal wave of new employment.

This time, the new roles need fewer people. And the gap widens every quarter. Dorsey said something happened in December with AI models getting an order of magnitude more capable, and it showed a path to applying it to nearly everything they do. When a CEO of a $33 billion company says that out loud on an earnings call, it’s worth taking seriously.

This is also the biggest window of opportunity for established companies in decades

Everyone will have access to similar AI tools. So the edge is not just the technology. The edge is using this moment to rethink what your company actually is. Your structure. Your positioning. How you operate. What you stand for. Not just trim headcount and add “AI-powered” to the website.

The companies with real expertise, real client relationships, operational depth built over years, those are the ones who should be leading right now. They have something startups can’t fake: trust earned over time. But trust attached to an outdated brand becomes a liability. You’re known for what you were, not what you’ve become.

Most companies won’t touch that. They’ll satisfice. Trim enough to feel modern without changing anything fundamental. Restructure the org chart, update the homepage, publish a LinkedIn post about embracing change. And slowly become irrelevant from the inside while watching for threats from the outside.

The hard move is not cutting people. Dorsey proved the market will applaud that. The hard move is looking at the company you’ve built and asking whether your positioning, your narrative, the way you operate, still matches where you’re going. Because if it doesn’t, the restructuring only buys you time. Nothing else.

Go wild or go home

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, we just published the IMSERV case study. One of the UK’s most established energy data companies. 600+ people. Decades of trust. But the market still saw them as a traditional metering provider. We repositioned them from infrastructure to intelligence. From hardware to insight. From service provider to strategic partner.

Worth a read if you’re thinking about any of this.

Love.

Stef