Harvard Business Publishing

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber reports on two recent leaked memos from Steve Jobs on the MobileMe fiasco and Steve Ballmer on the FY '09 plan.

I smile when I see these "leaks". I have many memories of working at Microsoft in the 1990s and reading about memos like these in the press. Memos I'd already seen. Memos that, for most people in the know in the company, said little they hadn't heard before. Company-wide memos are more for show than for any real communication or decision making. They allow the rest of the company to catch up with problems or decisions people with strong networks or positions of importance already know.

There is a difference between talk and action, and memos are 90% talk. We all know this. If a CEO at a 20,000+ person company wants to take action, he will, and most of those actions will surface through the executive chain. The corporate-wide memo is the most diffuse and overrated tool in an executive's playbook, but since it's the only play that most of the world sees, we naturally over-represent its significance. In every paragraph ask "Is this talk or action?" and you'll see more clearly what the memo actually means, if anything at all.

At companies like Apple and Microsoft, where most major memos are leaked to the press in a matter of hours, the authors know who the majority of readers will be outsiders. Nothing intended to be kept secret is ever mentioned in a memo from Jobs, Balmer, or any major CEO. They know better. They fully expect these things will end up on blogs and websites and they're written accordingly.

For example, in Steve Job's memo about the MobileMe failures the only point of action is this:

"One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services -- iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy's new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me."

Similiarly Balmer's nugget of action, buried near the end of the memo, is this:

"...Effective immediately, Steven Sinofsky, Jon DeVaan, and Bill Veghte will report directly to me to lead Windows/Windows Live"

Neither move represents much strategy, and neither is a surprise (Ballmer's #1 FY 09 goal being "Invest in the right opportunities" wins the stating the obvious award. As if half the company read that and said, ooooooh, I thought we were trying to invest in the wrong ones).

And to most of the people involved on these projects these memos represent little action. Certainly at Microsoft, replacing one VP with another, or shifting the reporting chain among VPs, means little to most of the people actually doing the work. Until change occurs that makes it easier for line level people to make good things happen, these moves change nothing.

The company-wide memo, at any company, is best read between the lines.